As self-aware franchises such as Scream have shown us, horror films often espouse conservative moral values, and adhering to or flouting these values are often the difference between life and death for the characters on screen. There’s even a trope for the virginal young maiden who lives to the end of the film based on her purity: the Final Girl. But what happens when a horror film doesn’t just showcase these values implicitly through the gory deaths of fornicators and hedonists, but has the villain explicitly target people to teach them these lessons?
The answer to this question is the premise of the Saw franchise, now in its ninth entry with the spinoff Spiral. Across the films, various villains place their victims in gruesome traps, for the purpose of teaching them lessons about their behavior. The victims are given a choice that typically goes as follows: voluntarily self-mutilate in order to get out of the trap and survive, or remain passive and die terribly.
As the franchise has grown and developed, and as it’s cycled through several different antagonists, the way in which the franchise conceives of its role as moral educator shifts. We can see this shift most clearly through the puzzles that the killers design, as well as their choices in victims. Each of the four franchise Jigsaw killers make specific choices about how to engage in moral education, and their pedagogy structures how the viewer feels about the victims and their death/survival. The rest of this essay will be pretty spoiler-heavy for the entirety of the Saw franchise, so if you’re interested in the films, I’d suggest a free HBO Max trial and a movie marathon before reading this.
This essay will go through the three main schools of Saw thought, but there’s no better place to start than at the beginning, with Jigsaw himself: John Kramer (Tobin Bell). Jigsaw is motivated to teach people lessons about the value of their own lives. His victims are commonly drug addicts or people caught in a cycle of bad choices that primarily harm themselves, though they have consequences for others. And his puzzles, while still generally deadly, have the real possibility of escape for the victims through exercising their will to live and making better choices. If the victim survives, they are then expected to carry that lesson and the benefit of a second chance at life with them. Thus, John Kramer is expecting his victims to engage in knowledge transfer: to use what they learned in the puzzle in other parts of their daily lives. He’s therefore generally on pretty solid pedagogical ground, with more sympathetic victims than what is to follow.
The two proteges Jigsaw takes on in his life have a much different approach. Both Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) and Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) seek out victims to punish people for wrongdoing. In these instances, the victim is a scum-sucking villain, such as a rapist, a white supremacist, or a predatory loan shark; the audience is thus made to feel that their fate in the puzzle is earned, since they are bad people. However, these puzzles lack the educational value of Jigsaw’s originals, since there is no way to succeed and survive. The puzzles are meant to teach the victims a lesson, but since they are assured of death anyway, they’ll never be able to use that lesson elsewhere in their lives, making the lesson pedagogically unsound.
Finally, there’s (GIANT SPOILER) Detective Shank (Max Minghella), the copycat Jigsaw killer in Spiral: From the Book of Saw (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2021). This film follows the formula of prior entries, since it features the actions of a police precinct trying to catch a Jigsaw-copycat. Spiral departs from the MO of the films before it, however, by having the police play a dual role: not only are they attempting to solve the murders, but they are the exclusive targets and victims of the copycat. While cops have been caught in Jigsaw’s traps before, it was always more incidental, or because of something outside of the cop’s job, while in Spiral the kills are targeted because the victims are police officers by profession.
While Shank never interacted with Jigsaw personally, his emulations are closer in spirit to John Kramer’s than either of Jigsaw’s actual proteges, but with a notable difference. Where Jigsaw’s puzzles were meant to teach the victims themselves a lesson, Shank’s puzzles are meant to be examples for onlookers to learn from. There’s a very topical plot about police corruption and abuse of power that Shank is reacting to, and the death of each corrupt cop is meant to be a warning to others to get their acts together. This pedagogical strategy can be broken down into two parts: “Model,” where the instructor gives an example and talks through it for the learners, and “Reflect,” where the learners are given the chance to think about what they’ve been shown and how to integrate it into their lives. While this is not a terrible strategy, it’s missing a crucial middle component, “practice,” where learners use the model to act for themselves and come to terms with using their new knowledge. Without the practice element, reflection remains abstracted and learners are less likely to retain the information. This also means that learners will have a harder time with knowledge transfer, which was the original Jigsaw’s entire motivation. Overall, then Spiral presents a pedagogical vision that’s more interested in its own theory than in its lived results.
The evolving nature of how the films see their own hand in moral education (as well as the pivot in Spiral from purely conservative politics to… still conservative but with a new “fuck the police” ethos) means that Saw has, as a franchise, adopted kind of a contradictory stance about moral responsibility. The original franchise held that moral responsibility lay purely in the hands of the individual: John Kramer targeted people like drug addicts because he saw addiction as a personal moral failing. Spiral, on the other hand, is holding not just individuals morally responsible, but the entire law enforcement institution. While it’s still happening one cop at a time, the Jigsaw copycat is attempting to alter the culture of an established organization through individual punitive action. We can see this shift in the pedagogical approaches of the traps: Jigsaw was always devoted to teaching the individual, while the copycat was focused on teaching (if you will) the entire class. It will be interesting to see, if Spiral lands a franchise in its own right, how the more recent pedagogical inclinations toward addressing a collective or system will contend with the series’ individualist trappings.
You can find Spiral on Amazon, as well as HBO Max (ad):
Emma Kostopolus is an Assistant Professor at Valdosta State University, where she teaches writing and writes about teaching. On her off time, she writes about many other things. You can find her words on her twitter, @kostopolus.
Related: Game Horror, Circle (2015), and Lifeboat Ethics
