The seven Saw films, released between 2004 and 2010, comprise the most important and most profitable horror film franchise of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite their many avid fans, the films have been almost uniformly condemned by reviewers and film critics alike. (Christopher Sharrett writes of the Saw films’ “intellectual bankruptcy and retrograde politics,” for instanceFootnote ¹). The standard critique, implicit in the dismissive “torture porn” label,Footnote ² is that the films revel in violence for its own sake (the word “sadistic” recurs frequently) and have little to no social, political, or ethical value. It's safe to say, however, that the cacophony of condemnatory voices galvanized by the Saw series indicates nothing if not their importance as horror films. After all, it's only when a horror film doesn't shock, repulse, and outrage its viewers that we can say with some assurance that it's not very good.

The essays in Aston and Walliss's collection succeed admirably in demonstrating the value of the Saw films, first and foremost by illuminating their narrative and ideological complexity. Aston and Wallis enter into the ongoing debate about the series’ politics, arguing that while the Saw films might seem to proffer a neoconservative agenda (in featuring a disgruntled white male who believes in the salvific power of torture), Jigsaw's violent vigilante justice actually fails to “regenerate” anyone. The films thus suggest a liberal critique of “the American government's sanctioning of torture in the ‘war on terror’” as well as a crisis in conservative political ideology (26–27). Other essays illuminate how the Saw films map emergent forms of power in the twenty-first century, defying easy categorization as liberal or conservative. Evangelos Tzillas describes the series’ “video game logic” (53–54) in order to show that the techniques of surveillance in all the films (the constant presence of video cameras) are actually surpassed by its revelation of how we are solicited to “play a game” and to participate bodily in our own control. And Dean Lockwood argues that the Saw films represent how early twenty-first-century capitalism exploits not only labor but also the “affective potentials of the human body,” exerting control over minds, emotions, and bodies, and turning “living laborers” into “affective puppets” (141–42).

Fernando G. Pagnoni Berns and Amy M. Davis's excellent contribution shifts from the political to the theological register, exploring Jigsaw as God and interrogating themes of foreknowledge and free will in the Saw films. Like God, Jigsaw seems to know exactly what his subjects will do. This uncanny foreknowledge raises the question, do his subjects, as he repeatedly claims, have free will? Berns and Davis argue that Jigsaw's subjects do in fact always have a choice, “however horrific or morally questionable” (81). Jigsaw's foreknowledge, though, always “places the possibility of free action in danger,” and it is the “constant dialectic” between free will and foreknowledge that gives the film series its existential complexity (83–84).

Most of the essays address in some way the question of Jigsaw's agenda – and while several contributions make the important point that Jigsaw is not merely punishing his victims (as the logic of horror films so often goes), but attempting to rehabilitate them (to give them a choice), Steve Jones, in perhaps the best essay of the collection, picks up on the bothersome contradictions in Jigsaw's statements, using them to argue that Jigsaw actually isn't interested in redemption at all but that he is a radical nihilist, engaged in a thoroughgoing destruction of everything, including himself. He argues that many of Jigsaw's victims mirror his own traits, and that in destroying them he is eradicating himself (106). Of all the collection's interpretations of Jigsaw (as vigilante, as stand-in for the Bush administration, as torturer, as God), Jones's is perhaps the most compelling because most closely attentive to the textual details of the film.

Quite a few of the essays (notably those by Ben McCann, Brian Collins, and Madeleine Smith) do not articulate their argument as clearly as they could have, but they all, without exception, provide provocative food for thought about the Saw films. Collectively, they make it impossible, it seems to me, ever again to dismiss the Saw films as bereft of meaning or value.