Hacker Cinema
Saw
2004 · Film · 103 min
Part of Saw Collection
Directed by James Wan
Two men wake up to find themselves shackled in a grimy, abandoned bathroom. As they struggle to comprehend their predicament, they discover a disturbing tape left behind by the sadistic mastermind known as Jigsaw. With a chilling voice and cryptic instructions, Jigsaw informs them that they must partake in a gruesome game in order to secure their freedom.
5 positive17 negative1 mixed48 neutralfrom 71 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
78 comments on Hacker News
What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).
> it's also very umconfortable and stressful for the patient.
This is what concerns me. If someone took a blade to my eye, I would be screaming, vomiting, and thrashing until I lose consciousness even though my rational brain knows the surgeons are helping. Are there options for the irrationally mutilation-averse people such as myself (like general anesthesia) or are my options just go blind or re-enact a Saw movie?
I saw a meme the other day about what Jigsaw would set up as a torture for a Linux developer in the Saw movies.
It would be to have them sitting in a room, in front of a Linux laptop with a perfectly usable userland utility and expecting them to not reinvent the wheel. The door would be unlocked and the developer would be free to leave at any time.
There are multiple lines because when an organ comes up, it can only last so long, so a person needs to be able to get to the hospital without a certain period of time. Usually this means driving distance. When you have a private plane, the distance expands. The organ still goes to the most sick person in line, not the one with the most money.
I was at a talk with Martine Rothblatt several years back, who created a startup for 3D printed organs. They ended up also building electric helicopters to transport those organs, because the transportation bottleneck was a huge issue.
I try not to judges peoples character when they’re looking death in the face. No one really knows what they’ll do in that scenario. Most people who can save their own life will. This was the premise of the movie SAW… how far are you willing to go to save your own life? How strong is your survival instinct? Most people are never tested, and it’s easy to sit back and judge, but would you just sit back and die? How do we even know there was someone else in line behind Jobs? It could be that he got an organ that would have otherwise been wasted.
We have a word for when Bob comes up to Alice with a gun and threatens to shoot her if she doesn't hand over her purse.
It isn't 'bluffing'.
We don't even have a word for what is happening with Gaza, and any illustrative analogy I can come up with would be cribbing the SAW movies.
There’s literally hundreds of shows and movies.
What some people have missed is that this is its own sub-genre of horror.
You have shows like Alice in Borderland that doesn’t get nearly enough love (and is far better than Squid Games in my opinion).
Cube is a late 90s movie that’s on this theme too. You could argue the SAW movies are too, though I’m not personally a fan of those.
There are also plenty of comics on this theme too. The aforementioned Alice in Borderlands is based on a manga by the same title.
This is the same 'get out clause' that the antagonist in the Saw films uses: "I didn't harm those people directly, I only created the conditions under which they would be harmed."
The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.
> These things are objectively not violence.
Semantics cannot possibly be 'objective'.
Sure, I just was giving it as an example because I think it's a pretty funny bible verse out of context, and even a little funny in-context.
Still, the old testament in particular has pretty much every single theme that parents clutch their pearls at; Lot has incestuous sex with his daughters (and it's decidedly not condemned) [1], a man murdering his daughter because she's the first person to enter his house [2], prostitutes getting murdered, butchered, and mailed to her suitors [2].
If the old were accurately made into a movie, it would be right next to Se7en or Saw in categorization, certainly not appropriate for children.
I know that this stuff is probably wrapped in layers of metaphor and social context, that's fair enough, but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot_(biblical_person)
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+11&version=NIV
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+19&version=NIV
EC Comics (and now I am showing my age for sure) attracted me when I was 12 years old or so. I am not sure if the "Saw" films reciprocate (also have avoided them), but the victims in the EC Comics (and the "Night Gallery" TV series is another example) often "deserved" their gruesome end. It was karma ... or "vengeance porn" if you like (wow, with "Death Wish", "Walking Tall", "Legend of Billy Jack", vengeance porn was the Zeitgeist of the 70's).
Older me is put off by "morbid justice", but I recognize the appeal.
I actually avoided the Saw films for a long time because of this. I finally watched them recently and they were better than I expected. Still nowhere close to my favorite movies... Not even favorite horror movies... But not the total trash that I expected.
Oh man you rustled feathers with this. I'll try to further rustle them by saying that this exact critique applies to many body horror films, including all SAW films (yes, including the first one).
I downloaded it in the UK.
Here, there's not that much high quality TV content on it that isn't available on the free VOD providers (BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4) for the free-to-air TV channels. If I click on to the 'Series Spotlight' and look at the TV series on offer, they're all strange low budget things ('Bad Girls Club', 'Evil Killers', 'Z Nation'...) and I've not heard of the first 19 of them. The 20th one is a 'Gordon Ramsey: Uncharted' National Geographic show that I have access to through Disney+.
For films the picture is much better in that there are popular ones that if not blockbusters were at least things I'd heard of, but it's still mostly older stuff (Donnie Darko, Kick-Ass, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Twilight, Saw, Kill Bill).
