You Won’t Be Able to Unsee These 20 Secrets About the Saw Franchise

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1. While the first film took place in a rundown industrial bathroom, an initial idea from co-creators James Wan and Leigh Wannell was to have the entire film feature two actors stuck in an elevator, shot from the point of view of security cameras, in the hopes of keeping it contained and relatively cheap.

2. After James pitched Leigh on what would become the first film's plot, he was struck with inspiration for the untitled project.

"I'll never forget that day," Leigh told Bloody-Disgusting.com in 2010. "I remember hanging up the phone and started just going over it in my head, and without any sort of long period of pondering, I opened my diary that I had at the time and wrote the word SAW. It was one of those moments that made me aware that some things just really are meant to be. Some things are just waiting there to be discovered."

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3. The impetus for the franchise's iconic villain Jigsaw came about when persistent migraines sent Leigh, convinced he had a brain tumor, to a neurologist for an MRI.

"I started to think, 'What if you were given the news that you had a tumor and you were going to die soon? How would you react to that?'" he told The A.V. Club in 2010. "So I started to imagine this character who had been given a time limit, who'd been told that he had a year, two years to live, really, and that his condition would slowly kill him. Then I sort of attached that to the idea of somebody who put people in a literal version of that."

4. Despite her character Amanda Young becoming a central figure in the Saw franchise mythology, actress Shawnee Smith, not a horror fan, initially turned down the role, describing the script as "horrific." It was only after she watched the original short film, which featured what would become Amanda's story in Saw, that she accepted.

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5. The first film was shot over the span of 18 days with a production budget of just under $1 million. Money was so tight that very few takes were permitted for each scene and, in post-production, James found he didn't have enough shots to work with, forcing him and editor Kevin Greutert to get creative.

"We would cobble shots together...that we would make up, and basically we would grunge the shot up to make it look like surveillance cameras," he explained to The A.V. Club. "And then we would, like, use stills that the still photographer had shot to basically fill in gaps."

Acutally, he continued, "We did a lot of things to fill in gaps throughout the film. Whatever we cut to newspaper clippings and stuff like that, or we cut to surveillance cameras, or we cut to still photography within the film, which now people say, 'Wow, that's such a cool experimental style of filmmaking' we really did that out of necessity to fill in gaps we did not get during the filming."

6. Billy, the puppet that became the mascot for the series, was originally created by James on the cheap with a face made of clay, papier-mâché and black ping-pong balls with irises painted on for the eyes. By the time Saw II was being made, he'd upgraded with a set of remote-controlled animatronics and waterjet-cut foam for the body.

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7. After Saw proved to be a massive success, making $103 million worldwide, Saw II was immediately given the greenlight, but neither Leigh nor James was available to work on it. So, producers optioned a script called The Desperate by Darren Lynn Bousman to be crafted into the Saw II script. Darren went on to direct, while Leigh found time to provide rewrites on the script. 

8. For Saw II's iconic Needle Room trap, in which Shawnee's character is thrown into a pit of hypodermic needles to find a key, four people over the course of four days had to remove the needle tips from 120,000 syringes and replace them with fiber optic tips. The needles that appeared to be stuck to her were blunted syringes struck into padding under her clothing with a fake arm used in certain shots.

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9. Initially, neither James, Leigh or Darren accepted the offer to make a third film for the franchise. But when producer Gregg Hoffman, who had been instrumental in bringing James and Leigh's vision to life, passed away suddenly at age 42 just weeks after Saw II's release, the trio agreed to return in his honor.

"Leigh, James Wan and I all got together and had lunch the day we heard," Darren told ComingSoon.net in 2006. "We were sitting there and we were like, 'You know what? They're going to do Saw III with or without us, so let's do it for Greg.' It was always his intention to have three films, and so we all got together on that day and started talking about it for the next two weeks."

10. Saw III's bathroom set had to be borrowed and redressed from the production of Scary Movie 4, which had created the set and modeled it after the bathroom in the first Saw movie in order to specifically spoof the franchise.

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11. While several of the franchise installments were threatened with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA until cuts were made to achieve a more marketable R, Saw VI was deemed so violent in Spain that it became the first film in the country's history to ever be issued a Pelicula X rating for violence. (The rating is usually reserved for pornography.)

Restricted to just eight select theaters in the country, the movie was released almost a year later with an 18 rating after producers cut several of the film's more violent scenes.

12. While a seventh and eighth installment had been planned, the poor box office performance of Saw VI, forced producers to scrap Saw VIII and condense story elements from it into the seventh film, which would be titled Saw 3D.

Ironically, that film had a worldwide gross double that of its predecessor.

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13. Saw 3D featured late Linkin Park lead vocalist Chester Bennington in the role of Evan, who worked with an acting coach to understand the character.

"It was actually a little more difficult than I expected because it took a lot for me to figure out how to portray this guy and what exactly his motives were going to be throughout," he told ArtistDirect.com in 2010. "I thought maybe I was overthinking it, and I met with this really great acting coach who helped me walk through and make sense of the motivation."

14. While the franchise would come back to life with 2017's Jigsaw, producers of Saw 3D wanted to go out with a splat and used over 25 gallons of fake blood in the making of the film. That's two and a half times more than what was used in Saw II.

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“I watch a dramatic movie, and I go, 'I could’ve got four jokes in there without f--king up the movie.’ I always play that game,'" the comedian said in a 2021 interview with Comicbook.com. “Saw, especially Saw II, was one of those movies where I was like, ‘I think I could’ve gotten a couple of jokes in there without screwing up the movie.’”

So, he continued, he pitched the idea to the head of Lionsgate at a wedding.

“I was like, ‘You ever think about putting some comedy in Saw?’ Chris added. “Not a lot like a Scary Movie, not make it silly. But the Saws are so dire.”

17. As for why Spiral wasn’t just called Saw IX?

"It's because it's the ninth instalment of this franchise, but it's not Saw 9," director Darren Lynn Bousman explained to RadioTimes.com in 2021, "because there will never be another Tobin Bell, there will never be another Jigsaw."

As he put it, he “didn’t want to insult the fans by trying to make another Jigsaw," and introduced a new killer to avoid comparison.

18. In fact, Tobin doesn’t appear in Spiral at all. Instead, Darren wanted the new character to build off what Jigsaw had done. 

“This killer, our new killer, is reforming an institution, a big group of people,” he noted to RadioTimes.com “And I think that he's taking it to the next level, which is, in my mind, the ultimate legacy of what John Kramer wanted: to make a change, a cultural impact."

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19. However, Tobin did come back for Saw X, marking Jigsaw’s return in what Lionsgate dubbed his “most personal game.” The film was set between the first and second Saw movies, so the filmmakers had to make sure the scenes represented that moment in time.

“As far as phones go, we had to use flip phones, and I think one of the characters has a Blackberry,” director and editor Kevin Greutert told the Oscars’ guide A.frame. “Finding those things wasn't easy, especially getting working versions that would behave. Cars were another problem. Whenever we were on a public street, we had to make sure, or at least do our best, to have the models we needed. There was one scene that was deleted from the film that involved John Kramer on a street, and when we got to the location, none of the cars we planned to use had shown up.”

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20. Saw XI was originally slated to premiere in September 2024 but then got pushed back a year. And while fans will just have to stay tuned to learn more about the movie, Tobin has confirmed he’ll be back.

“I’m really excited about continuing to develop him,” the actor told the Los Angeles Times in October 2024. “John Kramer is not done. There’s more to learn.”