10 Horror Movies That Switch Villains

When fans heard the Saw series was being resurrected once again for the 2020s, there was only one question on everyone's mind: which of Jigsaw's secret acolytes was going to be the villain? The first wave of trailers and promotional material, however, had us eating our words, because X did the unthinkable, bringing back Tobin Bell's Jigsaw.

With a whole host of new traps and nasty surprises (including an eyeball vacuum that became the focal point of the whole marketing campaign), most of us assumed that the prequel would have the master engineer serial killer back in sinister form, laying the hurt on a whole new array of vaguely immoral victims. Not so!

While the film has Jigsaw front and centre, conceiving of some of his most creative traps and orchestrating some truly brutal bloodshed, he plays a surprisingly emotive second-fiddle to the film's secret main villain, the manipulative doctor Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody).

Running a fake cancer centre, Pederson cons the most vulnerable out of their cash before leaving them to die from their debilitating illness. While she puts on something of a sincere face for most of the film, subtly undermining her colleagues in crime, her villainy comes out full force in the final act as, amongst other things, she locks Jigsaw and a small child into a blood waterboarding trap. Eugh.