These are just my favorites, and in the order of which the popped into my mind.
- Office Space, 1999 (especially for people who work at offices) - The Matrix, 1999 - Fight Club, 1999 :)
Umm, what else? - Spirited Away, 2001 (and many others from Miyazaki) - Requiem for a Dream, 2000 (Very Heavy addiction-related film! I actually got watery eyes just by typing this, I've seen it too many times.) - Joker, 2019 - Full Metal Jacket, 1987 (and many others from Kubrick, such as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining) - Django Unchained, 2012 (and many others from Tarantino, at least Pulp Fiction) - Alien, 1979 - The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 - Saw, 2004
I made a bit longer list, so that I can share the link to my friends.
Actually there are many quirky ones which came to my mind, such as Borat, the South Park movie, Team America, Airplane! (alternatively titled Flying High!), Idiocracy and Hangover, but I wouldn't say these are in the must-see category. Actually I wouldn't even recommend these to most people, if I didn't know what kind of humor they like.
Fascinating that the actor from the Saw movies is so talented outside of designing elaborate death machines
So your gut reaction is overriding any capacity for actual thought?
I guess I can empathise — when I don't get enough sleep or if I drink too much caffeine my emotions can overwhelm my ability to reason.
And that one time a heart transplant was shown explicitly on a TV documentary. As a mere memory that's fine, but at the moment the heart came out of the chest on TV? Nopenopenope.
Likewise the existence of horror as a genre. The mere adverts for the Saw franchise left me disgusted at humanity, so obviously I never watched the films.
Irony, you write as if rationality throws away something that we need, but I think you've lost something…
I agree! They could be making movies like Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey or maybe the Saw movies. Lots of creativity there and no law against it. Probably wouldn't have been fired. But people-a husband and wife pleasuring each other? Intolerable! And while we are at it, you know that statue of David? Put some pants on it!
Calling something a test wouldn't make the harm and suffering you've set up ok. Otherwise "Saw" would be wholesome family movie recommended for all ages.
On the contrary. Setting up "tests" is often a sign of perverse malevolence.
This is timely. My partner and I have been watching the Saw movies, and we use the term "pigging" to mean "abducting" (as abductors wear pig masks in the series). Everytime someone is abducted we say they're "getting pigged".
Last movie I saw in theaters was The Revenant in 2015, and before that ... maybe the first Hobbit? Agreed that current movies suck, mostly Marvel crap and rehashes ... Local to me we have: Taylor swift movie, a new Saw movie, a new Exorcist movie, a new Paw Patrol movie. Lame.
I recently tried calling a local restaurant’s number via the google maps listing. The number was changed to call a prankster who now sends me “wanna play a game?” texts like from the movie Saw.
could you output it again, but make it like john oliver wrote it ChatGPT
I'll do my best to capture the humorous and satirical style of John Oliver, the host of "Last Week Tonight." Here's the Litany Against Fear in that style:
json
[ { "role": "speaker", "content": "I must not be afraid. No, seriously. Because fear is basically the mind's version of that terrifying clown from Stephen King's 'It.'" }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "It's the mind-killer, like if your brain decided to binge-watch all the 'Saw' movies back-to-back and then said, 'Sure, this seems like a sensible way to perceive reality.'" }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "Fear is the 'little death.' And no, that's not the name of the world's saddest funeral home for pets. It's a metaphor for how fear can lead to total oblivion. Yeah, cheery thought, right?" }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "I will face my fear. It's like facing the fact that yes, British food is terrible. But we do it anyway because, well, I'm not quite sure, actually." }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "I'll allow it to pass over me and through me. Just like the way I imagine a ghost might. If that ghost happened to be a metaphor for fear. And not, you know, a vengeful spirit with unfinished business." }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "And when it's gone past, I'll turn my inner eye to see its path. Because nothing says 'self-improvement' quite like mentally replaying your moments of terror in slow motion." }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. A bit like the space between Boris Johnson's ears." }, { "role": "speaker", "content": "Only I will remain. And maybe some crumpets. Because as we've established, British food is terrible, but crumpets are alright, aren't they?" } ]
FWIW, my reaction to the side-of-a-bus adverts for Saw franchise films in the UK was visceral disgust that there exist enough people who would buy tickets on the basis of those adverts to justify the existence of the adverts, let alone the films themselves — if I thought banning them would actually make any difference, I would call for exactly that!
I don't know of human psychology really works like the toy model in my head (probably not, typical mind fallacy), but that's a separate thing to my own affect.
I just absolutely fail to see the issue with CGI porn, even of the underage variety (because let's face it, that's all anyone is going to care about when it comes to banning it).
Trying to argue that fake pictures of non existent kids doing bad shit is somehow "child porn" is about as dumb as saying Saw (the movie) is an actual snuff film.
Is it vulgar and offensive - of course. Is it child porn - no, because the person in the picture does not exist.
