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By Kevin Hall and Jesse Hassenger
The series' tenth installment, Saw X, is a surprising success critically as well as commercially, which means it's time once again to rank all the Saw traps. If you're unfamiliar with the basic premise, it goes like this: Saw’s villain, Jigsaw, doesn’t technically murder his victims: he puts them in intricate traps, and lets them decide how far they’re willing to go to save their own lives. Point of order: The main focus of these rankings is traps, not trials; traps used more than once weren’t included. Here we go!
70: The Razor Wire Maze (Saw)
It is what it sounds like. The razor wire maze may have been mind-blowing back in 2004, but compared to the Jigsaw traps we'd see as the series progressed, it just seems run-of-the-mill. Sure, razor wire shredding into your skin is horrible, but there’s zero creativity here.
69. Wax On (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
A woman is tied down under a spigot from which boiling wax flows. It will burn and suffocate her if she doesn’t use a blade positioned at the back of her neck to sever her spinal cord. This is brutal, and also a bit confusing (even more so because the movie keeps cutting away from it.) What kind of mechanism would have to be set up for a severed spinal cord to turn off a faucet? If it’s just someone behind the scenes with a button or something, it’s not a proper trap.
The victim here must either build a trap for Jigsaw or have his spine cut to shreds as he’s stuck to a chair. In this installment, many people chose to become apprentices of Jigsaw because what was the alternative? To borrow from Mr. T’s performance in Rocky III: “Pain.” The victim complies, saving his spine.
67. Sounds of Silence (Saw 3-D)
Needlessly complicated, too technical, yet still gross. A woman is hooked up to a device that can monitor noise. If anyone makes a sound, metal rods approach her throat. Saw 3-D’s protagonist has one minute to find the key, which is… inside the woman’s stomach? What?
Another example of effective, yet lazy. This trap murders the hell out of Detective Sing in the first movie. But it’s just four shotguns tied to a tripwire. Jigsaw clearly was uninspired at the beginning! This isn’t inventive at all!
The later Saw movies introduce Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who is put through the ringer by Jigsaw. This trap is exactly what you think it is, and, again, proves Jigsaw didn’t always bring his A game. Another shotgun? Other guns exist, you dope!
64. Glass Grinder (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
The device itself-- an endless conveyor belt of empties and a grinder that breaks them up and spits the shards out at a victim hanging from chains-- has the fun found-materials energy that makes the best Jigsaw traps, even at their most elaborate, feel like demented garage tinkering. But the engineering feels a little off here; would a mechanism designed to grind up glass really get that kind of distance when shooting out the pieces, and would the pieces really be that big? That’s how you can tell an imitation Jigsaw from the real deal.
63. Puppet Target (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
This one is more psychological than physical: A man is hooked up to a blood-draining device that can be stopped with a single bullseye gunshot. The twist: The cop with the gun only has a single bullet left, and therefore must choose between the victim (his father) and stopping nouveau-Jigsaw. He chooses his dad, but the game is rigged anyway: By not unhooking his father from the machine right away (and going after his quarry), he leaves him vulnerable to a back-up trap that convinces other cops that Dad is really pulling a weapon on them. Kind of an interesting back-to-basics approach, but a letdown as far as climactic sequel-capping traps go.
Five characters find themselves in a room with buckets over their heads. Oh, and they’re also tied to chains that lead them into buzzsaws. Jigsaw explains that each person must give up a small amount of blood in order to escape. Despite claiming someone’s life-- or does it?-- this trap loses points because of how easy it is to escape.
This boobytrap…doesn’t actually kill anyone. It’s literally just stairs that electrocute people. This is once again Jigsaw in his early torture phase. He clearly had some duds and kinks to work out, but nobody’s perfect!
60. The Oxygen Crusher (Saw VI)
This is essentially a “hold your breath” contest. Sensitive masks indicate when each participant takes a breath, and chest clamps would tighten if a breath was taken. With every breath you take, Jigsaw’s watching you.
While an inventive (and incredibly gory) kill, this is less impressive because it’s pretty easy to avoid harm. Just don’t look directly at the peephole, stupid!
58. Gas Chamber Office (Saw X)
A locked office fills with poisonous gas, and there’s only room for one head in the only opening to clean air. It’s really more of a fight-to-the-death prompt than a proper trap – but sort of refreshing, given that.
Another “less is more” trap, with a mother/son duo melting an insurance salesman with acid. And not the good, trippy kind. (The “removes the skin from your bones” kind.)
Another mailed-in trap: A woman is chained up, and unless the protagonist saves her, will freeze to death via extremely cold water. You have to wonder if Jigsaw had off-days or left his office/torture chamber to go grab a beer early on a Friday and just clocked out on some of these.
55. Automated Hanging Escape (Saw 3-D)
The protagonist must give the victim a key to unlock a device that will eventually hang him. He must cross an obstacle-ridden bridge to do this. Since when did Jigsaw’s inspiration switch up from Rube Goldberg to American Gladiators?
Without the impending death, smashing jars to find a key with a bat actually seems fun? Just make sure you don’t beat the crap out of anyone! And watch out for the bomb!
Despite (or maybe because of) the 3-D gimmick, this installment is unfortunately full of duds. Also, you don’t find out the outcome of this trap. Someone lies dangling over a room full of running lawnmowers, but do they live or die? We never know!
52. Wearable Clawing Mechanism (Saw X)
Part of a mid-credits stinger, so we don't actually learn what kind of choice the victim gets in terms of stopping this trap. But there’s a certain simple elegance to this device, designed to give a deceitful man a real scar (or worse) to replace the fake scar he used to trick John Kramer earlier in the film.
Chains again. Maybe all these chains are an homage to Clive Barker and the Hellraiser films?
50. Nerve Gas House (Saw II)
This is the setting for the majority of the second film, which means it ends up being outshone by the traps inside it. It does claim the life of Lucy from 7th Heaven, however.
49. Code on Teeth (Saw 3-D)
At this point, the seventh film in the series, you’ve seen so much bloodshed and creativity that a man ripping out his own wisdom teeth to find the combination to unlock a door seems...pass? Come on Jigsaw!
This one is gory, but too complicated for my taste. A man is suspended above a cone-like metal object, and must press the handbrake beneath to stop it. Oh and the object has coils inside. Jigsaw has some genuinely inventive traps, but this isn’t one of them.
This one seems easily beatable. In order to escape a cage, the victim must pull the pulley. But, there are spikes on the floor. However, just swing the cage a little, and you’re in the clear.
Look, Jigsaw clearly wanted to put people through incredibly cruel mental ordeals. But this one , as well as the Brazen Bull (more on that soon), lead this writer to believe he wanted people to get a good sweat in, too. A man must hoist a machine (that will cut into his obliques) in order to save a woman trapped in another machine that, if he doesn’t, will impale her neck. You shouldn’t have skipped chest day!
Jigsaw takes the old science adage of “water conducts electricity” to the nth degree here. Each victim must electrocute themselves just a little by shocking themselves in a bathtub. Or be stuck in a room. With nail bombs. Devious.
A man must pop open his skull and extract a certain amount of brain matter to dissolve in a container of acid. If it’s big enough, it will present him with a key to unlock his head from a freaky grill-cage device. Gotta say, this all feels like a big ask, even for Jigsaw.
43. Beakers of Blood (Saw V)
Slice your arm lengthwise to fill enough blood in a beaker. Simple, yet brutal.
A woman gets blown up by a train. But it isn’t a trap—it’s a dream sequence. A cheat!
41. The Steam Maze (Saw VI)
The protagonist must guide a woman through a maze; she’s wearing a device that will shoot a rod through her head. The maze, at several points, is blocked by high-pressure steam. Another overly complicated trap.
One of the gnarliest Saw traps in memory doesn’t just ask the victim to cut off her own leg with a wire saw to avoid another wire saw beheading her; it also requires that a certain amount of bone marrow fill up a container in order to stop the beheading. From a gorehound perspective, this is terrifically vile. From a fairness perspective, even in the often-blinkered world of unwinnable Saw traps, it feels cruel; does the morally compromised victim really have any control over how quickly her bone marrow flows throw a tube? Between this and the brain surgery trap, Jigsaw’s grand moral judgments shouldn’t turn so heavily on a technicality.
Look, surgery is hard. Surgery when you’ll be shotgunned to hell if your patient flatlines? Downright impossible.
38. Melting Ice Cube (Saw IV)
Donnie Wahlberg gets his head caved in by two giant ice chunks. He’s also hanging on top of another ice cube on a noose. This one is gory, sure, but all over the place concept-wise.
A man must choose who will be hung and who will survive. Hell of a moral quandary, but this isn’t very inventive.
36. The Brazen Bull (Saw 3-D)
A man must use the hooks in his chest to hoist himself upwards in order to save his wife. If he doesn’t, she’ll burn to death. It does not go well for either of them. The name of this one comes from an ancient Greek torture device.
35. Finger Trap (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
A man is stuck in a tank with rising water that will hit some open wires and electrocute him – unless he frees himself by biting down on a device that will pull his fingers off. It looks agonizing, though there’s some tiny measure of humanity in allowing the victim to use biting to trigger the mechanism; teeth-clenching seems like a perfectly natural response already.
34. The Bedroom Trap (Saw IV)
A pedophile is given the choice of either blinding himself or removing all his limbs. This is gross. But the audience’s sympathies don’t necessarily lie with the victim...
Another “less is more” bit, but one that loses power when you realize that the victim could’ve just broken the glass underneath to retrieve the antidote, avoiding putting their hand in a box with enough razors to guarantee bleeding to death.
Drowning traps aren't a frequent feature of Jigsaw’s M.O., but he uses one memorably here. It doesn’t claim the victim’s life, because he stabs himself in the throat so he can breathe, but it’s still chilling.
31. The Face Slicer (Saw IV)
Saw aficionados may cry foul at this being ranked so low, considering it’s Jigsaw’s very first trap. A man is stuck to a chair facing a bunch of needles. In order to escape, he must move his face forward, cutting himself against the needles. It shows potential, but it’s nowhere close to Jigsaw’s best work. But who can blame him? No one comes out of the gate swinging.
30. Cut Through Your Feet (Saw, Saw III)
Another trap that loses shock value after a while, but that first time we saw Cary Elwes slice through tissue? Pretty disgusting and effectively unsettling.
Jigsaw went above-and-beyond here, as this trap is directly linked to the Grain Silo trap (more on that later). If someone in the Grain Silo trap pulls the lever to free themselves, they will cut through the legs of someone stuck in the Leg Wires trap. Again, even if a victim thinks he’s making the right choice, someone’s going to be hurting, and badly.
Five people are tied by the neck to chains that will pull them back into a huge razor blade, unless they smash five glass boxes revealing the keys that will free them. Unbeknownst to them, one key would free all their traps. Teamwork really does make the dream work here.
What’s with this guy and shotguns? A woman seems to gain advantage over her opponent by shooting him, only the gun is inverted, and she ends up killing herself and wrecking a key (hidden inside the bullet).
Two victims are positioned on a platform, with enough room to maneuver to spare each other (some of) the blood raining down upon their faces to choke them. It's just blood – preferable to the torrent of rotted pig innards in Saw III-- and you have to figure two non-malicious people could pretty easily wait out the blood supply without dying. But from a conceptual and visual standpoint this one is pretty strong-- the last-minute double-twist substitution where Jigsaw and an innocent child (!) are the ones trapped makes it all the more memorable.
25. A Wife’s Revenge (Saw IV)
A wife and an abusive husband are impaled together through long spikes. If the wife pulls out her spikes, she lives, but her husband will die. You have to admire the anatomical precision here, even if it throws the plausibility into question.
24. Venus Fly Trap (Saw II)
A variation on a classic. Only this time with a less positive outcome. A man is stuck in a similar reverse-bear trap device from the first Saw. The key is hidden behind his eye. This one, sadly, was a quick...open and shut case. They really came out swinging in the first sequel.
This one loses points primarily because, who the hell is this guy anyway? Why do we care? We never find out the potential victim’s relationship to Jigsaw, and this trap fails because the drills that slowly come closer to his face are shot off by Detective Sing.
22. Pipe Bomb Arms (Saw X)
A guy’s gotta slice two pipe bombs sewed into his flesh, and there's no time to do it carefully. Simple stuff, but effective; this is like the Jigsaw equivalent of a raw, punk-rock first album.
A bomb is about to go off. A man is chained by his legs, obliques, feet and shoulders. He must rip these chains away to escape. Oh, there’s also a chain attached to his lower jaw. This leaves…little to the imagination.
A trap that would make Lt. Aldo Raine from Inglourious Basterds proud. A woman is shackled to a chair, and her hair is entwined in the mechanism. Precious seconds pass. This is not the makeover anyone wants.
One of the victims in the second film goes into a furnace to retrieve some syringes containing an antidote, and ends up locking himself inside the furnace. And then he burns to death.
A thematically-on-point trap from a particularly cancer-treatment-centric installment of the series. A woman who has participated in a scheme to bilk Stage 4 patient John Kramer out of his money with a phony cure is suspended in front of a radiation machine. If she doesn’t break her own ankle and wrist to free herself, she will be incinerated in short order. The radiation could very well cause major health problems down the line even if she escapes; decide for yourself if this is fitting or petty, or maybe both.
A victim is strapped down as shredded pig entrails engulf him. This one is just gross, but that’s what you’re paying for with these movies.
Victims must risk grain suffocation/farming implements raining down on them. Unless they pull a lever. And that lever activates another trap. (see #24). Sneaky.
15. The Horsepower Trap (Saw 3-D)
An incredibly intricate, gory trap featuring one of the guys from Linkin Park. Chester Bennington’s skin is glued to his car. He must rip his skin off to save many of his friends. It really matters how hard you try here.
14. The Rib Spreader (Saw IV)
Agent Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer) is put on a needle-filled rack that will, as the name suggests, spread her ribcage open if she can’t find the key. The key is floating in a nearby jar, in a vat full of acid that will dissolve it. Jigsaw sure loves a Rube Goldberg machine. This one is especially cruel considering it’s unwinnable. What a jerk!
Two men are chained. One has his mouth stitched shut. The others' eyes are stitched shut. They are both being pulled by a winch in the center of the floor. The mute man notices a key on the blind man. Chaos ensues. Teamwork is hard.
12. The Pit and the Pendulum (Saw V)
Saw pays homage to various horror legends and tropes. The creepy puppet can be seen as a throwback to Dario Argento’s classic Deep Red, for example. This trap modernizes Edgar Allen Poe’s pit and the pendulum: A man is trapped on a stone slab, as a huge pendulum slowly descends upon him. He can free himself by crushing both his hands in a vise. The impending doom elevates this one.
11. Public Girlfriend Slicer (Saw 3-D)
This puts two opposing boyfriends and one cheating girlfriend in a tug-of-war, with saws. The philandering girl is suspended in the air, and each boyfriend has their own saw. The boyfriends have one minute to decide to either turn their saws on one another, or enact revenge on the girl that wronged the two of them, and let a blade cut her horizontally. This one is made all the better because there’s an audience. Jigsaw is one creepy dude!
