20 Things You Didn't Know About Saw

20. The Story Nearly Had Astral Projection

When director, James Wan, and writer, Leigh Whannell, agreed to make a film together, they pitched a lot of different ideas. In the end, they boiled it down to three plot lines. Before they decided to make a movie about a serial-killer, they considered a story revolving around a man who could, much like Doctor Strange, project his consciousness out of his body. Wan abandoned this idea, stating, "We weren’t quite sure if that was going to be cool enough to be our breakthrough film".

The second plot was about a man who woke up in the morning to find scratches all over his body. He doesn't know if he is doing it himself or if another force is attacking him. To learn the truth, he sets up security cameras to film him during the night. Wan and Whannell devised this idea many years before the release of Paranormal Activity, which has a similar story and structure.

Ironically, Paranormal Activity was the first film to beat a Saw film at the box office. In fact, the developers made Saw 3D the last in the series (for a while) because they felt like the franchise couldn't compete with Paranormal Activity.