It’s great for summarizing content, or lengthening it. It used to be great for writing insane, outlandish versions of stories such as “a version of the movie Saw as an educational cartoon for preschoolers” or “a breaking bad scene where Walter White reveals himself to be a gothic Satanist” but the woke and copyright edits killed that. Bing will probably do that once I get access tho
Tangentially, as a catholic myself, I recently began to find it weird how openly my religion is displaying a medieval torture setup with an obviously tortured, wounded and half-dead man on it, mid-suffering. Not only is it everywhere in churches, but often villages will have big close-to-life-sized, colored statues of him bleeding. And grandmas have it hang all around their house too for everyone to see.
Imagine if we replaced every cross statue with some other form of torture that is less symbolic. Say, the scene from saw where he just cut his leg off.
Would you object to that scene being displayed as a big ad in your city, or to it being immortalized in your local cemetery as a colored statue? What would your grandma say if you hung posters of that in her living room and her bedroom?
I have to admit though, I never found it weird as a child, and I don't think it affected me one bit. Whereas the Spiderman movie spiderbite really upped my phobia of spiders when I saw it at 6.
I don't know what to make of all this, I just learned to pause and find all of it weird for a second every once in a while.
To be honest, I think I would be more horrified. There is something surreal and disgusting about the thought of killing in such a way. Similar to the horror of the Rube Goldbergesque devices used in the Saw films. However, if you put it through a filter to make it look like a game and pull and Ender's Game on the user, you may get the psychological distancing you mention.
I would watch the hell out of this Saw movie
It's like saying you don't understand how someone could enjoy playing Call of Duty or any other FPS videogames, because it involves killing people in the game, which is a terrifying and horrible experience that pretty much no one would want to go through irl. So it must be that they enjoy murder irl, right?
They don't enjoy the torture parts of Saw, they enjoy how that movie overall makes them feel (terrified, contemplating certain moral dilemmas, etc.). Like, the point of Saw, from what I gathered, was that it put people who did terrible things to others into those death game circumstances. Which adds a whole other sub-theme of "but does it make it less terrible, if they were a horrible person?" type of a dilemma. And overall, the grotesque nature of the visuals in the movie just serves the purpose of highlighting how horrifying it all is, not to make people enjoy the torture and think "wow, this is kinda fun and lighthearted".
Mind you, I am saying that as someone who cannot really stomach horror movies in general. That doesn't mean that I cannot see plenty of valid reasons for why people might like those movies.
Probably because different people could process the same thing differently, and derive enjoyment from different feelings.
For example, i like movies with really convoluted/branching multi-timeline stories where you dont really have much of an idea of what's going on, and you have to uncover it as you go (e.g., Inception). It makes my head "hurt" in a good way, and i like it because of that. I know plenty of people who dislike those movies for the exact same reason I like it for. And i hear the same "why would anyone want to subject themselves to this" critique about those movies from them.
I couldn't make it through Saw either, and I am not into those types of movies at all. But i can totally see plenty of valid reasons for why a person would enjoy it. It is essentially a really twisted escape room story with death games. And all that violence and gore just ups the stakes of the death games, thus making it feel more grotesque and intense. They might like how uncomfortable that movie makes them feel, similarly to how I like intensely convoluted multitimeline mystery stories that make my head "hurt" in a good way.
I was pretty scarred by the first Saw movie, even though I only made it about halfway through the first torture scene. I don't understand why people want to subject themselves to that kind of psychological violence.
Nature: living every day like you're in a slasher horror movie. Really, really bad. It only seems fun and wholesome to us because we're on top and almost none of us spend much time genuinely engaging with nature in even the way that an apex predator has to, let alone prey animals. And jeez, why would we? It's terrible.
Factory farm: living every day (and probably not very many of them) like you're in Saw or Cube or something. Far worse than even the pretty bad situation that is life in nature. Like, a lot worse. And that was already pretty bad.
Ethical farms, keeping backyard chickens, et c: Like living in a relatively good dystopia. Brave New World, maybe, in the best case. Logan's Run, in the worst.
Hollywood is not some united single entity. I’ve seen some powerful anti gun movies, and movies that treat them like a fetish. At the end of the day it’s a business and it’s more profitable to make movies people want to see. Be that Saw - for some people or Barney's Great Adventure for a different audience.
I’m annoyed that Apple requires Telegram to block sexual content. I perceive sex as a generally positive thing, a common source of joy.
I strongly dislike realistic violence, to the extent that the poster adverts for the Saw films are things I wish I had not seen. I think the frequency of it in popular entertainment reflects badly on the human condition.
Nevertheless, I have recently seen there is evidence showing that violent media reduces real life violence, so even despite my visceral reaction I wouldn’t make a general censorship against violence just to satisfy my personal preferences: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/health/video-games-violence-explainer/index.html
That said, simply because everyone is different, I think there is a place in the future for automated filtering on a personal basis. Perhaps a social media plug-in that stops me seeing violence, while somebody else has a different one that stopped them seeing nudity — and not the built-in ones! When Twitter started using “likes” as an alternative retweet, they kept showing me BDSM[1] that someone else liked.
