Game on: Ranking the 20 best (and 5 dumbest) traps in the Saw movies

Although it flirts with the process at a couple different points over its run, 2010’s Saw 3D is probably the point where Saw came closest to embracing the idea of full self-parody. And that’s not entirely to its detriment, as the movie acknowledges the utter absurdity of John Kramer (Bell) and his relentless attempts at inspiring better living through strapping buzzsaws to people’s faces. Case in point: This opening spectacle, which sees two bros (Sebastian Pigott and Jon Cor) fighting to the death over the woman (Anne Green) they’ve both been dating, in the form of shoving, well, a bunch of buzzsaws into each others’ faces. The real twist? The whole thing’s happening out in a sealed box in a public square, a feat so improbable that not even the Saw movies—a franchise that loves explaining every single moving piece of every single stupidly convoluted plan—ever really bothers to explain how it was done.

Protagonists typically don’t last for longer than a single movie in Saw land, so kudos to Scott Patterson’s Agent Schram for getting out of this particular guaranteed deathtrap with his life intact. The trap itself is just plain nasty—one of those “intentionally inescapable” ones that crop up as the series adds antagonists less obsessed with fair play than its original baddie—as Schram wakes to find his head stuck in a glass box that rapidly starts filling with water. His solution is the clever kind of nasty, too: One of the rare instances of a Saw protagonist using actual lateral thinking to survive (even if he still has to spill quite a bit of trachea-aspirating blood to do it).

Despite its HD visuals, and a slightly higher caliber of acting, franchise revival Jigsaw, from 2017, is mostly a celebration of Saw’s worst impulses. (The eventual reveal of the killer is almost brain-meltingly convoluted and dumb, among other things.) But it does have a few cool traps, including this opening number that sees five hapless souls dragged toward a wall full of spinning blades while they’ve also got buckets strapped to their faces for some reason. (It’s so the screenwriters can preserve some of their identities for a big “twist” down the road. Don’t tell!) We’ll admit to having a weakness for Saw traps where our “heroes” don’t just scream like idiots and die, so hearing Laura Vandervoort’s Anna actually bother to listen to instructions for once and save most of her fellow prisoners by working out the rules of the game is a refreshing change of pace.

This one earns its place on visuals alone, as Mpho Koaho’s Timothy contends with one of the single nastiest devices in all of Saw canon: A massive, bone twisting clockwork apparatus that Jigsaw simply refers to as “The Rack.” Nestled deep in franchise turning point (and not necessarily in a good way) Saw III, this sequence has some dumb extraneous nonsense attached to it, in the form of a key you have to get shot by a shotgun to grab. (Because apparently the giant device turning a dude’s ankle inside-out wasn’t sufficiently gruesome.) But if you’re watching these movies with the goal of seeing fucked-up shit happen, well, hey: The Rack is fucked-up shit in abundance.

We can’t believe we’re saying this, but 2009’s Saw VI is, in some ways, the “socially conscious Saw movie”—at least, in so far as most of Jigsaw’s victims in this surprisingly fun installment are asshole-ish health insurance company employees, or, as in this opening sequence, a pair of predatory lenders. And while the budget might be (very obviously) falling at this point, the introductory trap serves up some classic Saw over-acting, as the loathsome duo (Tanedra Howard and Marty Moreau) are tasked with hacking off as much of their own flesh as they can and tossing the severed meat into tubes that will deposit the bounty on a scale. Biggest contributor gets to leave with however much of their bodies are left; losers gets a pair of big, nasty screws drilled through their heads. Have fun!

A fine blend of clever and nasty, this Saw 3D trap tasks Sean Patrick Flanery’s Brian—a grifter riding a wave of self-help celebrity by falsely claiming to be a former Jigsaw victim—with pulling a key attached to a fishhook out of the stomach of his unfortunate publicist (Naomi Snieckus). The fun bit (for a grisly value of fun) is that the device preparing to drill its way into poor Nina’s neck is rigged to go faster every time it picks up a loud noise—such as the sorts of sounds you might make when your asshole boss is dragging a fishhook out of your stomach on a length of string. (She doesn’t make it, although that’s par for the course for Saw 3D, which is one of the most aggressively lethal films in the franchise.)

