Every Twist In The Saw Franchise - Ranked From Worst To Best
Game Over.
Over the last 17 years, no horror movie franchise has transfixed audiences quite like Saw.
Since its 2004 debut, the series has prided itself on not only its stomach-churning gore and insane melodrama, but also the customary plot twist(s) tacked onto the end of every new installment.
No Saw movie is complete without a ridiculous, context-altering final reveal which forces audiences to reconsider everything they thought they knew.
Much like the nine films themselves, the quality of the twists on offer has been all over the map, ranging from inspired and deliciously nasty to lazily rehashing some of the franchise's more successful rug-pulls.
And so, with the recent release of Spiral: From the Book of Saw, there's no better time to revisit the series and consider how each of the twists holds up to contemporary scrutiny. Does that original stunner of a twist still rule the roost, or has it actually aged poorly?
But before we begin, as this list covers all nine Saw films to date, a reminder that it will include huge spoilers for Spiral: From the Book of Saw if you haven't seen it yet...
9. The Test Subjects Needed To Work Together, Strahm Gets Killed & Framed As Jigsaw (Saw V)
Saw V boasts the most predictable and low-effort plot twists of the entire series, so mild and unimaginative that they can barely even be called twists at all.
The movie's marketing boldly boasted "you won't believe how it ends," and while technically true, the twists ultimately mustered a very different kind of disbelief than the filmmakers were presumably expecting.
The first reveal relates to the five focal test subjects, who were all involved in causing a building fire which killed eight people.
Jigsaw makes it clear early on that they all need to work together against their selfish instincts, so the climactic confirmation that they all could've survived by teaming up lands with a whimper.
And anyone hoping for a jaw-dropping climactic surprise was sure to be left yawning when it turned out - shocker! - that Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) ends up crushed to death because he refuses to listen to Hoffman's (Costas Mandylor) "advice." Worse still, he gets framed as Jigsaw.
Hoffman being lowered into the floor while Strahm dies is just too silly, even for Saw, and because both of these reveals were telegraphed far in advance, Saw V ended on the biggest "Is that it?" shoulder shrug of the entire series.