[1] For me, S&M in particular pattern matches to “violence” rather than “sex”, but (unlike the mere existence of gore films) that doesn’t mean I think it reflects badly on anyone. Like boxing, I don’t need to grok it: I trust the people-I-perceive-as-victims saying they enjoy it.
More realistically, it was hyperbole poking fun at how many Saw movies there are.
> How would that be possible? There seem to be nine Saw movies. Nowhere near 400,000 hours.
Pretty simple; each Saw movie is 45,000 hours long.
More realistically, a training process might involve watching each movie more than once.
>Mr Puzzles, clearly based on a misunderstanding of the movie Saw. He's a bad guy attempting to kill people via elaborate set-ups that make no sense. There are a lot of Saw movies so it's possible the bot spent 400,000 hours watching nothing but Saw movies.
How would that be possible? There seem to be nine Saw movies. Nowhere near 400,000 hours.
The title reads as follows:
>Netflix released a horror movie written by a bot and it's spectacular
That is confusing and click-baity.
The subtitle reads as follow:
>It's good. And by good I mean terrible.
Is it good or terrible? Does the word "terrible" refer to horror movies and sinister plots?
>As a journalist constantly stressed about being replaced by robots.
Did Mr. Puzzles put a period where the rest of the sentence should be to torment us?
Wow, 20% of images being misclassified as CP would be terrifying. I never thought I'd say it but my next phone will definitely not be an iPhone or any device that is uploading my information to another server without my permission for any reason.
Is there even any evidence that arresting people with the wrong bit pattern on the computer helps stop child rape/trafficking? If so, why aren't we also going after people who go to gore websites? There's tons of awful material out there easily accessible of people getting stabbed, shot, murdered, butchered, etc. Do we not want to find people who are keeping collections of this material on their computers? And if so, what about people who really like graphic horror movies like Saw or Hostel? Obviously it's not real violence, but it's definitely close enough, and if you like watching that stuff, maybe you should be on a list? If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of naked children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of people getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be arrested and put on a list?
This is all not even taking into account that someone might not even realize they are in possession of CP because someone else put it on their device. I've heard there's tons of services marketing on the dark net where you pay someone $X00 in bitcoin and they remotely upload CP to any target's computer.
It seems like we are going down a very scary and dangerous path.
It's a very well crafted piece of cinema that intelligently deals with the idea of detectives chasing down a psychopath. The characters are well defined and well acted, and the plot isn't really 'guessable'. It's Brad Pitt's best movie.
As others have said though, it is definitely a bit gratuitously sickening in places but not in a way that's out of step with the plot of the film. It almost crosses into the horror genre in places (in a Hostel or Saw franchise sort of way). If you're squeamish it's probably best to stay away.
So you think paintball is more violent than a movie like Saw, because they involve actively targeting another player? How about a game of tag?
I meant to type "voluntary".
To make a tortured analogy to illustrate a point, are the victims in the movie Saw not responsible for their own deaths, as they voluntarily chose the actions which lead to their untimely deaths?
Voluntary choices don't imply preferrable or desirable choices. When Walmart arrives and lowers prices to the point of bankrupting small business in the town, residents certainly welcome the provided conveniences and lower prices, but are faced with the choice between paying higher prices, or paying lower prices and destroying small business within their towns. Humans aren't perfect economic machines, so they're likely to pick the lower prices, paying the long-term consequences for those decisions. Hence, people don't want Walmarts moving into their towns, since the outcomes are fairly predictable at that point.
Films like Saw and The Human Centipede are probably just adrenaline rushes and quick thrills. I'm not keen on them because I tend to empathise too much with characters and, to be honest, I don't want to put myself in the shoes of someone facing their final moments with a reverse bear trap stuck to their face. It's generally why I'm not overly keen on violence in movies because I start to over-think or over-feel it, and those situations are so unrealistic that of course I can't comprehend it. I suppose that in itself is a form of cosmic horror but it's purely self inflicted, it's not what the movie is selling. Saw isn't a Lovecraft film.
I wouldn't stop anyone else from watching them, and those movies aren't shit or trashy either (like some commenter has said). But I know my reasons for not enjoying them, and preferring horror that is more subtle, psychological, and rooted in realistic trauma that I've experienced myself.
Torture is out of the picture because it's too often depicted as something the torturer can't wait to do, they're just held back by a system and they want to go rogue. You know, the trope of the torturer unfolding a cloth or a leather pouch to joyously reveal a bunch of surgical instruments. Or punching a guy in the face so hard it knocks their chair over; which in real life would probably put them in a coma.
The Saw films are called "torture porn". There is no good thing about them. They are horrible movies and show just how low people will go to watch trash.
Showing that torture is an effective way for good guys to obtain something is particularly bad. However, I am not against the use of torture in films like Saw.
