Editorials
Why ‘Saw III’ is the Best Sequel in the Franchise
With Jigsaw now out in theaters, we revisit the franchise’s high point.
It could hardly be considered an exact science, but a case could be made that it’s in the third installment that a franchise is often perfected. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Paranormal Activity and Friday the 13th are all home to second sequels that are standout fan favorites, and Saw is certainly no exception to that particular theory.
Because with Saw III, the franchise was most definitely perfected.
Franchise co-creator Leigh Whannell returned to write Saw III, released in 2006 and directed by Saw II‘s Darren Lynn Bousman. It’s important to note Whannell’s involvement, because Saw III was the third and final time he was directly involved in the series’ storytelling. And it shows, as Saw III works overtime to provide franchise closure.
There are two main storylines that inevitably collide in Saw III, both of them compelling enough to elevate what many have written off as “torture porn” over the years into nothing short of a damn fine horror film that nails all the key themes and ideas that made the franchise so much more than that. In the first story, grieving father Jeff is kidnapped by Jigsaw and placed into a game where he’s forced to confront everyone who played a role in the death of his young son. They’ve all been strung up in nasty traps, and Jeff gets to decide who lives and who dies.
Elsewhere, we catch up with Lynn Denlon, a surgeon who is also kidnapped and placed into her own game. In Lynn’s game, a dying Jigsaw is confined to a bed in a makeshift, far-from-sterile hospital environment, where “student” Amanda Young is watching over him. Lynn’s task? Keep Jigsaw alive. If he dies, a collar around her neck will explode.
It’s the second story that is unquestionably the most important in Saw III. As we find out at the very end of the film (spoiler alert!), Lynn’s game was actually Amanda’s game, which is a surprise twist even to Amanda. It was Amanda who had to keep Lynn alive, and Jigsaw intentionally kept from her the important little tidbit that Jeff and Lynn are husband and wife.
Why would Jigsaw be testing Amanda *again*, after she already survived the “reverse bear trap” in the first film? Well, that’s where Saw III gets really interesting. Jigsaw *wants* Amanda to take over his work after he dies, but he’s not convinced that she’s actually capable of carrying on his cause. Amanda’s traps are designed to kill rather than teach lessons, and Jigsaw’s final test for her, before he dies, is to see if she has the will to keep a “subject” alive. As for Amanda, well, she’s got some serious demons battling inside her head.
Amanda Young, unquestionably the most interesting character in the franchise, was seemingly destined to become just that in the first Saw. Though she only makes a minor appearance in that film, it’s something she says to the police after surviving her trap that hits to the heart of everything the franchise is about.
“He helped me,” she tells them, referring to Jigsaw.
Amanda is the only victim of Jigsaw’s games who has actually learned the lesson he spent the final years of his life trying to impart, finding through her near-death experience a purpose in her life for the very first time. She is incredibly important to Jigsaw, and naturally, he’s the most important person in her life. It’s this connection between the two characters that makes Saw III something of a twisted love story, as Amanda vies for Jigsaw’s attention in the presence of another woman (Lynn) who seems to be the new apple of her teacher’s eye.
This sends Amanda into a tailspin, and it becomes clear that she has a goal that’s very different from Jigsaw’s: while Jigsaw genuinely wants his subjects to survive, Amanda simply cannot deal with the idea of anyone else in the world possessing the unique gift that Jigsaw has provided her with. It’s this dynamic between the two villains that makes Saw III the most interesting film in the franchise from a storytelling standpoint, and the performances of a calm Tobin Bell and a distraught Shawnee Smith sell that dynamic beautifully.
Revisiting Saw III this week, it became clear to me that Leigh Whannell intended to use the film, again his final one in the series, to wrap up loose ends and bring all the storylines from the previous two films to a satisfying conclusion. And he does just that with his script, using Saw III to cap off what is great standalone trilogy within the franchise. In particular, Saw III deepens the character of Amanda before killing her off, returning to the events of the very first Saw movie and showing us something new: Amanda was helping Jigsaw all along.
It was Amanda, wearing that iconic pig mask, who kidnapped Dr. Gordon and Adam, and as we learned in Saw II, it was Amanda who was running that particular show with a front row seat. The first three films wonderfully build upon that story of Jigsaw and Amanda, and Saw III is the perfect conclusion to their saga together. With massive wounds to the neck, one by gunshot and one by circular saw, Jigsaw and Amanda bleed out together. It’s a tale somewhat akin to Romeo and Juliet, only 1000x more twisted, and there’s something beautiful about it all.
While all this is going on, Saw III also serves up some of the franchise’s most gruesome traps, both through flashbacks to some of Amanda’s subjects and also to Jigsaw’s final game, the latter involving Lynn’s husband, Jeff. The traps in Saw III are aggressive and hard to watch, with “The Rack” and “Pig Vat” being two particular standouts on that front.
Bottom line being, Saw III delivers on everything that made the Saw films so damn good in the franchise’s early days, telling a compelling story, nauseating us with creatively nasty traps, and hitting us with a final act twist that we genuinely didn’t see coming. In many ways, it’s the perfect Saw film, and it’s also one of the best franchise sequels of them all.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to Saw III. After it killed off everything interesting about the story, the franchise quickly went downhill and never managed to recover.
But that original trilogy remains an incredible 3-part story of two characters: one who is searching for her own purpose, and another who is trying to give one to others.
