30 Perfect Horror Scenes Of The 2020s

Well, this was absolutely horrible. 

Jigsaw has forced his victims to do many horrible things over the years, but forcing a man to remove part of his brain tissue without any anaesthetic? That definitely ranks among the worst. Once again, it's horrible but thankfully, it's horrible in a good way, as the better Saw traps are. 

First up, it feels earned because it's being done to a genuine scumbag - Mateo (Octavio Hinojosa) and his associates were running a scam where they took money from cancer patients and pretended to cure them. As such, this avoids feeling too cruel and functions well as a display of gruesome karma, which is what the kind-of story the better Saw movies tell. There's also something particularly poetic about it. The scammers had pretended to remove Jigsaw's brain tumour, so brain surgery was a great choice of trap here. 

Better still, the queasy gore effects, Kevin Greutert's on-point directing and a fine performance from actor Octavio Hinojosa make this a gloriously disgusting, well-mounted set-piece that acts just like the drill Matteo has to use - it goes right into your brain. Even if the premise of this trap was given away in the trailers, that didn't make it any less harrowing once it arrived on-screen.