Bookmonkey Saw: Day 2

Okay, so today let’s look at the first film of the series, Saw (2004).  Created by Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannel, the story is actually quite simple.  Two men wake up in an abandoned bathroom, chained by their ankles to pipes on either end of the room.  In the centre of the room is the body of a man who appears to have shot himself in the head.  In its hands are a tape records and a gun.  The two men manage to acquire the tape player and finding cassettes in their pockets which say “Play Me” (Obvious shades of Alice in Wonderland here), are informed that they have approximately 8 hours in which to escape, which will only occur for the one left alive at the end.

There is also a sub-plot focusing on two police officers who are hunting down a serial killer called “The Jigsaw Killer” who places his victims in horrible hurt-yourself-and-escape-or-do-nothing-and-die traps (such as they one our two leads are in).

As with many horror/thriller films, there will be plot-twists and discoveries, but I’m attempting to write without spoilers so I’ll go light on those.

In terms of the Horror genre in 2003/2004 when the film was released at the Sundance Film Festival and later released throughout North America , here is what was going on.

2003 Was filled with a lot of sequels and remakes, Dawn of the Dead (Remake), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Remake), and Freddy vs. Jason (considered parts 8 and 11 of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th franchises respectively), as well as Van Helsing an homage to the classic Universal Monster movies of the 1930s.  Keep in mind that the Horror genre is one made of sequels and remakes; usually the producers and directors are working on their first or second film and horror films have always packed kids into theatres.

Saw worked in a very different way than the other options horror fans had at the time.  To begin, the killer is off screen for almost the entire film, second there is no female lead (one of the two men in the bathroom has a wife, but she is on screen for less than 10% of the film, mostly in flashbacks), and finally, although the story clearly owes concepts to both Mad Max (1979) and Se7en (1995 – which also focuses on cops trying to find an incredibly clever killer) Saw wasn’t an obvious remake or sequel.

Watching it myself I have to admit that the first film is kind of clever.  The on-screen violence is fairly minimal (you don’t see any severed body parts for example), and the story seemed innovative and quite smart for an incredibly low-budget film.  In the end, the movie did so well at the box-office a sequel was ordered with a release date set for the Friday before Halloween in 2005.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Unlike the other films I’ve been working on this month, I didn’t actually see the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) until I was about 25 years old. Basically, I had heard so many things about the film growing up that the idea of watching the actual movie scared me too much. It wasn’t until I got into the study of folklore that I decided to watch the film.

The movie itself follows the tragic tale of five kids who, after visiting the graves of the grandparents of two of the party, decide to explore the area looking for an old farmhouse that belonged to the deceased grandparents. Horrible, chainsaw involved events follow. The movie was based partly on real life serial killer Ed Gein (who was also the basis for Psycho and Silence of the Lambs), and involved a family of killer cannibals who make short work of these five kids, except for the Final Girl, Sally. Two of the clever parts of the original film are the opening narration, which gave the film a documentary feel, and the way the film plays with classic folklore and urban legends.

All right – I promise this will be my last educational segment this month, but you may need to know, so here goes:

Learning with Bookmonkey!

Lesson 2 - Urban Legends

Urban Legends are (usually) horror-based examples of modern folklore in which certain moral behaviours are described along with extreme punishments for ignoring these behaviours. Examples include people eating a Kentucky-Fried Rat when their mother has recently began a job outside of the home and no longer prepares home cooked meals, or the murder of young couples (or at least the boys) when they park their cars in out-of-the-way locations for making out. In terms of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) the crime that the protagonists commit one of the most basic crimes in classic folklore – that is they “stray off the path;” by searching an un-mapped area of Texas to look for the old home of Sally Hardesty’s grandparents, the kids involved are welcoming disaster. A more in-depth study of Urban legends can be examined in Jan Harold Brunvand’s seminal book on Urban Legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (W.W. Norton and Company, 1981)

As I only watched this film as an adult, I was able to view it a little more critically than the others, and although it didn’t have a major effect on my love of horror films, I was able to appreciate it for what it was, and view the reimagining with an eye for what might change.

The 2003 reimagining is the film responsible for the recent trend of reimagining classic horror – that is, rather than simply remaking the film, attempting to change an aspect of the basic concept, creating an entirely new story. With the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the big change is that of the killer family. The film itself takes place in the same time period (1970s), location (rural Texas), and still has the same villain (Leatherface), and even the same opening narrator. The differences included: 1) making the kids a little more guilty in the classic horror sense – the guys in the van are attempting to transport marijuana so that they can sell it in their home town, 2) the killer family is no longer cannibalistic, and in fact, mostly live ordinary lives around the town, keeping Leatherface safe as a sort kid-brother to the town. 3) there is significantly more use of a chainsaw than in the original.

Like with many of the other reimaginings, we are given more back story in which sympathies are given towards the killer, but as he’s going around killing a bunch of kids, there is only so much sympathy we can give him. The leads all do a good job of being scared victims and the film’s Final Girl, Erin (played by Jessica Biel) is actually a really good example of the classic Final Girl, being an outsider to her friends, coming across all of their bodies and eventually taking a much more active role in the death of the villain.

In the end it wasn’t a movie I would own, but it worked. I can definitely see why it would end up leading to a similar trend in horror movies over the next decade.