A good horror franchise can only survive so long without showing a little sympathy for the devil. Chucky is a family man now, and he’ll stab you in the head if you don’t respect his genderfluid kid’s pronouns. Michael Myers has slowly pivoted from a vessel of all-incarnate evil to a vessel of all-incarnate generational trauma. Now, the time has come for the Saw franchise to show a little love to its arch-architect of murderous escape rooms, John Kramer, aka the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell). And so, in its latest instalment, Saw X, we get up close and personal with the puppet man himself.
In all fairness, Saw has always toyed with its audience’s sympathies. John – who only picked up his sadistic hobby after facing serious tragedy and a terminal diagnosis of cancer – dedicates himself to teaching blackmailers and insurance fraud types about the preciousness of life by forcing them to chop off their own limbs. Does he always choose the best victims? No (he loses a few points for his zero-tolerance policy towards addiction and sex work) but there can be no Saw, really, without the secret, guilty hope that his victims will fail to escape their respective traps and be pulverised into instant mincemeat. And so, while no one would really argue they’re on John’s side, audiences would be lying to themselves if they claimed the opposite to be true.