Saw is a horror movie. Horror movies are a way to experience scary things without putting you in actual danger. And they are not going to achieve that by just showing kittens playing, getting you to be scared/horrified/disgusted/... when you know you are perfectly safe and that the story is fiction is hard enough. So they use an arsenal of techniques, from jump scares to phobias and gruesome deaths. And torture is great for this. We can imagine what it feels like, we get to see the blood and gore, we know it something that happens in the real world,... Well made, torture scenes are very effective at creating tension when it is called for.
And I don't think we should not use them just because torture is atrocious in real life. When we go see a horror movie or thriller, we know the game, we don't want it to go easy on us. Deep inside, we know we are safe, that's what allows us to have fun playing with our limits.
Is it healthy? I think so, most kids love getting scared at some point, and they don't become psychopaths as a result. And horror stories, even the most tasteless ones definitely don't glorify what they are showing.
24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel.
Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.
The most unassuming movie I was recommended, but turned out to be spectacular: Upgrade. I read somewhere the producers had really low expectations for this movie as it is low budget and not about comic book superheroes. Apparently, there are no plans for the 2nd installment. But, imho, creative camerawork, beautiful cinematography and wild choreography put it anywhere above and beyond most any superhero flick out now.
The movie that shattered any expectations I had for it: Enter Nowhere. I stumbled upon it on Amazon Prime, thought the synopsis was somewhat interesting and went into watching it with extremely low expectations (the title is crap, the poster is crap, it has Clint Eastwood's son with wooden expression throughout the movie). But this movie turned out to be a trippy puzzle unlike what we are used to (Cube, Saw, Escape Room). Instead of wealthy people with kinky(?) sense of entertainment and insane philosophers, it has something to do with WW2. Unusual.
Low budget movie that takes place in a single room, yet won't bore you even for a second: Circle. It's a survival game movie where predicting the outcome of the game is half the fun. Blew all my expectations out the park. I watched a lot of survival movies of late and this is one of the (very few) best.
The movies that deserved all their hype: Arrival, It, Us, Annihilation. In Arrival I loved the design of aliens, their environment, the way the linguist tries to decipher their language and the final twist. One negative is how the movie deals with geopolitics - it's crude and laughable. For a movie led by kids, It (the movie) is really a solid one. It is polished like a huge budget superhero flick, but also, uh, literate and entertaining. Us is a beautiful, very slick movie that pops in your face. It has a couple of interesting twists and some funny bits. Refreshing break from the regular Hollywood fare(schlock). That said, Us is riddled with holes as if someone shot at it from a semi. But even with that it's fun to watch as Hollywood doesn't make movies like Us often (only on special occasions?). Annihilation is gorgeous. Period. The set design is a work of art and I love the subject matter. Again, H'wood doesn't dabble in this sort of stuff very often. The move signals the ending twist half-way through, but I am not sure it's even a twist. This movie doesn't end with a bang as it's all about the process. To me it is a meditation on research, often frustrating and unsuccessful (though, the linguist in Arrival was very much successful in her endeavor :) The soundtrack is unusual (and beautiful) for this kind of movie (although the movie itself is unusual). I love the sound design in all these four movies. Really attractive.
Among the memorable shorts (I watch a lot of them; I can recall many, but can't remember their titles) I saw are The Gun Fighter [0], Paradox (try solving the problem in the movie before it ends)[1], Thresher [2], Rakka [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnfh3qcpBxA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ2t_yNHQs
I tend to agree. Movies in general seem to be escapism[0]. Even incredibly depressing/artful movies like Requiem For A Dream, Joker (since it was brought up on this thread), Irréversible, The Truman Show, Martyrs, Saw, etc. are a form of escapism.
Now, each person may have their own preferences as to what type of escapism they want, but ultimately it's really just spending a few hours at a theatre or in front of a TV.
(We could argue about the intellectual merits of each of the films I've mentioned, but that's irrelevant as to whether they're escapism or not.)
Hot take: The problem isn't "shallow movies" or similar. It's that well-enough-off people are increasingly getting bored.
[0] Hell, I'd even extend that to most art.
One other thing I've never quite understood is that a child can watch James Bond shoot a few hundred people and that's fine, it is significantly less fine for that child to watch a film of 2 people having sex, even though sex is a normal heathy part of life. In the UK a 16 year old can legally have sex, but cant watch it?!
Tbh I'm not sure, I get turned off by things like Saw, because I don't really think theres the need to go that far, but on the other hand, is Mario jumping on a turtle animal cruelty?
I suppose the line is realism? Mario isnt attempting to be real? Quorn mince isnt attempting to be real, vegetarian bacon is.
The article seems to really gloss over the fact that the "escape the room" concept was a media trope or even subgenre before this industry exploded. The history discussion skips the years that the concept really started becoming popular in media. The best-known examples are probably in the Saw franchise, but it's also a popular genre in casual gaming. As far as I remember, it really took off ~15 years ago with Toshimitsu Takagi's Flash games (Crimson Room, Viridian Room, White Chamber; the latter should not be confused with the sci-fi horror game the white chamber). There are other semi-popular franchises that use the concept within a larger framework, as with some of the Saw sequels (Zero Escape, Danganronpa).