Most recent Saw movie Spiral is by no means a good film—wasting, as it does, Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, an enjoyably committed performance from Max Minghella, and any deeper ideas it could have had about the state of policing in America in the 2020s. (Not necessarily in that order.) But it does have at least one cool trap, as Rock’s one-good-cop Zeke finds his corrupt former partner (Patrick McManus) strung up in front of a high-powered fan that’s situated directly below a glass crusher being fed a constant supply of bottles. The net result? A high-speed glass gun, firing shards with (eventually) lethal force, and which at least manages to look cool, unlike most of Spiral’s contributions to the franchise.

The sole positive entry on this list from 2007’s abysmal Saw IV skates by on spectacle alone. (And that’s pun intended, by the by.) We spend a lot of time during this particular moral slogfest watching Donnie Wahlberg’s Detective Eric Matthews standing in a warehouse somewhere on a melting block of ice, while Lyriq Bent struggles mightily to carry an entire movie on his back. But the payoff is, undeniably, an image we won’t be getting out of our heads for at least a minute, as Bent’s SWAT team member Rigg rushes in to the rescue at the final moment—triggering two swinging pendulums of ice that collide directly on Matthews’ head, turning his brains and skull into just so many Wahlburgers.

2005’s Saw II is at least partially concerned with trying to one-up its immediate predecessor on raw spectacle, if nothing else, and this first trap sequence marks an early success in that column. Sure, a reverse bear-trap on your face is nasty, but what about a Venus fly trap-esque mask full of nails, just waiting to spring shut on your dome? And sure, having to cut a key out of another guy is bad, but what if the key is in your own eye?! (Answer: You very understandably fail to get the key out, and your dome gets sprung; Saw II is, in a lot of ways, a movie about people being extremely bad at solving puzzles, and it announces that intent from the jump.)

There’s a bespoke awfulness to the traps in the original Saw, which often forego elaborate mechanisms in favor of something a bit more lo-fi and clever. Take, as an example, the briefly glimpsed ordeal of an accused fraudster (Paul Gutrecht) who wakes to find himself locked in a dark room, slathered with highly flammable gel. His only hope of surviving the slow-acting poison moving through his veins? Deciphering a safe combination written on the walls of the room—with a single, lethal candle as his only light source. As an introduction to Jigsaw’s MO, it’s short, and, well … Sweet’s not exactly the right word for inadvertent self-immolation, huh?

Our second winner from Saw VI is the first to focus on the closet thing the movie has to a “hero”—professional insurance claim denier William. (Peter Outerbridge, putting a surprisingly sympathetic face on a total moral failure of a man.) Like a lot of Saw VI traps, William’s first ordeal is a competition, with only one survivor possible. In this case, William is pitted against his company’s janitor, each man fitted into an apparatus that will slowly crush them the more they breathe. Silly, yes, but also the kind of horror conceit that will have you holding your breath right alongside the hapless victims.

The traps in 2008’s Saw V are a bit hard to talk about in isolation, since they actually operate as a piece, gradually building up to one of Jigsaw’s endlessly self-justifying “morals.” That gets its best demonstration here, as Julie Benz and Greg Bryk arrive in the final room of their gauntlet of traps—only to realize that filling a jar with 10 pints of blood to get the last door open would have been a lot easier if they hadn’t killed, backstabbed, or otherwise screwed over the three other human beings that started the night with them. Saw V is mostly a non-entity—it’s deep into what we’ve come to think of as the franchise’s “Costas Mandylor Zone,” not a compliment—but it’s rare enough for one of Jigsaw’s platitudes to actually make this much sense that we have to give the guy the win.

Saw simplicity at its finest: Get to the exit of a maze of razor wire without cutting yourself to shreds and bleeding out. We get why John Kramer didn’t stick to these refreshingly easy executions for the series’ later installments—clockwork silliness gets butts in seats. But this first-movie trap is near-perfect because it forces you to go through the classic Saw audience member mental process: “I could do that…”, “Well, maybe I could do that…”, and, finally, “God, I could never actually do that…”

This is another one where a single incredible visual manages to spackle over a lot of narrative and logistical issues: We may not enjoy the reveals that come at the end of Jigsaw, but it’s hard to fault its final, incredibly gory kill. (Hey, Battlestar Galactica fans, ever wanted to see what a flower made out of Callum Keith Rennie’s head looks like?) One moment of absolute visual inspiration in a movie otherwise way too stuck in the past.

