Limbs Pile Up, and Money, Too

Lionsgate Entertainment picked up the distribution rights and planned to dump “Saw” straight to video. But after the film packed three midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 and scored well with test audiences, Lionsgate released it in theaters that Halloween.

The rough cut had been grisly enough to merit an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. “We pointed out that there really wasn’t a lot of gore, and that the violence was mostly implied,” Mr. Koules said. “Frame by frame we showed the censors that the doctor’s foot hadn’t been cut off. We didn’t have money for special effects.”

After a little trimming — more of stomach-turning sounds than images — “Saw” was downgraded to a teen-friendlier R. “With lots of caveats,” Mr. Koules added.

(The makers of the “Saw” movies recoil at the term torture porn, arguing that the films’ creepy catalog of dismemberment isn’t in the same league as, say, the flailings and floggings of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” “Try watching the first 10 minutes of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ without sound,” Mr. Koules said. “If Steven Spielberg hadn’t been the director. …”)

All the effort paid off: the first movie brought in an impressive $18.3 million on its opening weekend.

“The trailers, TV ads, posters and online marketing campaign effectively conveyed the sense that this film would be new and different,” said Katrina Wolfe, former senior vice president for production and casting at Dimension (“Scream,” “Halloween II”).

“Saw,” she said, offered a fresh alternative to the splatter, slasher and post-slasher formula, and it wasn’t a remake. “The central plot didn’t hinge entirely on a final twist or a revelation,” Ms. Wolfe said. “Horror fans sensed they were getting in on something innovative and legitimately terrifying.”

Which they were. With scarcely a familiar name in the casts, frugal production (no single “Saw” budget has exceeded $10.9 million) and taste-challenged promotion (in the poster for “Saw II,” the “II” was a pair of severed fingers), Twisted Pictures and Lionsgate have created a lucrative horror business model. (Adding in international sales and revenue from DVDs, television and merchandise, the “Saw” franchise has taken in more than $1 billion.)

And in Jigsaw they have conceived a life coach with a deadly bent. As much Dr. Phil as Dr. Doom, he practices tough love on those he believes don’t value existence.

Unlike most of the horror peerage — Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Godzilla — the soft-voiced Jigsaw relies on brains rather than brawn to get his point across. And doesn’t so much kill as force people to make lethal choices.

“What makes ‘Saw’ successful is that it crosses the boundary of horror and reality,” said the Hollywood financier Ryan Kavanaugh, whose Rogue Pictures specializes in low-budget genre films like “The Strangers” and “The Unborn.” “It’s not about sharks or aliens or someone being satanically possessed. The audience is taken for a spin by a concept that, in one way or another, it can relate to.”

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