This, in turn, probably has a less direct relationship to films and TV episodes that focus on a single room to save budget or create psychological tension (as with the original Saw), without escape necessarily being a major theme.
It’s kind of a relief to see so many other people say that the violence is too much for them.
I was 8 when the original MK came out. It was gross and extreme, but it all felt like a cartoon, it didn’t seem threatening. When it showed up on Genesis, I found the blood code and learned every fatality, knew the game inside and out. When MK II arrived on SNES, it was even better!
By comparison, my impression of modern MK games is that they aim to creat the experience of actual human suffering. I guess it’s unavoidable that the detail of the violence would have to grow with the technology, but it makes me uncomfortable, I find it too unpleasant. Watching it is the difference between the heart removal scene in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and a recent Saw movie.
I wasn’t saying that they are “shitty films” - movies like saw, etc are clearly popular, but don’t have the drama (as in acting, not crazy coworkers) that film reviewers like.
The problem for movies like Get Out and the quiet one (blanking on the name), is that they get placed in the “horror” bucket, which is increasingly dominated by the Saw-style torture porn movies.
I’m not entirely sure that I particularly buy the articles arguments, I think it’s more a reflection of which sub-genre is perceived by the general populace as reflecting the genre as a whole. As with many things the dominant sub-genre changes over time. The author seems to want a specific sub-genre to be regarded as the actual definition of the whole genre rather than allowing the overall perception of what a genre should be to change over time.
For instance the article is talking about the horror genre, and the torture vs suspense sub genres. But we can look elsewhere as well - compare what was considered an “action” movie in the 80s, vs 90s, vs 00s, vs today. We can see as the popularity of different genres ebbs over time. For action movies the sub genres /could/ be meaningful plot vs explosions and everywhere in between. Modern action movies (super heroes) try to have character development, 80s and 90s less so (predator, which might also be considered “horror”).
And I’m rambling incoherently so I’ll be off :)
It wasn’t always this way. Films like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and pretty much the entire Hitchcock collection were some of the most iconic films of their times.
In my opinion, the popularity of the late 70s to 80s slasher films (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St, Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few), combined with studios’ ever-shrinking tolerance for risk, resulted in a particularly bland few decades of mainstream horror, with the well-known Saw franchise and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat satirical Final Destination series as typical examples of the era. Personally, I’m partial to the Evil Dead films, Army of Darkness most of all. Groovy.
Horror can be excellent when done well, and pathetic when done poorly. It is easy to go for cheap scares and bloody massacre scenes. There is a lot to dislike about modern horror films that can turn off audiences looking for more than jump scares and blood splatter. If I hadn’t dated a girl in college who was super into the horror genre, I would have never gotten into it.
Horror is best when it floods you with an emotional high that lasts long after the initial shock. For a most masterful example, try playing Silent Hill 2, if you dare.
Reread what I actually said. I didn't say violent video games weren't popular.
I said very few people derive direct pleasure from simulating murder in eg a video game. When you stomp on a bad guy in Mario, you are not feeling the serial killer equivalent to some kind of sweet orgasmic reaction high to murdering a fellow human with a butcher knife in real life. There is no connection at all.
To put it into movie terms: a lot of people enjoy action movies (which include violence), the latest flick by The Rock etc, they're exciting. A dramatically smaller share of the population enjoys watching highly graphic, gruesome, murder movies like Hostel or Saw. And that's not the person simulating murder, that's second hand, watching the simulation of it, and the drop off in popularity is extreme.
People are not having fun in GTA because they get off on actually murdering people and their sole physical outlet for it is relegated to a video game. All of those players aren't actually lusting after wanting to slaughter their fellow humans.
You can simulate sex in VR, or watch porn, and then go have sex, jerk off all day, etc. There's a direct connection.
Very, very, very few people murder or actually want to murder; some extremely high percentage of the population wants sex, has sex, jerks off, etc.
The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.
We also avoid movies like Saw not only for our older children but even ourselves. Why fill out bellies with filthy water when there's plenty of fresh water all around us, free for the taking? Only people who convince themselves that there's no fresh water, or that it's not good enough for their belly, will look for filthy polluted water and convince themselves it's their only hope.
This was a sadistic game of simon says that was always going to end in an execution. The jigsaw killer from the Saw movies would be impressed.
Torture is much worse than molestation in my opinion, yet as a society we don't seem to have a problem with movies like Saw and Hostel.
Hostile and Saw film franchises are direct outcomes of insex
Absurd. I'm sure it was an influence, but let's not forget that the century kicked off with videos of things like Al Qaeda terrorists sawing off Daniel Pearl's head and horrific ethnic cleansing abuses in the Balkans. To think that these would not have been on Eli Roth's radar and ascribe it all to a porn site strains credulity.
legally-dangerous aspects (plots/scripts)
Do please explain your theory of what makes these legally dangerous. I am sure you have more legal knowledge than I, a law school dropout, but I'm interested enough censorship and first amendment issues that this claims seems highly questionable.
