‘Saw X’ Proves The ‘Saw’ Franchise Is Truly The Dirtbag Marvel Cinematic Universe

It was the cheer heard around the world, and then heard again on social media posts, repeatedly, until you wondered if maybe there was some kind of a global movie shortage. The subject of that vocal adulation was that part of Avengers: Endgame where Captain America stands alone and defiant against Thanos, until the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, un-snapped back into existence, starts to assemble and charges into battle. Four-plus years later, it remains a fun, pure-frosting payoff to a long-running superhero film series—but it also more or less ruined Marvel movies and the geek audiences that cheered them on, as time and time again they’ve been chasing that same sugar rush without a comparable payoff. Granted, the onset of the pandemic in 2020 put a damper on the communal moviegoing experience, and on the other side, audiences since then have delighted en masse at movies like Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, and even the Marvel-made Spider-Man: No Way Home. But when the latter needed to enlist two entirely additional Spider-Men to get the crowd going, and when other MCU offerings failed to provide the same giddy satisfaction, it seemed possible that Marvel had managed to leave a void without actually going anywhere.

But like so many tortured (albeit fictional) souls somewhere in a nameless and vaguely Canadian city, Jigsaw will be our salvation.

It would be hyperbolic to suggest that Saw X is on par with Avengers: Endgame. The tenth installment could become highest-grossing Saw movie ever (which seems possible only because of inflation, and even then, unlikely), and that would still only make it about a fifth of the money earned by the lowest-grossing (and best!) Avengers movie, Age of Ultron. Storywise, it’s not on that level either; Endgame capped off 11 years of Marvel movies by including virtually every major character in the multi-tentacled franchise to that point. Saw X has… Amanda (Shawnee Smith), Jigsaw’s victim-turned-disciple from the first three movies.

Here’s the thing, though: When I saw Saw X on opening night in Times Square, the crowd went NUTS when Amanda showed her face. They also cheered, in no particular order, at the opening title card, the closing title card, the first appearance of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the old gear-grinding Lionsgate logo bathed in red, the Twisted Pictures logo, a couple of relatively predictable plot twists, and a mid-credits scene featuring another character that was not, to my recollection, receiving rapturous applause back in the Saw sequel heyday of the mid-2000s. Someone even let out a whoop when Jigsaw—also known as John Kramer, the technicality-loving serial killer who places guilty people in deadly traps and forces them to self-mutilate to survive—self-identified as an engineer. 

Granted, this is a theater that probably outright exploded multiple times during Endgame or any number of Marvel movies, and this screening of the tenth Saw movie wasn’t even completely sold out. But even if some of it was playing to a very specific weirdo-engineer demographic, it was still the most enthusiastic sequel reaction I’ve heard in a movie theater in a good long while. Saw X has also, improbably enough, notched a series-high Rotten Tomatoes score of 85% (at this writing); even if it drops 10 points after more reviews come in, it’ll be the most-acclaimed installment by a wide margin. 

Those numbers can be taken with several shakers of salt for any number of reasons, not least the volume of lightweight fan sites and YouTubers that delight in covering almost exclusively franchise and franchise-adjacent movies. As it happens, that’s also where the Saw series forms its unlikely parallel with Marvel: It’s become a long-running series with enough fans to inflate its Rotten Tomatoes scores to levels that would have been nearly unthinkable back in 2004. (To wit: X2’s RT score in 2003 was only a little higher than Saw X, and at the time the X-Men sequel was considered one of the very best superhero movies ever made.)

Horror and comic books have always been natural companions, even when horror was getting comics in trouble back in the 1950s. They’ve both spent so many years as disreputable subcultures that their biggest fans still carry a chip on their shoulder about perceived mistreatment. To paraphrase the horror film From Dusk Till Dawn, they’re such losers they haven’t realized when they’ve won, and superhero fans in particular can no longer claim any real cultural ostracization. Multiple movies featuring the Scarlet Witch are on the list of the ten biggest movies ever! Multiverses are commonplace! Groot is a near-universally understood reference point! Horror fans, though, can still hang on to some sense of subcultural pride. No matter how much Terrifier merch you can now buy at Hot Topic, horror movies do not make $800 million domestic. (Unless they’re The Exorcist and adjusted for inflation.)

