It was only $5000 dollars with which two young film students began their dream of making a film. Leigh Whannell wrote, financed and starred in the short film Saw, which his friend James Wan directed, and then made copies on DVD and presented them to different producers in the United States. They thought it was easier for someone to invest in his idea in Hollywood than in his native Australia.
In the short, Whannell is questioned by police about how he escaped the inverted bear trap (the one that would break his jaw when opened and which Amanda manages to escape from in the film), and he quickly caught the attention of producer Gregg Hoffman, who Together with two partners he formed Twisted Pictures, just to finance his first feature film: Sawwith a budget of just $1 million.
After being presented at Sundance, the film about two victims forced to play a serial killer’s game was acquired by Lionsgate, a studio that developed an aggressive campaign to release it in the middle of the 2004 Halloween season. In the end, they raised nearly one hundred times their investment. only in theaters, without counting its passage through home video.
You might also be interested: James Wan’s legacy to horror cinema.
It was then that the true path of the Jigsaw assassin would begin through a series of sequels that would make his presentation in the field of mainstream with the subgenre of torture porn, where apparently the only gratifying thing for the audience would be to see how people are martyred. Before the torture porn was only seen in home video and B movies, it was even known as splatter film. There we have works like Cannibal holocaust (1980), August Underground (2001) or Sweet Revenge (2010), which inaugurated an entire franchise.
After the success of Sawtapes like lodging house (2005), by Eli Roth; The human centipede (2009), by Tom Six; A Serbian Film (2010), by Srđan Spasojević, or the reboot of Halloween directed by Rob Zombie were clear heirs of the genre.
For director James Wan, however, his debut was never about torture but rather a thriller psychological. And seen only as a single tape, he is right. The game of fear closed perfectly, to blacks, with the now famous “Game Over”, while we were listening to the song “Hello Zepp” by composer Charlie Clouser.
People tend to think that The game of fear it’s a film gore and torture porn because we see it through the lens of a long-running franchise that, film after film, has made death traps the main reason for Jigsaw’s plot. It was even the overwhelming success of the franchise Saw which seemed to be the death trap from which James Wan would not escape.
You might also be interested: Saw: Chronology of the movies and where to watch them.
“It took me a while to get out of the shadow [de las películas] for what they had become, something so big and with its own mythology,” the director told the site. Dark Horizons in 2013. “For better or worse it became its own brand and I felt like I was carrying a lot of weight on me. It definitely took me a while to recover and leave that shadow; it was around The fear game VII and when I started doing The night of the demon that people stopped seeing me as the type Saw but like a film director.”
Seen in retrospect, Wan’s film plays with elements of psychological horror – such as the pig’s head and Whannell’s character taking photographs in complete darkness – that do not exist in the later films, where the stars are effectively the traps and deadly games of the victims—the torture porn in its fullness.
At once The game of fear It is located in a transitional stage within the horror film language of the 21st century. There is still an MTV music video style: the characters escape from traps under an edition of endless cuts that looks like a Nine Inch Nails video and contains a car chase where the zero budget is noticeable (they basically filmed the actors inside a car while moving the steering wheel). It features one of the most ingenious plot twists in the genre in living memory, and we owe that entirely to Whannell and Wan, who emerged alive from that death trap called Saw.
A version of this article was first published in the special edition “50 Best Horror Movies of the New Millennium” of Cine PREMIERE in 2018.
Sergio Lopez Aguirre Stanley Kubrick once said “To have a broader vision, not only watch good movies, but also bad ones.” I obviously listened to the second and it’s very funny.