Also, it's wrong unless it's based on some very recent news. I may as well admit I'm somewhat into SM myself and so I'm familiar with Kink.com's output, though I don't consume much porn. Last time I looked they were still doing things with plots, albeit the very rudimentary plots that amount to little more than verbal foreplay to set up the scene for the sexual activity. Now, I have no professional or personal relationship with them (although I have loose acquaintances with several people who have worked or performed for the firm) and don't find their offerings very erotic, but I fail to see why you would think it falls outside the bounds of first amendment protection, unless you are of the opinion that no sane person could consent to engage in sadomasochistic practices.
APA Review Confirms Link Between Watching Scary Movies and Fear
APA Review Confirms Link Between Relaxing on the Beach and Serenity
APA Review Confirms Link Between Reading Nihilistic Poetry and Ennui
Entertainment media are specifically designed to elicit an emotional response. Books, movies, games, music, if they didn't make you feel something then why would you buy it?
If we dislike being afraid so much, why would we seek out a game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or a movie like Saw? Could it be because despite the emotional response, we're still rational actors with a firm grip on the separation of fantasy and reality?
Good question, but seriously, no.
You can actually test that hypothesis yourself very easily. Go look at some of the more gory scenes from Saw, or the Aliens movies. If you're like many typical internet people they won't even phase you. Now go and find some of the typical rotten.com / liveleak content and see how much you can stomach of that. Likely not a lot and not easily at all.
Knowing that something is real makes a MASSIVE difference.
Further, being on the ground with a gun, facing armed and active enemies² makes you more likely and less inhibited to recklessly kill people, because while there may be consequences to killing, the consequence to being killed is FAR greater.
Soldiers need to be trained to not go full auto with their rifles for a reason.
² Just a note to make clear that i edited that part in as clarification.
vvvv For one, that book doesn't seem to cover direct vs remote combat, which is the comparison i was making, and further: Read the reviews underneath.
> Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids
No, people are arguing against films like Saw or their 1980s equivalents.
> Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
What life lessons is a child going to learn from watching "Hostel"?
Also, "limp wristed"? FFS.
As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
I'm only joking, but wouldn't seeing a SAW movie with them and explaining that this kind of violence is perceived as justified against certain groups suffice?
Most likely because the average person doesn't want to explore violence that way. I love some FPS games, but not because they are violent. I like how fast-paced and strategic they are.
The same goes for movies. Most people will watch movies with some violence, but movies like Saw don't have mainstream appeal.
That's interesting. I guess what I'm noticing is not so much the sinister intentions but the sort of gruesome nature with which it's portrayed these days. The joker has always been a sinister agent of chaos that kills people indiscriminately. But the Heath Ledger joker surgically implanted a bomb inside of a guy. He sliced peoples faces into smiley faces. That's stuff straight out of the movie Saw. The most the Jack Nicholson joker did was squirt poison gas out of the flower on his jacket or explode people. They just die, and that's that, nothing that gruesome.
Yeah. Probably not. I haven't even watched Saw. I'm too emotional. As for Dexter I don't think it's violent. It would be family comedy-drama about slightly maladjusted individual if not for all the killings. On the other hand I have friends who coldn't suffer through first episode. At the same time they happily watch something as nasty as Das Experiment. I guess there is some variation in perception of violence.
The thing is, if you're not doing some sort of incredibly bloated production, you don't need 10,000 people to make a movie. Most movies are NOT Lord of the Rings.
For instance, one of the best critically received movies of the last decade was probably No Country For Old Men. Budget? $25 million. Made back well over triple that at the US box office alone.
The King's Speech? $15 million, made over $135 million
Argo? $44 million, and that had lots of expensive location shoots in the middle east
The Hurt Locker? $15 million
Slumdog Millionaire? $15 million
Crash? $6.5 million
Million Dollar Baby? $30 million
All movies that did very well at the box office, and were made for $25 million or less (with one exception). They also all won the Best Picture oscar. So there is PLENTY of evidence that you can make a great movie without getting anywhere near a 9-figure price tag.
Of course, for "indie" films, you can go well under that. "Clerks" cost about as much a new car. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was barely over $100k....the first Saw movie was made for just over $1m and grossed 100 times that.
> I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films
Isn't that the truth. I appreciate this is largely preaching to the choir, but it seems increasingly bizarre that sexual content (including simple nudity) is so often censored, while graphic violent acts are everywhere in mainstream entertainment. What are people afraid of?
It's interesting that "violent games" and "violent music" often get blamed (often by the same people), but "violent films" or "violent novels" less often. I would guess demographics are a big part of it: lots of people who don't think of themselves as potential killers like horror films, but they think of video games, or black metal, as something only weird obsessives are into, because people in their circles aren't into them.
