Why did critics hate Saw (2004) so much?

Watch the trailer for this lovely film right here.

In 2004, there was a newspaper article about a recently released kidnapper in my city of 30,000 people. I was pretty positive that he was going to climb into my window and whisk me off into the night never to be seen again. Unfortunately for my parents, that didn't happen. Still, I was an anxious child and it is probably best that I avoided a film centred on post-kidnapping torture at the tender age of nine years old.

By the time I first watched Saw (2004) in my twenties, exceptional dread was nothing new to my jaded, horror-loving brain— or to contemporary horror fans. Films like The Babadook (2014), 1922 (2017), and Hereditary (2018) come to mind (yes, I watched all of those before Saw).

For its time, Saw pushed the boundary on what dread could be. Viewers in the era watched people in despicable situations that just toed the line between realistic and unrealistic. The situations carried enough realism that we might wonder if they could really happen, and that created fear for viewers... And still does. It feels a little fucked up to wonder what you would do should you be faced with killing an apathetic stranger or cutting open the guts of a living man in the name of saving your family and yourself. But that is half the fun!

The film carries a blasphemous 50% on Rotten Tomatoes (make me an official critic pls), but I see this rating as the by-product of a critical martyr. The nature of a critic's job is to overthink a little, and so it's unsurprising that the introduction of moral questions in the form of extreme dread, torture, and gore were not fondly received in 2004. The 90's brilliance that was Misery (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Scream (1997), and The Blair Witch Project (1999) did not prepare critics for this– So maybe they wanted to kill it, or at least label it as too grotesque for the mainstream. Saw traded psychological tension for graphic violence that earlier films only hinted at while using morality instead to create that same tension. But if it was a martyr, it was an unsuccessful one. It was in your face and horror fans welcomed this unapologetic approach that pushed the boundary of mainstream gore. At it's core, it's a movie for horror fans. It's the kind that teenagers of the era probably grabbed from Blockbuster and watched with dropped jaws in their mom's weed-smelling basement. It is a good-time and its meant to be enjoyed for its fucked-upiness, not over-analyzed.

Some predecessors such as Cube (1997) or even Final Destination (2000) might have pushed the boundary in a similar fashion while garnering the same unfortunate critical response, but none emerged in the zeitgeist quite like Saw did. It introduced Jigsaw as a villain comparable to Freddy Kreuger and Michael Myers. As the nine following movies tell us, the first film was enjoyable enough among the laypeople to set up a powerhouse of a franchise that still enjoys commercial success. If it's been a little too long, gather some friends, and fire it up for some fun that was a little too messed up for critics. Nearly two decades later, Saw remains loved by horror fans. Critics were (and are) wrong... Argue with a wall!

Rating: 4/5.

P.S. Also, watch 1997's Cube. It is brilliant.