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.
Despite what the higher-ups at Marvel would have you believe, Stan Lee’s original vision for Spider-Man was very different from the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler that fans ultimately got.
It was comics maestro Steve Ditko that turned him into the lovable web-head that we all know and love, though even that first draft of the character wasn’t exactly meant to be a child-friendly mascot. Ditko envisioned an uncanny arachnid-human hybrid whose freakish poses and dark costume would strike terror into the hearts of criminals, with the inclusion of web-shooters possibly having been a suggestion by Ditko’s roommate at the time, renowned fetish artist and bondage enthusiast Eric Stanton.
These more adult-oriented origins may have changed over the years, but one could argue that Spidey never completely lost his darker side. In fact, we’d eventually see several grim storylines that explored the horrific consequences of Spider-Man’s radioactive blood. While having his irradiated body fluids give Mary Jane cancer is likely the most terrifying of these yarns (track down Spider-Man: Reign if you’re up for a depressing read that was at one point set to be adapted to film by Michael Jackson), one of the most memorable horror-adjacent moments in these comics has to be the acceleration of Peter Parker’s mutation and the eventual introduction of Man-Spider – a storyline that appears to have been one of the main inspirations behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
I sincerely doubt that Marvel Studios is really going to give their toy-selling juggernaut a Cronenbergian rebrand, but the most recent trailer for Brand New Day suggests that the creative team is pulling from some surprisingly spooky source material in this latest superhero sequel. Specifically, the trailer makes it seem like the film is set to be a loose adaptation of the Neogenic Nightmare arc from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, commonly known as the best exploration of Spidey’s radioactive dark side that also features the most iconic version of Man-Spider.
If you’re wondering what these influences could mean for the upcoming film, I’d like to invite you to join me as we look back on some of the animated series’ most horror-tinged episodes.
A fourteen-episode story arc that made up the show’s second season, Neogenic Nightmare began airing in September of 1995. At this point, the series had already earned a reputation as the definitive version of Spider-Man despite dealing with absurd levels of censorship and executive meddling. It’s widely known at this point that this incarnation of Spidey was prohibited from ever punching his villains, and the studio even insisted that realistic guns should be replaced with futuristic laser weapons in order to avoid enraging concerned parents.
And that’s not even mentioning bizarre demands like setting up Hobgoblin as the original Goblin villain simply because the folks responsible for the toy-line had already prepared the character’s merchandise before scripts were even written.
At the end of the day. the show’s success mostly came down to John Semper’s excellent writing, with the (mostly) faithful recreation of the Spider-Man’s core principals and a handful of iconic storylines (coupled with an excellent cast behind the scenes) elevating a what was intended to be a kid’s show promoting ToyBiz products.
Naturally, the rampant cartoon censorship of the 90s couldn’t keep Semper from wanting to explore darker themes from his own favorite Spider-Man comics, and that’s how his team came up with a season-long re-imagining of iconic arcs like the Six-Arm Saga, The Mutant Agenda and even the first appearance of the Sinister Six. These stories would be enhanced with additional “dark” characters like Blade, The Punisher and even Morbius (though the latter had to exchange his vampiric blood-drinking for bizarre plasma-absorbing powers in order to conform to network guidelines).
If you haven’t yet seen it, the complete Neogenic Nightmare arc follows Spider-Man as he discovers that his mutation is progressing beyond his initial superpowers and threatening to turn him into a more monstrous hybrid. After developing extra arms, Spidey goes so far as to request help from both the X-Men and several other super-heroes as he becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a team-up between some of his most iconic villains. The arc eventually introduces us to the show’s version of Man-Spider, which is depicted here as the monstrous final stage of the process which began when Peter was first bitten by that radioactive spider.
Personally, I think this werewolf-like addition to Spidey’s genetic curse is the best incarnation of Man-Spider that we’ve ever seen. This is because the six-armed body horror of it all adds even more weight to Peter’s decision to keep helping others regardless of what his powers may cost him, with the creature’s final rampage even giving the supporting cast a chance to help Spider-Man for a change. While I don’t hate the Morbius movie as much as some other comic fans, it’s a shame that Sony relegated that story to a solo film instead of later incorporating it into the Man-Spider saga like Neogenic Nightmare did.
Season two of the animated series ended up being an even bigger hit than the first, with fans loving the show’s take on an expanded Marvel Universe (which even included the ’90s X-Men cast) as well as the darker take on a more monstrous Spider-Man. That’s why it makes sense that the MCU’s return to street-level comic adventures would harken back to this particular storyline – especially since it appears that the Disney wishes to use the upcoming film as an opportunity to shine a light on other Marvel characters just like Semper did back in the day.
From what we can see in the trailer, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appears to be going through his own additional transformations, including creepy fully black eyes and organic web-shooter, as well as the cocoon-building behavior previously seen in Marvel’s The Other arc in the comics. As I mentioned before, I doubt that the MCU will allow this particular cash cow to fully transform into a nightmarish spider freak that can scare away children, but there’s always a chance that the studio could surprise us with more horror elements. I’d also love to see the story explore Spidey’s mutation and use that as an excuse to formally introduce X-Men’s mutants into the MCU, especially since Sadie Sink is rumored to be playing Jean Grey in the flick.
However, even if Brand New Day doesn’t adapt as much of the Neogenic Nightmare as the promotional material has suggested, I’d argue that this particular season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is still worth revisiting simply because it’s a great example of artists being able to work past network limitations in order to tell complex stories that approach full-on body-horror.
You must be logged in to post a comment.