I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films, than I am by people playing Call of Duty or buying Dimmu Borgir albums, but ymmv.
edit: That isn't to say that I think violent films should be banned, either. But I'm more weirded out by the fact that some really gory stuff is really popular, than I am by anything that comes out of the game or music industries.
Because the SAW movies are about killing people and thus leave nobody alive to testify?
> First, it's you who puts yourself in that position.
The people in the saw movies all kill themself, right?
Visiting their store feels like you've stepped into a Halloween horror movie.
The staff must be forced to take lithium at the start of each shift. At the Microsoft store in Chicago, it's not only empty and in the least 'cool' part of the city (distant suburbs), but the constant demos felt like I was a victim in a Saw movie. I had to enthusiastically play a Kinect game... or else.
Actually, no you wouldn't. You'd be able to answer why Alexandra Gelber, Assistant Deputy Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, thinks violence/violent imagery is different than sexual abuse/sexual imagery. The only citations are to law (both statutory and case law) but in a memo arguing for the justification of the law, citing the law is begging the question. She does make reference to a number of specific cases, but one could just as easily pick out examples of violent acts being committed by people exposed to violent imagery. In order to refute the analogy, you must show why the two situations are different; Ms. Gelber makes an effort to connect sexual images of children with sexual abuse of children but fails to show (rather than state) how that differs from the case with violence.
Consider the passage you quoted.
"no one who watches Saw believes that the images of violence are actually happening"
Actually, you do believe it, at least for the duration of the film; the concept is known as "suspension of disbelief". Rationally, you know better, but your mind takes a temporary lapse of its senses for the sake of enjoyment. That doesn't change the fact that the violence is realistic enough to pass for the real thing.
"where in child pornography images, real children are actually being abused."
What about animated images or self-taken images? There is plenty of content produced that involves no actual depiction of children, nonetheless the abuse of children. Yet the law seems to state and the courts seem to think, for the most part, possession of images not depicting abuse constitutes the same offense as possession of the genuine article.
"Furthermore, what is the point of any pornography if not to stoke the fires of sexual desire"
I could just as easily say: what is the point of any pornography if not to satisfy sexual desire? Since I too am providing no citations for my claim, one cannot objectively state which of our two statements holds more water.
I appreciate the contribution to the discussion, but ultimately what we have (as is often the case in such matters, to be fair) is a dispute between opinions, lacking any hard evidence for either position. Remember that the position is about child pornography/pedophilia in general, so you can't just cite specific offenders; exceptional cases do not a trend make. Statistics are needed here, but obviously they're going to be hard to come by.
Also, even if we take Ms. Gelber's argument at face value, it essentially boils down to: images of child pornography are very highly correlated with acts of child abuse. If that is true, then I would certainly say it, coupled with the necessary accusations, justifies a police investigation and the issuance of a warrant. However, I do not believe that makes a compelling argument for the act in and of itself to be illegal. Sexual abuse of minors is the crime; possession of its depiction is, at best, a minor offense (invasion of a child's privacy).
Movies like the saw series seemed to do this fine, opened pretty much everywhere one the same day. Sure not every movie can get the same limited screen space, but the big movies that are getting the most online downloads probably can.
Yeah all the SAW films were pretty much worldwide release on the same day.
When I saw the first Saw film, I was convinced that it was directly inspired by this incident.
IMHO all law suites over patents in software are slimy. This my opinion as a programmer. If you are indeed a programmer, please feel free to look at this and tell me if you see any of the stuff mentioned in the lawsuit not fairly obvious. http://www.theserverside.com/report/The-Oracle-Google-Patent-Lawsuit-Demystified . I do not think algorithms should be patentable as this stifles innovation. Oracle vs. Google lawsuit would be fun to watch -- if you like the "SAW" movies.
You know it's funny you mention that, because I just finished reading an AV Club interview with the producers of the original Saw movies. It was one thing to have a script passed around from place to place, but these guys went the extra step and made a 5-minute short to demonstrate the concept.
Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people take that one step to get into the latter category. And sometimes it's not that difficult to actually do.
A clever idea but the implementation is far from perfect.
On the product page for V, a novel by Thomas Pynchon, I got a torrent link for the fifth installment of the Saw horror movie series.
Yeah sorry about the lack of paragraphs. I always get this nagging feeling that I need to add empty rows for.. clarity :)
You watch Fight Club several times per week?! I can't understand the motivation, but hey, people are different!
I've seen Fight Club exactly once, in a theatre, but there are movies I've seen many times, and will watch again. One such movie is Leon ("The Professional"). In case you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour.. It has to be the director's cut though.
> Finally, I think at this stage piracy (well, quality piracy at least) is still something that Joe Public isn't savvy enough to pick up.
Maybe, but many Joe Publics are already downloading movies much like you and I, and at least see some of the good stuff in there while looking for Saw XVII.
They might download quality entertainment by accident. Of course, they might just as well stop watching it too, when quality fails to keep their attention.
Anyways, Transformers was legendary for me too, and the movie was enjoyable, with some of the coolest 3D ever. I feared Michael Bay would just totally ruin it.