When we think of long-running horror franchises, traditionally we're talking about strings of movies that don't have much to do with each other beyond the ongoing premise. This stuff is supposed to be cheap, disposable thrills that never makes you think too hard about anything--or at least this is how movie studios have usually treated them. But that's not the case with Saw--which, despite being known mostly as "torture porn," sent us down an incredibly intricate seven-movie rabbit hole with its story during its original run. Saw isn't just horrifying and gross--it's smart, too. And now, at 20 years old, it deserves to be revisited.

Saw is the story of a serial murderer named John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, who puts people in lethal contraptions that will kill them if they don't complete some horrendous task that usually requires egregious self-harm. The opening of Saw II, for example, featured a guy whose head would be destroyed with a spike-filled iron mask if he didn't unlock his harness with a key that was hidden in the back of his own eye socket--to survive, he'd have to gouge his own eye out. And those are just the simple ones. There are plenty of even more messed up multi-person games as well.

But there's an argument to be made--and, indeed, I'm about to make it--that Saw is the greatest horror franchise ever because it's satisfying both viscerally and intellectually. It's not perfect, of course--Jigsaw and Spiral were disappointing spin-off attempts, and there's always some messiness when you're making up the story as you go along, which is how the Saw series was assembled. But it's really a matter of effort--the folks making these movies cared enough to try, and it works so much better than it should as a result.

To me, though, Saw isn't just an outlier within the horror genre--there's more of a commitment to the overall plot than I've ever seen from any original movie franchise. Star Wars and Marvel are great and all, but those franchises can't keep much straight from one movie to the next. And, somehow, the movie series that taught me it didn't have to be that way is Saw. Let's take a deeper look into why that is.

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They always follow through in some way or another

It probably wouldn't be accurate to say that the Saw franchise's story is airtight, but it's much closer than any other current franchise, horror or no, just because it always followed up on everything. Take Jeff (Angus McFadyen), the subject of the game in Saw III. He makes it to the end, then kills Amanda and Jigsaw--who gives Jeff a new recorder that promises a new test that he'll have to pass if he wants to see his kidnapped daughter again.

Jeff is then missing from most of Saw IV--but the twist ending is that it takes place in parallel with III. At the end of Saw IV, we learn that Detective Hoffman is Jigsaw's secret other apprentice, and that he'd left a trail of clues for his nemesis, FBI Agent Strahm, that leads him to Jigsaw's deathbed, where he shoots and kills Jeff just moments after Saw III ended.

And then in Saw V we learn that Jigsaw had essentially blackmailed Hoffman into becoming a disciple against his will, and now that Jigsaw and Amanda are dead, he wants to close out the tests and move on--after setting up Strahm, Hoffman makes a show of rescuing Jeff's newly orphaned daughter to make himself look like a hero.

It seems fairly clear that there was some other plan for Jeff when Saw III was written, and I don't have a clue if they'd intended Hoffman to have an ongoing role at all when he very briefly appeared in that one. But they put so much effort in the next two movies to make the story-pivot make sense that it feels now like it could have been planned out this way from the start. There's an unusual thoroughness to it.

It makes the storytelling effort that bigger franchises don't

One big problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe in recent years is there's no perceivable commitment to overall coherence--when they need to pivot their stories, they do so mostly by removing connective tissue rather than making new connections. So as we saw with Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness--two movies that allegedly take place back to back with one leading directly into the other, but which have no story connections to each other at all because they were released in the wrong order--we end up with weird twists that don't gel with previously established material, and there's no real overall picture that we can glean from what we're watching. It's just lots of stuff happening that may or may not ever matter.

But the beauty of the Saw franchise, by stark contrast, is that whenever it would expand the story in the present--such as when it revealed Hoffman as Jigsaw's other apprentice--it would always also give us flashbacks that firmly establish the reality of the twist. While Saw V is the worst of the mainline series--it's strangely low-energy next to the other main franchise entries--it tells us exactly how Hoffman got into this situation and shows us his motivations, and this in turn makes the remaining two mainline movies all the more effective because it gives us a very clear picture of everyone's motivations, and because those films follow through on what that had been set up in Saw V, rather than simply casting it aside because it got bad reviews.

Aside from giving the franchise an unusually coherent story, this approach served two additional purposes as the series went along: it expanded the story in a believable way, and it kept Jigsaw the character involved even though he died in Saw III, thanks to the copious flashbacks. Since it's probably really Jigsaw's death that made this approach necessary, it could be that killing off Jigsaw was the best thing that could have happened for this series.

It's not "answering questions"

Despite being a series that's so full of twists, Saw doesn't really do long-term mysteries. It's got some cliffhanger endings, but they're "I can't wait to see what happens next" endings, not "what does it all mean?" endings. When there are mysteries, they're generally set up and then solved within the same movie, not left dangling for later. This ain't Lost.

This is good because it meant there was no need for fans to theorize obsessively–there aren't any trails of clues to follow between movies. And since they were making it up as they went, this way of doing things meant that Saw was never weighed down with a bunch of long-term mysteries it needed to address.

Take Hoffman, for instance. He's introduced very briefly at the beginning of Saw III, delivers one semi-cryptic line that might make you do a double take, and then is absent for the rest of the movie. He's just another cop during that scene, and actor Costas Mandylor isn't a big star or anything, so when he pops back up as a major character in the next film and eventually reveals himself as a Jigsaw apprentice, it's just a cool twist that's easy to accept. And that's par for the course with Saw.

The template

This way of telling the story is really only possible thanks to the franchise's aesthetic template, which involves a fairly constant dramatic soundtrack and lots of music-video-esque quick cuts that usually give the films a decidedly heightened energy. This editing mode is essential to the storytelling of the Saw franchise, because each film ends with some reveal, followed by a quick-cut montage that recaps all the story bits that foreshadowed the reveal while the signature franchise soundtrack builds to its crescendo. Saw would be a much less interesting series if the filmmakers involved hadn't managed to come up with such an effective and quick way to sum things up--the series might not have worked at all without this carefully crafted and efficient approach.

Kevin Greutert

Speaking of the filmmakers, Kevin Greutert is the only key creative who has worked on every Saw movie, directing Saw IV, Saw: The Final Chapter, and Saw X, and working as a film editor on all the rest of them--while he wasn't originally part of the crew on Spiral, they did eventually bring him in to help bring it all together in post-production. So, at the very minimum, he had a key voice in establishing the franchise's unique editing format, and by now there's nobody else who knows how to build a Saw movie the way he does. The successful revival of the series with Saw X, after a couple spin-off misfires with Jigsaw and Spiral, is largely Greutert's doing.

Detective Mark Hoffman

One of the key issues with both Jigsaw and Spiral was that they attempted to reboot the series instead of continuing the existing threads. Both of those movies tried to give us new Jigsaws to take us into a new era, but neither had a villain worthy of the title. They simply didn't have the right curmudgeonly energy or presence.

We did not have this problem with the original movies. Once Jigsaw died in Saw III, Hoffman stepped into the spotlight, and carried that torch perfectly. He had the presence and smoldering intensity for the part, but most importantly, he wasn't Jigsaw and didn't want to be. Hoffman is jaded and mad at the world and doesn't really care about teaching anybody lessons, but he's been pressed into this service and now he's gotta follow through on this whole thing to the very end--this is a lot more interesting than having another earnest murderer. In that sense, Hoffman was just as essential to the Saw franchise's success as Jigsaw himself was.