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Matt Glasby

When Saw was released on October 29, 2004, it did not seem primed to go down in cinema history.
However, like other horror genre game-changers such as Night of the Living Dead, Halloween and The Blair Witch Project, it was so influential – not to mention profitable – that it became the torch-bearer for an entire subgenre. And pretty soon torture porn was everywhere.
Over the years Saw has grown into a media franchise worth more than US$1 billion, encompassing 10 films, plus comics, video games, even theme park rides. But its origins were humble.
For their debut feature, Australian film school graduates James Wan and Leigh Whannell followed The Blair Witch Project playbook by keeping things simple, concentrating on two main characters locked in a room.


They are Adam (Whannell), a sleazy photographer, and Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, The Princess Bride), an oncologist with some dark secrets of his own.
We first meet them chained up in a grimy basement with a dead body on the floor between them and no memory of how they got there.
Gradually, it is revealed that the basement holds as many secrets as its occupants – like a kind of prototype escape room – and only one of the pair will be allowed to leave alive.
“I actually think the restrictions we had on our bank accounts at the time, the fact that we wanted to keep the film contained, helped us come up with the ideas in the film,” said Whannell.
He wrote a script based on a story he concocted with Wan, who directed the film.

When it came to the villain, a dying killer known as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) with a sick sense of humour, Whannell took inspiration from an unlikely place.
Waiting for an MRI scan to get to the root of some migraines, he wondered what a character might be capable of if they had a brain tumour and knew they were going to die.
The answer, of course, is terrible things. And that is what people really remember about the film. Not secondary characters such as Danny Glover’s doomed police officer, Wan’s glitchy direction or the occasionally awkward performances, but Jigsaw’s fiendish traps.
One standout in the first film is the “reverse beartrap”, a contraption padlocked to the face of heroin addict Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith). The idea is that, if she does not retrieve the key from her cellmate’s stomach in time – with a scalpel, no less – it will rip her head apart.
Ingenious and icky in equal measure, the traps are the series’ USP, providing a handy precis of the torture-porn narrative: a sadistic set-up, followed by suspense, then splatter.

Sadism and cinema have always been intimately connected, right back to the decapitations in D.W. Griffiths’ 1916 epic Intolerance.
But torture porn’s specific origins can be traced to the mondo movies of the 1960s and 1970s, which purported to show genuine documentary footage of real violence, but often did nothing of the sort. Faces of Death (1978) is a good – or, depending on your viewpoint, bad – example.
In the 1970s and 1980s, video nasties such as I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust presented torture as an essential part of their narratives. By the end of the millennium, however, mainstream American horror films had grown so bland that pockets of protest were springing up around the globe.
In Japan, so-called “Asian Extreme films” by the likes of Takashi Miike were often unflinchingly violent.
His 1999 masterpiece Audition is the story of a damaged young woman (Eihi Shiina) who takes terrible vengeance on a rich suitor (Tetsu Sawaki) while the audience looks on helplessly. Ichi the Killer, Miike’s 2001 gore-fest, went even further.

At the same time, in Europe, the New French Extremity movement spearheaded by rape-revenge drama Irréversible (2002) and postmodern slasher High Tension (2003) was blossoming.
But after Saw made US$103.9 million at the box office on a US$1.2 million budget, the floodgates truly opened. In 2005 alone, Eli Roth’s Hostel, Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects and Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek all made their mark while making the studios money.
Cheap to shoot and simple to market, torture-porn films strip horror back to its basics, requiring little more than a cheap set – often a Saw-style basement lit by a flickering strip light – a game cast and some gruesome SFX.
“I wanted to make Saw in a very Hitchcockian style, but that style of filmmaking takes time to set up,” Wan told online newspaper The AV Club. Instead the result was “gritty and rough around the edges due to the lack of time and money that we had”, an aesthetic that was all too easy to copy.

In the wake of 9/11 and the war on terror, images of torture were all over the news. At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, prisoners were subjected to violence, sexual assault and ritual humiliation by US military personnel, with the photos leaked to CBS News in 2004.
“Whether torture was glorified or condemned, it was everywhere, and horror films of the time reflected our collective anxieties on the subject,” wrote Charles Graham-Dixon in Vice.
But horror does not just reflect; it takes those anxieties and pushes them to the limit.
“It might be that this trend is mainly a way of ratcheting up the stakes – that in the quest to have a visceral impact, actual viscera are the final frontier,” wrote New York magazine critic David Edelstein, who coined the term “torture porn” in 2006.

Once the subgenre had reached saturation point, films such as The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) and A Serbian Film (2010) took the depravity to new lows. Japan’s Grotesque, among others, were banned outright by the British Board of Film Classification.
“Unlike other recent ‘torture’ themed horror works, such as the Saw and Hostel series, Grotesque features minimal narrative or character development and presents the audience with little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism,” said the board’s director David Cook.
To a certain kind of horror fan, such words were probably catnip.
Looking back, it is easy to dismiss the subgenre as being distasteful, but there were several masterpieces among the many copycats.

Wolf Creek is a terrifying indictment of Australian masculinity, with its racist, sexist serial killer (John Jarrett) hiding behind good-old-bloke bullishness.
And Martyrs (2008) has complex points to make about France’s colonial past and the dangers of blind faith. Even more populist efforts such as the Hostel series had veiled – sometimes very veiled – points to make about America’s place in the world.
Stephen King himself defended Hostel: Part II in the LA Times, saying: “Sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.”
In the years since, Wan and Whannell have done much to reinvigorate American horror, with Wan’s classy Conjuring universe, and Whannell’s The Invisible Man, a clever parable for domestic abuse.
As for Saw, another instalment is expected next year.
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How Saw, James Wan’s 2004 horror movie, launched the torture porn subgenre

Cary Elwes as oncologist Dr Lawrence Gordon in a still from Saw (2004). Photo: Lionsgate Films

Leigh Whannell as sleazy photographer Adam in a still from Saw (2004), the horror film that inspired a sub-genre of torture films. Photo: Lions Gate Films

Tobin Bell as the killer Jigsaw in a still from Saw (2004). Photo: Lionsgate Films

Director James Wan and Cary Elwes on the set of Saw (2004). Photo: Lionsgate Films

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Dieter Laser as Dr Josef Heiter in a still from The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009).

Shawnee Smith as trap survivor Amanda in a still from Saw (2004). Photo: Greg Gayne/Lionsgate

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James Wan’s low-budget horror film Saw spawned a US$1 billion franchise and inspired numerous ultra-violent films


James Wan’s low-budget horror film Saw spawned a US$1 billion franchise and inspired numerous ultra-violent films.


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Explainer | How Saw, James Wan’s 2004 horror movie, launched the torture porn subgenre

James Wan’s low-budget horror film Saw spawned a US$1 billion franchise and inspired numerous ultra-violent films