There was a moment in Japanese culture when writers and filmmakers began to update centuries-old fears so that they could still be effective storytelling tools in the modern world. One of the best examples of this is how extremely popular stories like Ringu and Parasite Eve began re-interpreting the cyclical nature of curses as pseudo-scientific “infections,” with this new take on J-Horror even making its way over to the world of video games in titles like Resident Evil (a sci-fi deconstruction of a classic haunted house yarn).
However, there is one survival horror game that is rarely brought up during discussions about interactive J-Horror despite being part of a franchise that helped to popularize Japanese genre cinema around the world. Naturally, that game is the Nintendo Wii exclusive Ju-On: The Grudge, a self-professed haunted house simulator that was mostly forgotten by horror fans and gamers alike despite being a legitimately creative experience devised by a true master of the craft. And with the title celebrating its 15th anniversary this year (and the Ju-On franchise its 25th), I think this is the perfect time to look back on what I believe to be an unfairly maligned J-Horror gem.
After dozens of sequels, spin-offs and crossovers, it’s hard to believe that the Ju-On franchise originally began as a pair of low-budget short films directed by Takashi Shimizu while he was still in film school. However, these humble origins are precisely why Shimizu remained dead-set on retaining creative control of his cinematic brainchild for as long as he could, with the filmmaker even going so far as to insist on directing the video game adaptation of his work alongside Feelplus’ Daisuke Fukugawa as a part of Ju-On’s 10th anniversary celebration.
Rather than forcing the franchise’s core concepts into a pre-existing survival-horror mold like some other licensed horror titles (such as the oddly action-packed Blair Witch trilogy), the developers decided that their game should be a “haunted house simulator” instead, with the team focusing more on slow-paced cinematic scares than the action-adventure elements that were popular at the time.
While there are rumors that this decision was reached due to Shimizu’s lack of industry experience (as well as the source material’s lack of shootable monsters like zombies and demons), several interviews suggest that Shimizu’s role during development wasn’t as megalomaniacal as the marketing initially suggested. In fact, the filmmaker’s input was mostly relegated to coming up with basic story ideas and advising the team on cut-scenes and how the antagonists should look and act. He also directed the game’s excellent live-action cut-scenes, which add even more legitimacy to the project.
The end result was a digital gauntlet of interactive jump-scares that put players in the shoes of the ill-fated Yamada family as they each explore different abandoned locations inspired by classic horror tropes (ranging from haunted hospitals to a mannequin factory and even the iconic Saeki house) in order to put an end to the titular curse that haunts them.
In gameplay terms, this means navigating five chapters of poorly lit haunts in first person while using the Wii-mote as a flashlight to fend off a series of increasingly spooky jump-scares through Dragon’s-Lair-like quick-time events – all the while collecting items, managing battery life and solving a few easy puzzles. There also some bizarre yet highly creative gameplay additions like a “multiplayer” mode where a second Wii-mote can activate additional scares as the other player attempts to complete the game.
When it works, the title immerses players in a dark and dingy world of generational curses and ghostly apparitions, with hand-crafted jump-scares testing your resolve as the game attempts to emulate the experience of actually living through the twists and turns of a classic Ju-On flick – complete with sickly black hair sprouting in unlikely places and disembodied heads watching you from inside of cupboards.
The title also borrows the narrative puzzle elements from the movies, forcing players to juggle multiple timelines and intentionally obtuse clues in order to piece together exactly what’s happening to the Yamada family (though you’ll likely only fully understand the story once you find all of the game’s well-hidden collectables). While I admit that this overly convoluted storytelling approach isn’t for everyone and likely sparked some of the game’s scathing reviews, I appreciate how the title refuses to look down on gamers and provides us with a complex narrative that fits right in with its cinematic peers.
Unfortunately, the experience is held back by some severe technical issues due to the decision to measure player movement through the Wii’s extremely inaccurate accelerometer rather than its infrared functionality (probably because the developers wanted to measure micro-movements in order to calculate how “scared” you were while playing). This means that you’ll often succumb to unfair deaths despite moving the controller in the right direction, which is a pretty big flaw when you consider that this is the title’s main gameplay mechanic.
In 2024, these issues can easily be mitigated by emulating the game on a computer, which I’d argue is the best way to experience the title (though I won’t go into detail about this due to Nintendo’s infamously ravenous legal team). However, no amount of post-release tinkering can undo the damage that this broken mechanic did on the game’s reputation.
That being said, I think it’s pretty clear that Shimizu and company intended this to be a difficult ordeal, with the slow pace and frequent deaths meant to guide players into experiencing the title as more of a grisly interactive movie than a regular video game. It’s either that or Shimizu took his original premise about the “Grudge” being born from violent deaths a little too seriously and wanted to see if the curse also worked on gamers inhabiting a virtual realm.
Regardless, once you accept that the odd gameplay loop and janky controls are simply part of the horror experience, it becomes a lot easier to accept the title’s mechanical failings. After all, this wouldn’t be much a Ju-On adaptation if you could completely avoid the scares through skill alone, though I don’t think there’s an excuse for the lack of checkpoints (which is another point for emulation).
It’s difficult to recommend Ju-On: The Grudge as a product; the controls and story seem hell-bent on frustrating the player into giving up entirely and it’s unlikely that you’ll unlock the final – not to mention best – level without a guide to the collectables. However, video games are more than just toys to be measured by their entertainment factor, and if you consider the thought and care that went into crafting the game’s chilling atmosphere and its beautifully orchestrated frights, I think you’ll find that this is a fascinating experience worth revisiting as an unfairly forgotten part of the Ju-On series.
Now all we have to do is chat with Nintendo so we can play this one again without resorting to emulation.
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