10 Movie Mysteries FINALLY Explained

It's been whispered about for years that the first Saw movie takes place on September 10th, 2001, the day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ensuring its focal characters were about to have one hell of a bad week.

And though you'd be forgiven for assuming that this was actually a hoax, upon checking the film itself, the flip-phone that Jigsaw aka John Kramer (Tobin Bell) leaves in the grotty bathroom does indeed faintly read "9/10/01" in the American date format.

It's much easier to read the date on Saw's recent 4K UHD release, and if there's any lingering doubt, it's also been fact-checked by the fine folks at Snopes.

But in true Saw fashion, there's a twist - while the phone does indeed display the date September 10, 2001, there are numerous indicators throughout the franchise that the movies are set several years later than this.

It's reasonable to deduce that Saw is set in or around the film's release year of 2004. Going by the same logic, if 2017's Jigsaw takes place a decade after Kramer's death, then Kramer's death in Saw III would happen in roughly 2007, with the first film occurring a year or two earlier.

Though the series' timeline isn't terribly consistent, it's incredibly unlikely that the first Saw takes place in 2001 - it's far more likely that the phone was still working from a factory-set date and Kramer simply never bothered to set it correctly.