I’d wager that when James Wan made the first Saw film in 2004, he didn’t imagine that scores of fans would someday interpret his tale of gory death traps as a gay cult classic. But that’s exactly what happened, and now a very campy, very queer adaptation of the horror movie is currently running off-Broadway, titled Saw the Musical: The Unauthorized Parody of Saw.
In case you’re a scaredy cat, a brief recap: Saw centers on the machinations of the villainous Jigsaw (a.k.a. John Kramer, played by Tobin Bell), who forces his victims to partake in gruesome “games” in order to prove their will to live. The first movie opens with Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), two men who wake up in chains on opposite sides of a dilapidated bathroom. Jigsaw soon orders Gordon to kill Adam so that Gordon and his family are allowed to survive. Classic meet-cute, right?
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Fans of the franchise have long argued that there are homoerotic undertones in the two men’s power struggle and tenuous, bloody alliance, and the Saw the Musical creative team is among them. Inspiration struck after producer Cooper Jordan’s sister Zoe, who wrote the book for the musical, encouraged him to rewatch the first Saw through a queer lens.
“My sister called me and said, ‘Cooper, they’re gay,’” Jordan recalled in a recent interview with NPR. “[...] I watched it again… and I was like, oh, my God. We really didn’t see this in 2004 when we were kids.”
As actor Andrew Caira (who plays Gordon in Saw the Musical) pointed out to NPR, the film’s very premise features a popular romance trope: Throwing two strangers together in close proximity to one another.
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“Right from the start, in 2004, you were having fan fictions of these two men, because you’re locking two guys in a room together,” Caira said. “It’s like, will they kiss? Of course they’re going to kiss. But they can’t kiss because they’re chained to the walls.”
Over the course of 90 minutes, Saw the Musical gloriously sheds all the subtext of the original movie, introducing a sex doll and songs with titles like “Filthy Things” and “Saw Right Through Me.”
But rather than focusing so much on blood and guts, this show finds time for sincerity in between punchlines.
“[The theme of the show] is about living the life you love, and cherishing your life — that’s what Jigsaw is teaching in all of his sick traps,” Jordan said in an interview with the entertainment website the Mary Sue. “It’s about people actually living their life how they want to, loving the people they want to. So we went down that route, I think we’re commenting on it, and I think that’s beautiful.”
In short: If we aren’t using the power of musical theater to make all of our iconic horror properties gay as hell, then what are we even doing?!
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