This one ranks high simply for making us laugh: In the midst of a support group meeting for Jigsaw survivors, one woman (Oluniké Adeliyi) relates her own traumas with the devious and malevolent criminal mastermind. We then cut to her and another guy leg wrestling while suspended over a floor full of spinning lawnmower blades, while a horde of (eventually blood-splattered) lawn gnomes looks on. As a visual, it’s neat—and as a rare joke by Saw about Saw, it’s a delightful dose of unexpected levity.

The highlight of Saw VI’s “Who decides who lives and who dies?” theme is an inspired bit of ugliness, as Peter Outerbridge’s insurance CEO William Eastman comes across six of his employees all strapped to a carousel—which deposits them, one by one, in front of a loaded shotgun that proceeds to fire. William can save his clerks by pressing a pair of buttons (getting a couple of spikes through his hands in the process, because Saw is always going to make you bleed). The twist? He can only do it twice—leaving the terrified workers to take turns pleading to live at their colleagues’ expense. A special shout-out goes to actor Shawn Mathieson, whose Josh is last in the line, and totally doomed—and whose final screams of “When you’re killing me, you look at me!” do at least as much damage to William as the nails through his palms.

When you see a set of saw blades fire up in a Saw movie, you typically expect to see them intersect, fatally, with human flesh. So kudos to Saw III for finding an undeniably fresh take on the dangers of rotating, rending metal—because while Judge Halden (Barry Flatman) isn’t in danger of getting cut apart when vengeful father Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) comes across the saw-adjacent vat he’s been restrained within, he is in danger of being drowned. That becomes apparent very quickly, as an assembly line of pig corpses begins moving through one of Jigsaw’s endless industrial playgrounds above the pair, each one dropping into a waiting set of blades—which merrily spray the resultant pig goo all over the increasingly panicked judge. The sight of Flatman disappearing beneath a rising tide of liquid flesh is horrible in ways that a million severed limbs can’t match.

Classics are classic for a reason, and it’s impossible to deny the power of Saw’s first truly gnarly John Kramer creation. It’s not just that the “reverse bear-trap” is a truly impressive piece of ugly metal creativity, threatening as it does to tear the human skull in two. (Spoilers: We won’t see what that actually looks like until Saw 3D; it is, indeed, pretty goddamn nasty.) But it’s also the way that the entire sequence surrounding the device functions as a vital short film lodged in the midst of the first Saw narrative. Shawnee Smith’s Amanda is, obviously, one of the franchise’s most major (and most interesting) characters, set to appear alongside Bell once again in Saw X. But the Reverse Bear Trap also establishes the key idea that Jigsaw really is as fair as he likes to claim in all his little tapes and videos, which is an important element of this franchise’s whacked moral code. If you wanted to explain Saw to people, you could do a lot worse than the above three minutes of horror.

This is a broad entry, since it encompasses, essentially, the entire 103-minute runtime of the original Saw. But there’s a reason that the basic setup there—two men chained up in an abandoned bathroom, with a corpse between them—was enough to propel James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s original self-funded short film into what is now a 10-film franchise. (And the two of them, of course, far up the Hollywood ladder.) Now admittedly, the actual solution to the dilemma facing Adam (Whannell) and Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes) here is pretty crappy, as far as puzzles go. (To the point that later films retcon some of its obvious unfairness to be one of Jigsaw’s pesky apprentices mucking things up, as is their wont.) But the “two-man play” vibe of these two guys vacillating wildly between trust, distrust, violence, and worse in desperate circumstances is genuinely compelling, the atmosphere of dread never relenting even as the twists pile up. Saw gets pretty far from this basic sales pitch even one sequel down the line, but there’s a reason that the first film remains iconic even as the rest of the franchise get more disposable by the entry. The fact that it’s only our second favorite trap speaks to the true gnarliness of our winner. But before we get to that sticky situation, a detour to the dark side of the franchise’s worst traps…