And among hit horror movies, Saw has remained defiantly cheap and dirty. From the 2004 original onward, which is a cross between a locked-room mystery and an absolutely terrible police procedural, they’ve been low-budget, exploitation-heavy affairs. Even when they were at their commercial peak, Lionsgate cranked them out at a punishing pace of one per year, sometimes not even shooting their annual late-October releases until the summer before. Jigsaw died back in Saw III, and the movies kept going without him—but also with him, via flashbacks, vocal cameos, and any number of timeline tricks to keep Tobin Bell in the loop without resurrecting him as a ghost, zombie, or vampire. The texture of the movies has remained the grimy same: all mucked-up bathroom tile, abandoned-factory gloom, and hyperactive camera swirls. The same two directors have made a majority of the ten movies, presumably because few other filmmakers are interested. (James Wan cut his teeth on the first one and lit out almost immediately, eventually making Furious 7 and Aquaman, though he did stick around for story credits on some of the early sequels.) In short, there’s something kind of dirtbaggy about the Saw movies.

I say this with affection. I have seen all ten of them in theaters. I watched Saw X while swigging a Mountain Dew; I nurture my inner teenage dirtbag, and feed him terribly unhealthy soda. I recognize and respect the cross-section of mall goths, skaters, FYE employees, gorehounds, Slipknot fans, and proud quasi-engineers that seems to make up the core constituency of Saw movies. I also admit that maybe my vision of Saw fans is outdated, and that after nearly 20 years, many of them have probably aged into respectable grown-ups who do not smoke cigarettes in the Denny’s parking lot or terrorize the pit at Korn shows. Judging by the opening night crowd, though, a certain number of adults have maintained an itch of nostalgia for the murky moralizing of the cancer-ridden Jigsaw and the edgelord, stomach-churning gore that his movies always contain. Swap in a protagonist less prone to indirect murder (although maybe not that much less, considering superhero collateral damage) and CG in place of grime, and it’s not dissimilar to the relationship a lot of 35-year-olds who read comics as kids have with their favorite superheroes. These characters have been welcomed into the fabric of their grown-up lives in a way that didn’t seem especially likely for past generations. 

Saw X may not have a multiverse’s worth of characters it can resurrect, but it has a lot of screentime for Jigsaw and Amanda, wedging its story sometime between the events of Saw and Saw III. The revengers have assembled; Saw is now Dirtbag Marvel. This means that some of the applause at Saw X, perhaps even most of it, was for recognition of stuff, not craft: Jigsaw just made reference to his plans! He means his traps! And there’s Amanda, pledging her loyalty just like before! If Saw X doesn’t exactly reinvent the formula (though they do at least jettison the always-terrible cop subplots), however, there’s still something thrilling about hearing those cheers of recognition greeting a movie that’s not exactly been carefully calibrated and rewritten in post with the expectation of global box office domination. The Saw movies proliferate in order to make money, yes, but in such a dirtbaggy enterprise, the mercenary zeal doesn’t feel quite so dirty. If anything, Saw X is oddly sentimental about the trap-building creeps at its center; one shot towards the end would be a prime candidate for Jigsaw’s Christmas card (if Billy the Puppet in a Santa hat wasn’t already the obvious choice). Again, echoes of superhero culture, expecting an emotional bond to follow all that recognizing. Dirtbags have feelings, too!

Is any single Saw movie one of the horror greats, the way that you can pick out three or four genuinely terrific superhero pictures from the MCU? Some would argue for the first one, and the hardcore fans might make a case for Saw II or Saw VI. I’d say none of them really belong in the horror pantheon with A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween or Texas Chain Saw Massacre—not even close. That’s also appropriate to their genre: No matter the more appreciative reviews, big box office, or cheering crowds, Saw is still kinda Saw. No matter where or when you actually see them, they’re mall movies for teenagers who smell like menthol, a specific time of life not so well-served by all the movies that aim to activate a more innocent, childlike wonder. If we’re going to ruthlessly mine everything for nostalgia cash, let’s at least be thorough about it, and tend to our inner dirtbags. 

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned