21 Days of Spooky: Saw (short film, 2003)

Via Tumblr

21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: James Wan's 2003 short film Saw. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: During a police interrogation, an orderly recalls his brief but scary time as a Jigsaw victim.

Are you grateful? That's the question maniacal puppet Jigsaw asks orderly David (Leigh Whannell) near the end of the almost 10 minutes long short film. A simple question ignited a franchise spawning eight (with a ninth in post-production) movies, blood drives, and even videogames, where you get to enjoy watching various victims suffering from elaborate traps somewhat related to stuff they've done in the past, with most of these victims being unable to escape and, thus, suffering highly grisly fates. But the original short barely has anything to do with all the stuff that sprung from it.

How different? Well, for starters, it has the later-classic "reverse beartrap" contraption, but it doesn't spring (otherwise David wouldn't be telling his story to the police, duh), and the goriest moment would be a little ditty about retrieving a key. Perhaps due to the indie-ness of it all, we're spared of the endless Rube-Goldbergian parade of deaths and we can only focus on the actual strain of being locked in a room with a death device on your head and a fucking puppet telling you what to do for reasons you're not really aware of. It's disconcerting, to say the least. And the saddest part is that Jigsaw gets away with it.

There was always something really iffy about Jigsaw's train of thought. Death, especially causing other people's death, doesn't really make you more grateful for your existence. It actually piles on more guilt, fear, and straight-up distrust about everything, over the whatever it is Jigsaw found to be your "crime". And in this short it gets the top focus, whereas in the movies you're 75% distracted by the fact that said "ungrateful" is getting its jaw removed from its skull, dropped in a pit of syringes, or sat facing an approaching rotating saw, diluting the purpose of it all no matter the filler scenes.

Who gets to decide if your life is worth redeeming, or if it's there anything to actually have a redemption for? David doesn't look like anything else other than a random dude who works in a hospital; we're supposed to believe that Jigsaw saw something else about him we aren't seeing, and thought "you know what this dude needs? To murder another human being in order to save his ass". We're all flawed individuals who will complain about random things about themselves and our way of life, heck, even the richest and most outgoing of folks have probably found themselves cursing at the universe for existing during a diarrhea bout.

But it happens every day. Not, y'know, getting kidnapped by a murderous puppet... I mean, thinking we know what's that thing someone needs to supposedly turn their lives around. Someone sees you walking out of the supermarket and thinks "if it cut back on the junk food, its life would really improve". A policeman arrests a pair of teens for loitering as he thinks a little cell time will "straighten them up". You see a good-looking lady with a not-very-good-looking dude and you think "oh she deserves so much better".

Those are just small-scale situations, but every day we're being manipulated by Jigsaw-like assholes. There are people out there getting killed for protesting against a government that's supposedly doing what's best for them, soldiers murdering other soldiers because their leaders told them the other one is a threat to their way of life, kids being sent to dangerous "reform" camps because their sexuality somehow offends a selected group of twunts, women being told they wouldn't have been attacked had they not worn a skirt to work that day. We're wearing social reverse beartraps every day, and we don't notice.

So, in the end, when we're as unstable and fucked up due to the manipulation, like David is on the short, everyone still expects we keep on going and live with the guilt, the pressure, the blame, with no help whatsoever. Aren't you grateful for that?

Tomorrow: Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room tells Nazi punks to fuck off, with grisly results.