One of several problems with Spiral is that almost all of its traps follow a very basic Jigsaw template: “Hurt yourself in a non-fatal way to save yourself from an unavoidably lethal injury.” These are almost always the most boring Saw traps, not least of which because nobody ever actually gets out of them: They inevitably delay maiming themselves just long enough to get hit with the big whammy, too. Case in point: The en-melting-ing of police captain Angie Garza (Marisol Nichols) later in Spiral. Yes, covering someone’s face in boiling wax is kind of awful/neat. But because the new Jigsaw wants Garza to sever her spine on a blade lodged in her back, all we really do is watch Nicols wriggle around for a minute before the wax starts to flow. Say what you like about the film’s somewhat similar opening kill, but at least there you get to see Letterkenny’s McMurray (Dan Petronijevic) try to rip his own tongue out before getting exploded by a train.

Look, even Jigsaw (the movie, not the murderer) seems to know that burying a couple of people in grain is kind of dopey. Hence, presumably, why the wheat eventually stops flowing over trapped Anna and Mitch (Mandela Van Peebles), and the producers just start chucking knives, saw blades, and farm implements at them out of the same hole that was previously dumping a whole farm’s worth of bounty on them, instead. It’s incredibly silly, even for a franchise that *gestures to the 21 previous entries*, and one more symptom that demosntrates that Jigsaw is far lazier in spirit than its various plot convolutions want you to believe.

The low-budget nature of Saw 3D shows itself here, as con-man Brian tries to save his lawyer (Rebecca Marshall) from getting a bunch of sharp objects shoved through her head in a way that probably looked at least mildly more impressive for viewers in a 3D-equipped theater. But no set of plastic glasses is going to make watching Sean Patrick Flanery doing shoulder presses while knives stab into his stomach look cooler than it is, which is very un-cool. The trap bits of Saw 3D are pretty much just an extended sequence of Flanery screaming while failing to save people, and this bit is their nadir. (Hey, at least the “we put a secret code on your teeth and now you gotta yank ‘em out” trap reminded us a bit of the Coens’ A Serious Man, which was a nice respite from thinking about Saw.)

Gratuitous nudity meets really lousy special effects in this early stinker from Saw III. Early in his quest for vengeance, mad dad Jeff comes across a woman (Debra McCabe) trapped in a freezer, with ice-cold water periodically spraying over her naked body. Will he save her, despite finding out she’s the witness who failed to come forward during the trial over his son’s death? Can the film actually convince you any of the objects in the room are actually cold by having people shout a lot? Has anything ever looked less convincing than the eventual woman-cicle that results from Jeff’s slow-paced dilly-dallying? These are the big questions Saw III forces you to ask.

With one exception, we’ve mostly avoided talking about Saw IV here, for the pretty basic reason that there’s not much in the movie that’d go in a list of best Saw anythings. But it does have, surprise surprise, our least favorite trap in the entire series, on basis of pure skuzziness alone. Running all over town on a quest for answers, Lyriq Bent’s Rigg winds up at a run-down motel, and tasked with kidnapping its manager (Marty Adams). Rigg is then confronted with said manager’s many awful crimes, which are ugly enough that the otherwise heroic SWAT cop willingly coerces the guy into a waiting Jigsaw trap—one that’s almost entirely perfunctory, as it basically races forward to the bit where the manager a) gets a knife in the eye, and then, b), is messily torn limb from limb. The Saw movies actually manage to dodge accusations of straight torture porn more often than not, if only because they’re as much about big elaborate setpieces as straight suffering. The Motel Bit is the one instance that’s truly about trying to derive sick satisfaction from watching Jigsaw (and our hero) take a guy (literally) apart, and it casts a pall over the entire film.

At the end of the day, when you’re evaluating big horror setpieces, you’ve got to rely on your own gut. And nothing twists that organ up worse, at least for us, than watching Shawnee Smith getting thrown into a pit of dirty, broken, and still very sharp needles while a deranged drug dealer (Franky G) screams abuse at her. (Adding an extra element to the awfulness: Smith’s character, Amanda, is a recovering drug addict.) Lit with sickly yellow brightness, the sequence is horrific even by the standards of the series, the sight of multiple syringes sticking haphazardly out of Smith’s arms an instant addition to The Nightmare Bank. There are an enormous number of things that happen to the human body in the Saw franchise that you wouldn’t want happening to you, were the option available. But somehow, this is the one that gets the most visceral reaction out of us.