10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows

James Wan’s psychological horror was a lovely little slice of nasty when it was released around Halloween a dozen years ago - and since then, it’s become a franchise, a movie being released at the same time every year until, by 2010, seven Saw movies had been hacked into existence.

The unique selling point of the franchise wasn’t the death trap scenarios, or even Jigsaw himself, the man responsible for kidnapping people and placing them in said scenarios. No - John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer dies at the climax of Saw III, and this isn’t the kind of franchise where zombie versions of the villain come back from the dead.

The real star of the Saw movies is the labyrinthine plot - because all seven films are just chapters in a single story, often told in a nonlinear fashion, flashbacks and concurrent action taking place in different movies, all telling different parts of the story. For example the events of Saw III and Saw IV, released in cinemas twelve months apart, take place at the same time.

Considering the franchise’s roots as a horror flick in the much-maligned torture porn style, the Saw franchise’s purposeful rehabilitation into a compelling, even innovative narrative is brilliantly done.

The problem is that, just as with Watchmen, the result is a project that demands to be watched in manageable chunks, but that is instead presented to audiences in unmanageable chunks of ninety minutes or more.

The Saw franchise would have made a phenomenal cable television show, and would have been recognised more for the artistic achievement it is had it not been reduced to feature films churned out to cinemas once a year on Halloween to make a quick buck or two.