Hitting Netflix on March 19th are all 10 of the movies in the Saw franchise. That means that Saw, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, Saw 3D, Jigsaw, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, and Saw X will all be available to stream making for one very gory and terrifying horror movie marathon for fans. This marks a rare opportunity to see the entire franchise on one streaming platform.
When it was released in 2004, the original Saw movie sparked a shift in the horror genre. While horror has always been a bit of a bloody affair, in the early 2000s many horror movies were more focused on supernatural scares that were larger than the plight of the characters caught up in the events of the story at hand. We’re talking about horror films that leaned into ghosts or unexplained phenomena as their threats and villains. It’ was effective and certainly made for some great movies (and still does make for great horror movies). Saw, however, was completely different. The threat in Saw, Jigsaw, wasn’t a supernatural force but a real one and even at that, he was unique. Jigsaw didn’t kill his victims directly. Instead, he put into elaborate traps and put their death or survival entirely in their hands.
This shift created a terror that was more psychological and grounded in the torture that comes with the horrific choices Jigsaw’s victims have to make. And those choices are bloody. For example, the first Saw sees one of Jigsaw’s captives saw off his own foot. The result was gore with a twisted purpose that made the movies unlike anything else in the horror genre and each installment only built on the concept. That said, as the franchise grew, the quality sort of shifted a bit so when Spiral: From The Book of Saw arrived in 2021, that film sort of reinvigorated a franchise that had already shaken up horror.
Functioning as something of a spinoff, Spiral stars Chris Rock as a detective investigating a Jigsaw copycat killer but who becomes a suspect — and a victim — himself. While critics didn’t necessarily love the film, its fresh approach to the concepts of the Saw franchise were fascinating. The film also offered up a new perspective by having the killer in Spiral be focused on a larger perceived injustice rather than John Kramer/Jigsaw rage at people who he feels are throwing their lives away while his own is being cut short due to cancer. It’s a great film, if bloody, and you can watch it along with the rest of the Saw franchise on Netflix this month.
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