Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
When Saw was released in theaters fifteen years ago, it launched the careers of James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Moreover, it birthed a franchise of eight films and counting. Though Saw was at the forefront of the subgenre dubbed “torture porn,” the reality is that it has more in common with a grisly crime thriller in the vein of Se7en. Thanks to iconic moments involving the Reverse Bear Trap and Billy the Puppet, it was marketed solely as horror and made a huge splash at the box office. That set the tone for the rest of the series; Saw II fully embraced the horror and dialed up the gore.
In Saw II, written by Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman, Wan handed the directorial reigns over to Bousman and served as executive producer. The plot follows Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and a team of fellow officers and SWAT as they converge on Jigsaw’s lair to arrest him. It turns out that Jigsaw allowed himself to be caught as a setup for a new game. Eight people are trapped in a house playing a carefully orchestrated game of death, and one of them is Matthews’ son. Jigsaw tasks Matthews with a concurrent game of his own, if he ever wants to see his son again.
Right away it’s clear that the body count is going to be far higher than before. The opening introduces a Venus Fly Trap, a spike-filled head contraption that snaps shut on its victim when he can’t bring himself to carve out the key hidden behind his eye with a scalpel. The rest of the gruesome traps, for the most part, are focused in the old house where the eight unlucky contestants must play for their lives. As they move room to room, they have to solve deadly puzzles to retrieve antidotes for the nerve agent in their systems that will kill them in two hours. Which means working together or against each other as the clock winds down and puzzles get worse.
The worst and most memorable trap of the bunch is the excruciating pit of needles that returning player Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is thrown into. The trap was intended for drug dealer Xavier (Franky G), to dig around in the pit to find a key to unlock a door that leads to an antidote. For two painfully stretched out minutes, Amanda struggles to simply maneuver. Syringes stick to her arms, legs, and back as she roots around for the key. Too late for the door, but she does it. It’s the worst trap created for anyone with a needle phobia, and it’s still a cringe-worthy watch even for those without a needle phobia.
The process of bringing it to life on screen proved just as excruciating. Over the course of four days, it took multiple people hours upon hours of doing nothing else but removing the needle tips from actual syringes and replacing them with fiber optic cable tips trimmed to resemble the needle. That’s it. For days. They’d replaced 40,000 needle tips, and it wasn’t enough. Then 60,000, and the bit would hardly be covered. In the end, it was about 120,000 needles and Styrofoam filler that ended up in the pit. Many of which didn’t have tips at all, for the sake of time.
Smith’s arms were covered in small prosthetics for the needles protruding from her skin, and her clothes had special padding in them for the needles in her legs and back. Prosthetic coordinator Francois Dagenais (The Blob, It Chapter Two, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) didn’t just rig the small pieces for the needles, but an entire silicone arm for the moment when the needles are ripped out of her skin.
Saw II is far from the goriest the franchise dared to go, but it is the bridge that connected the chamber piece crime thriller Wan and Whannell created to the torture-filled horror of later entries. Even still, it delivered one of the series’ best in terms of skin-crawling traps that’ll make you squirm over and over again.