Seeing and Saw
The best moviegoing moments
Of all the movies you’ve ever seen, how many of them can you specifically remember? Not just when and where you saw them, but who you were with, maybe even where you were sitting and what you chose to eat. For me there’s a lot of nostalgia tied up with doing this. I remember my life changing as a four year old being taken to see Star Wars in 1977 by my dad, as a special afternoon treat away from the hospital where I was undergoing long-term treatment for a collapsed lung. It was literally life-giving. I remember going to the same theater to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., a ton of James Bond movies and Back To The Future. That same local theater would also see my first date, The Lost Boys. Like many theaters, and that early relationship, it’s sadly long since shuttered its doors to the movies, and the building now serves as a second-hand furniture store offering charitable discounts which benefit the nearby hospital.
I remember seeing Jurassic Park when I moved to London, and the obnoxious kids sat behind us that would not shut up. Titanic in full IMAX in 1997 when I lived in Amsterdam, with a weirdly timed intermission right as the ship struck the iceberg. A terrifying midnight showing of The Exorcist and a completely disorienting mid-afternoon screening of Mulholland Drive while looking for my first job back in London. Moving to Philly and going to a screening of The Passion of the Christ and the euphoria in the audience as the stone is found pushed away from the tomb. And then settling in New York and dating my now-wife, who is from Jersey, and going to see Garden State, because, well, that’s just what you do when you’re trying to impress. But of all the incredible movie experiences so far, there’s only one that stands heads and shoulders above the rest, and I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was Saturday October 30th 2004, and I lived in Manhattan. My girlfriend-now-wife lived just across the Hudson in Weehawken, and would take the shuttle bus over into the city to hang out. The bus would drop her at the corner of 40th and 8th Avenue, which at the time was in the middle of a massive construction project. Many years later I’d work in the building that was coming out of the ground back then - The New York Times. We’d found a mutual love of horror movies, and decided to walk up the street to the AMC on 42nd Street, and roll the dice on a new horror movie we liked the look of, Saw. Like all the best moviegoing experiences, we’d not seen a trailer, didn’t really know much about it, but decided it looked fun anyway, and bought the tickets. It must have been around 4pm, as I remember it being late afternoon, and we must have been two of the last people to get in, as we had to sit in the front row. Usually moviegoing poison, but for a horror movie, especially this horror movie, the nearer to the gratuitous gore, absolutely so much the better.
A girl sat next to us was crunching ice cubes through the whole movie, despite my stares of death, passive aggressive ear covering, and heavy sighing. But as the lights went down what happened next was incredible. I’d grown up loving movies such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th and Hellraiser. The more violent, gory and downright disturbing, so much the better. But this review isn’t a recap of Saw. If you’ve seen it you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, then I highly recommend stopping now and putting it on. Any attempt at a recap would inevitably run into spoiler territory, and I want you to experience the movie the same way I did, with a leap into the unknown. But the spoiler-free premise is simple. A serial killer sets up a series of traps whereby questionable members of society are given the opportunity to redeem themselves. Survive the trap, you get to be ethically and morally reborn. Don’t survive the trap, expect to experience some of the worst ways to die every invented. Indeed, you spend most of the movie, and most of the series of (now nine) movies wondering what kind of sick mind comes up with this stuff.
There’ve been lots of ‘best moments in movies for me’. The first time the Star Destroyer flies overhead at the beginning of Star Wars. The giant boulder running down Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Titanic going down in all its IMAX glory. HAL killing the crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the winner is always the first time I saw the end of Saw. It’s a twist of such epic proportion that you literally never see it coming as you watch through your fingers. A twist that causes you to yell out loud. A twist that not only sets the tone for eight more movies, but that confirms that you’ve been in one of the games yourself the whole time. It’s fantastic, and everything the movies should be. I still think about it.
And of course, Saw was only just getting warmed up. As fucked-up as some of the death sequence traps had been, it was nothing compared to what followed. Needle pits, mechanisms that twist a man to death, venus fly trap masks with nails on the inside bolted to your face, head vices that crush your skull if you don’t cut off your own limbs, reverse bear traps attached to your mouth, and my personal favorite, the glass coffin from Saw V that keeps the murderer safe while the walls around him crush whoever else is in the room.
In many ways, Saw set the stylistic tone for much of what modern horror has become. A music-video-like fast-paced editing style, a ton of jump scares, and weirdly enough, every single poster these days looks the same, no matter what the franchise or production company. Especially in the age of streaming, there’s been a homogenization of horror tropes that’s caused a dearth of narrative creativity, perhaps with the exception of the Paranormal Activity series, which still gives me the creeps. These days it’s exorcisms, old houses in the woods, abandoned kids and pleasant-enough-to-begin-with families that usually end up as chunks at the bottom of the garden by the time the credits roll. And then there’s the relentless culture of remakes and reboots. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween (several times), IT, Child’s Play, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre all coming in for the cynical commercial cash-in treatment. Horror movies rarely get better the more sequels that get made, but that’s kind of the point, and Saw is no exception. By the time Chris Rock rolls around in 2021’s Spiral: From the Book of Saw, the franchise, like most of those who choose to cross Jigsaw, is very, very dead. Even Hellraiser, the longest holdout, is in production for a 2022 reboot with a female Pinhead.
Maybe I’m the one who has changed and not the movies. Maybe I’m the cynical one in search of something fresh to gross me out. Maybe I’m the one looking to recapture what happened back in October 2004 when I was on a date. But this much I do know, modern horror, with all its polish, style and production value, doesn’t hold a candle to the creativity, innovation, and legitimate terror that the eighties served up. Our terror in modern horror is just so managed. And as much as I love it, and continue to love it, Saw served as the fulcrum around which this shift takes place, after which commercial homogenization kicks in, reboots rise, and the lamentation of truly terrifying tales begins. Game over.
But I remain hopeful. I enjoyed The Invisible Man, A Quiet Place, Us and The Lighthouse, all of which seem genuinely thoughtful and innovative, even if they’re more psychologically than physically terrifying. Perhaps our pandemic, isolated sensibilities have desensitized us to modern horror because of all the legitimate awfulness happening for real in the world. It certainly accounts for not being able to have the opportunity for any of these experiences in a theater, which I truly miss. Not being able to experience the tension, anxiety and violence of a great horror movie on the big screen as you watch in curled anguish is something the at-home digital streaming experience just can’t substitute. The cinematic ritual of katabasis is gone. Instead of being surrounded by hundreds of others who are equally freaked out in the dark, instead we’re on our couches, distracted by the deafening screams for attention from our devices. Sure we can all put away our phones, turn the lights off, make up some popcorn and recreate the synthetic theater experience, but we know it’s not the same. For me, one of the things I’m most looking forward to when life settles down post-pandemic, is spending time in the theater with a really, really great horror movie. My only hope is that there’s a film out there already in production that’s going to be equal to my anticipation.
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