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The most horrific, disturbing and soul-destroying Saw traps, ranked
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It’s been nearly 20 years since we saw a man hack through his own leg to escape a dingy room with a bathtub, but the Saw franchise is back with a bang.
After eight films, countless traps and a lot of fake blood, Saw is being resurrected with Spiral: From the Book of Saw, as Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson bring us a new take on the saga.
For those of you who prefer not to wish for the sweet release of death on your cinema trips, the Saw formula is as follows – the villain, Jigsaw, tests people’s will to live by placing them in potentially deadly scenarios that force them to inflict pain on themselves or others to survive.
(Ironically, your own will to live is tested while watching them.)
While the first film involved two men chained to pipes and given hacksaws to cut through their feet, the tests became increasingly vile as the franchise went on – so much so that audiences became desensitised to the gore as blood and guts replaced plot.
Spiral hopes to change that by reintroducing – shock – a storyline, but isn’t getting rid of the classically gross tests – well, it wouldn’t be a Saw film without them. So, in honour of the new film, we’ve taken a look back at Jigsaw’s top 10 best (read: most life-ruining and soul-destroying) traps. So… do you want to play a game? (No. The answer is always no.)
10. The Knife Chair
Horrific in its simplicity, the primitive Knife Chair was shown to us in Saw IV, but was actually John Kramer’s first trap.
Whoever sat in it would have to press their face into a wall of knives and push themselves out to free themselves of their shackles – probably not fatal, but extremely painful.
Perhaps because we can understand how Kramer made it, it’s a little bit scarier.
9. The Bedroom Trap
OK, so, Ivan, the victim of the Bedroom Trap, was a very, very bad man, but that doesn’t make this trap any easier to watch.
The victim was forced to strap himself into the trap on his bed, and told that he would have to gouge his eyes out with scythes to atone for raping multiple women.
He managed to remove one of his eyes, but before he could do the second, the timer went off and metal columns ripped off his arms and legs.
8. The Angel Trap
We thought Allison Kerry would end up being our final girl after surviving until Saw III… and then she’s killed 20 minutes into the third film in one of the more gruesome traps.
Attached to a metal harness that looked like wings, Kerry had to grab for a key that was in a jar full of acid to free herself.
Kerry put herself through the pain of retrieving the key but then realised that the lock didn’t even work, courtesy of Amanda – and the cage went off, ripping out her ribcage.
Seriously, Amanda?
7. The Pendulum Trap
By the time we got to Saw V, things had become increasingly ridiculous and gory for no reason, but at least the opening trap, The Pendulum, took its inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe and The Pit and the Pendulum. See, this is basically a literature lesson!
Convicted murderer Seth wakes up chained to a table beneath a pendulum blade, and is told that he can avoid being literally cleaved in half by crushing his hands.
It’s a pretty tense opening as the gigantic blade swings back and forth, and Seth decides to flatten his hands to escape death… but the pendulum cuts him up anyway.
Side note – have you ever read The Pit and The Pendulum? It is f***ed up. We blame Poe for all of this.
6. The Classroom Trap
Also known as the trap that made you agree with your mother’s ‘no piercings anywhere other than your earlobe’ rule, Saw III saw convict Troy locked in a room with chains attached to his body via metal rings pierced through his shoulders, arms, shoulders, achilles tendons, hands and jaw.
He had to rip out all the piercings lest be killed by a nail bomb explosion, and the torture of watching Troy rip all bar his lower jaw piercings from his body is unbearable and made us reconsider that nipple piercing we wanted after Kendall Jenner got hers done.
Even worse is that Amanda had actually sealed the door shut, so even if Troy had have removed all of the rings, he wouldn’t have escaped anyway.
5. The Razor Box
Saw is even more horrendous when the traps aren’t that convoluted, and Saw II did that the best – case in point, the box containing a syringe with the antidote for a deadly nerve agent that the prisoners in the house were breathing in.
Great news, right? Well, unfortunately, when Addison pushed her hands through the holes in the box, she realised there were now two big old razors cutting into her wrists, and any attempt to get her hands out would cut her further.
Yeah, this franchise really isn’t good for anyone who gets queasy at the sight of blood. Or anybody with a soul.
4. The Scalping Seat
Anybody with long hair watching Saw IV probably walked out during the scalping scene, and you know what, who could blame them if they headed straight to the nearest salon for a buzzcut. Better safe than sorry.
Daniel Rigg found Brenda, a madam, attached to a mechanism which began to slowly scalp her while he scrambled to find the combination for the lock.
Brenda got out, but without a lot of her scalp… and then she was left for dead after trying to kill Rigg as part of her own task. Bad day for everyone involved.
3. The Rack
Jigsaw says in Saw III that The Rack is the favourite of all his traps. To which we say – what the hell is wrong with you? Seriously! How did we go from a key disappearing down a bathtub to this? At what point did we stop following the light?
The Rack, also known as the Twisting Crucifix, is by far the most gruesome of all of the traps. Basically, the victim has their limbs and head strapped to various parts of the rack, which begin twisting each limb after a set of gears are activated.
As the cameras focus on each horrendous injury in sickening detail, the victim’s head is the final thing to be twisted 360. In Saw III, the person in the trap couldn’t even save themselves, relying on the man whose son they killed to do the saving.
Horrific.
2. The Needle Pit
Probably the most cringeworthy trap in the franchise, the needle pit pops up in Saw II, and sees a key being hidden in… you guessed it, a literal pit of needles.
From the second Xavier dropped Amanda in the pit, we could barely look, and to this day it makes our skin crawl. It may not have been the most dangerous of the traps, but it’s the most nightmare inducing.
Moving swiftly on.
1. The Reverse Bear Trap
It’s Saw’s most iconic trap for a reason. Nothing sums up the franchise more than this simple, brutal and absolutely disgusting trap, which will make your mouth feel weirder than the Joker’s speech in The Dark Knight rises.
The name pretty much explains the trap pretty well – this mechanism will spring open and rip your jaw with it. We first see it in Saw II, as we learn that Amanda was forced to kill her cellmate and retrieve a key from his stomach to unlock the trap on her head.
She managed to survive the trap, as did Hoffman in Saw VI, although he lost half his jaw with it.
Why is the trap so iconic if two people managed to escape it? Well, the reverse bear trap proved fatal in Saw 3D, when Hoffman strapped the contraption to Jill Tuck’s head and it went off, with her head exploding into the faces of all the poor people wearing 3D glasses in the cinema.
Ah Saw, you disgusting freak of a franchise.
Spiral is in cinemas on May 17.
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