10. Tongue Train (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
The only truly great trap in the Jigsaw-free sorta-reboot Spiral is a doozy: A man is dangling from the ceiling of a train tunnel by his tongue, which is stuck in a metal clamp. He’s supported by a stool he can stand on, but a train is approaching, so if he wants to avoid getting splattered on the subway, he must kick out the stool and allow the clamp to rip out his tongue as he falls to the ground. Not only is this trap eminently albeit gruesomely winnable (a particular problem for later-period Saw installments), it actually offers at least a smidgen of potential for error in the victim’s favor; it’s possible that the train’s driver will stop it in time to avoid a splatter-y death. That’s not what happens, of course, but it’s possible! The Tongue Train also gets bonus points for Schwarzeneggar-level pun work: A cop is placed in this trap as punishment for railroading innocent victims!
The morality plays in the Saw universe are heavy (-handed). The man on the rack was involved in a car accident that took the life of a young boy. The young boy’s father can either save him or let him die. Like the pit, the brutality here is how long it takes. The rack rotates each arm 360 degrees. Then the legs. Then the head and...well you see where this is going.
This one gets bonus points because it’s the first time we see how maniacal Jigsaw can be. A safe lies in the middle of a room. The combination is written on the wall, but you can only see it using a candle to illuminate said wall. And you’re covered in a flammable jelly. Also, just to keep things exciting, broken glass is scattered all over the floor!
As seen on the Saw X poster. Guy's got vacuum tubes hooked up to his eyes, which will be sucked out if he fails to turn a dial that will break each of his fingers in turn. So this machine manages to be both disgusting and most likely non-lethal, even in the worst outcome; it also turns out to be (spoiler alert?) a Jigsaw fantasy! It’s a device he idly pictures when he spies a hospital custodian stealing from a patient, then discards when the man thinks better of it. Though it’s a little disappointing to learn it isn’t real, it’s almost better as a brief look into Jigsaw’s damaged psyche, which can apparently conjure up a full-fledged trap at a moment’s notice.
6. A Pound of Flesh (Saw VI)
Jigsaw gets Shakespearean here. Two people are tested. Whoever donates more of their body wins. Then a woman cuts her forearm off. Forget The Merchant of Venice, Jigsaw proves he’s the Merchant of Malice.
Jigsaw deviates from the norm here, as bear traps, saws, and other mechanisms make way for, as Dr. Evil would say, “frickin laser beams.” Each victim has been promised that if they confess their crimes, their collars will be released, saving them. However, if they take more than one minute to decide, one will be chosen at random to be sliced up by lasers.
4. The Glass Coffin (Saw V)
One of the few traps that would make Rod Serling proud. Detective-turned-villain Mark Hoffman is playing cat-and-mouse with Agent Strahm, a special agent who realizes Hoffman has become a copycat of Jigsaw. The two wind up in a small room with a glass coffin. Strahm locks Hoffman in the coffin, thinking he’s won. And then the coffin is lowered into a hollow space in the floor as the walls of the room move in, crushing Strahm to death. This scene is not for the claustrophobic or easily nauseated.
3. The Needle Pit (Saw II)
Many fans rank this scene as one of the most disturbing in the series. One of Jigsaw’s many disciples, Amanda, is forcibly thrown into a pit of heroin needles in order to find a key. The imagery is disturbing. But what takes this trap to another level is, although she finds the key, they don’t unlock the door in time. Amanda’s ordeal was for nothing!
Jigsaw ups the ante tremendously here with six potential victims. Each one is tied to a chair, and will get blasted with a shotgun unless the protagonist stabs his own hand to save them. It’s truly grotesque, and Jigsaw at his most perverse. In some of his traps, the choices, while brutal, are simple. There are no right choices here:. The way the trap is designed only leaves for two possible survivors. The clock is ticking!
You truly can’t beat the classics. Even the creators knew this, and included this trap again as the series progressed. Amanda stabs her way through a conscious man’s guts in order to find the key that will free her from the reverse bear trap, a device that would obliterate her skull. This very early moment is when the series made its macabre but creative intentions plain, and ensured that the first film would be a horror classic.
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