THE setup was as simple as it was perversely diabolical.
Two strangers — a doctor and a photographer — wake up at opposite ends of a windowless bathroom, manacled to a pipe by the ankle. The body of man who has apparently committed suicide is sprawled on the bloody tiles between them, a revolver clutched in one hand, a tape player in the other.
In the pockets of the strangers are tapes, which explain that one man must kill the other or both will be left to rot. The doctor has an added incentive: His wife and daughter will be murdered if he doesn’t get loose and shoot the photographer within eight hours.
The catch: To free himself, the doctor will have to saw off his foot.
So began “Saw,” the 2004 horror movie about a cancer-ravaged madman (Tobin Bell) named Jigsaw who kidnaps people he disapproves of and plunks them in baroque booby traps where escape involves deciphering cryptic clues and, often, self-mutilation.
Filmed over 18 days on a $1.15 million shoestring budget, the twisty, twisted morality tale took in $55.2 million domestically, ushered in what has come to be known as torture porn and spawned five sequels (so far) with enough decapitations and eviscerations to flesh out the Spanish Inquisition. The latest dread and circus, cannily named “Saw VI,” opens October 23.
Though critics tend to think “Saw” lost its teeth long ago, moviegoers — half of them female; two-thirds of them under 25 — have made it one of the highest-grossing fright franchises ever. It may still trail the “Halloween” (with 10) and “Friday the 13th” (with 12) movies in overall box-office sales when ticket prices are adjusted for inflation, but only because there have been fewer installments; “Saw” movies actually eclipse these other gore fests on a per-movie basis.
The enduring charm — if that’s the word — of the “Saw” cycle can’t be chalked up merely to the films’ carnage and elaborate instruments of torture. To their creators and biggest fans, the attraction is the movies’ puzzle-box plots and, as crazy as it sounds, vision of justice.
“ ‘Saw’ is not just a slash ’em and kill ’em picture,” said John Raybin, who as the exclusive dealer of “Saw” props, wardrobe items and autographs, traffics in oddities like shackles and severed (rubber-and-latex) feet. “It’s a thinking man’s horror movie with a moral center.”
The original masterminds of “Saw” are the director James Wan and the screenwriter Leigh Whannell, onetime film students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. Soon after leaving school they collaborated on a script about a hospital orderly who wakes up with his head in a macabre muzzle that will pry his jaws apart if not unlocked in time. The key is in the stomach of a cellmate.
Drawing on an array of inspirations that included “Mad Max,” “Seven” and the music videos of the industrial bands Danzig and Nine Inch Nails, Mr. Wan and Mr. Whannell made a seven-minute teaser and shopped it around. In early 2003 the producer Gregg Hoffman brought the short to Mark Burg and Oren Koules, whose management and production company (Evolution Entertainment) was about to make a killing on the TV sitcom “Two and a Half Men.”
“Gregg came to our office, gathered us into a room and said, ‘Lock the door; you’re not getting out until you see this,’ ” Mr. Koules said. They watched the film several times.
“We were stunned,” Mr. Burg recalled. The producers read the screenplay that night and two days later offered the young filmmakers creative control and 25 percent of the net profits. In return Mr. Burg and Mr. Koules got the copyrights to the full-length feature and any future franchise. (Since “Saw III” Mr. Wan and Mr. Whannell have not been involved in the movies’ production, though they still read scripts and make suggestions.)
