Saw IV (2007) – What Happened to This Horror Movie?

Saw III could have been the end of the series. It killed off it’s primary antagonist in Jigsaw and wrapped up everything it could. That’s not how horror franchises work though, do they? While it’s easy to say that the massive 165-million-dollar box office of Saw III is responsible for the production of Saw IV, the truth is that the movie was greenlit before the third entry ever hit the theaters. How would the story progress after the death of John Kramer? Who would be in the directors’ chair to follow up the most successful film in the franchise? What would the original creators have to do with this movie? Sit back and prepare for another game as we find out what happened to Saw IV.

Saw IV opens with the audience witnessing an autopsy. It takes place immediately after Saw III with John Kramer, Jigsaw himself, being the one that is getting opened up and looked at. This scene is somehow more graphic than many of the execution set pieces that litter the series and were shockingly passed uncut through the MPA without any requests to change anything. The idea behind this was to make it stand out from scenes that would appear in shows like CSI that would regularly have an autopsy to discuss the victim. While we see Tobin Bell’s face, it was actually a body cast that took two weeks to make and the cuts and overall procedure might look more realistic than most because they had an actual coroner in the room at all times. Detective Hoffman is called in because a tape is found in Jigsaw’s stomach that will start a whole slew of new games to unravel and tests to be taken.

Before we get into the rest of the movie let’s discuss the old and new guard. Leigh Whannell and James Wan had started a multimillion-dollar series and a yearly October tradition but were pretty much done by the end of the third film’s production. In 2007, the same year Saw IV came out, Wan would be focused much more on two other movies. Dead Silence which he wrote and directed and Death Sentence which he was only behind the camera for. Whannell would still write the screenplay for Saw III but then move on from the series to focus heavily on the Insidious movies and before that Dead Silence with his good friend James. One holdover from the group was director Darren Lynn Boseman who would help write part II and also get his first directing job on that movie. As we discovered in our look at part III, he agreed to direct that movie because the group’s producer friend passed away. He had mixed thoughts on taking over the duty a third time for a third sequel as he was terrified of being “the horror sequel guy” in Hollywood. The first offer to direct actually went to David Hackl who would end up declining but coming back to direct part 5. After reflection though, he changed his tune as he had a blast on all 3 movies and it allowed him to get his dream project, 2008’s Repo! The Genetic Opera to the big screen.

After the autopsy scene, Saw IV jumps immediately to one of its signature traps. The trap was almost a couple different variations including something that pulled the two men we see upward or a room that slowly filled with water. Budget and time restrictions changed it to two men being slowly pulled towards each other and a deadly trap while one of them had their mouth sewn shut and the other had his eyes closed the same way. This added tension to the scene with the two men being unable to work together as they needed keys for their own traps that were put on their partners bodies. Prosthetic thread was used on both men but while Kevin Rushton was able to see with the thread on, Louis Ferreria actually couldn’t speak.

The movie, as we see, will jump back and forth between scenes and characters we saw in the previous installment and new traps and tests. This was to better utilize the now dead Jigsaw killer, or his voice at least, as actor Tobin Bell had been signed on for both parts 4 and 5. While the first three movies form a loose trilogy, the writers brought back elements from all three previous films while starting their own mini series within the series by adding characters like FBI agent Peter Strahm and Detective Mark Hoffman. The first inkling of this is when the body of Dina Meyer is discovered by police and a second accomplice is deduced, something that part three sets up with Kerry’s death being against the rules Jigsaw sets up when her key doesn’t work. Dina Meyer is brought back but so is Angus Macfadyen from part III and Donnie Wahlberg from part II. The movie makes it hard to figure out exactly who the accomplice is and sets up a new set of games with multiple people.

With neither Wan or Whannell having any interest in writing, though they would stay on as producers and claim that the movie would be done right as the series was their baby, new writers would need to be brought in. Producers read a script for a movie called The Midnight Man which would eventually become The Collector, something that has more than a few thematic and tone similarities with the Saw series. Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton would be those writers and in addition to writing 4 consecutive Saw movies, they were able to make both The Collector and The Collection while having a hand in writing other horror flicks like the surprising-that-it’s-a-series Feast movies and Piranha 3DD. When they first took over the job, they thought their script was going to be used as a prequel to the series which would have made bringing back John Kramer even easier.

Ultimately the producers decided that a prequel wasn’t what they wanted and went forward with a direct sequel to part III that as we would find out, would also take place during the end of part III. Also on their minds was a purported Saw bible that was to be used in crafting all works in the series but their script was accepted before they ever were in possession of any Saw bible and in fact, they would never see one. Their script was trimmed down for time and budget though and parts of it were eventually used in part V. This works in the movies favor as part IV fits in with the rest of the series at a clean 92 minutes. They leaned heavily on Bousman who had directed the two previous films and ended up pitching their own trilogy with the previously mentioned Hoffman and Strahm. Working with Bousman was essential even if he would bow out of directing future films until coming back for Spiral starring Chris Rock.

The movie cuts back and forth between the past and the present while giving us a little history on Detectives Hoffman and Rigg who end up getting kidnapped and put in the game; Hoffman being a prisoner and Rigg being the one that has to run through the gauntlet of traps and the trapped. To keep the series consistent, the writers made Rigg one of the main characters as he played a minor role in the previous two movies. While Hoffman is trapped for the majority of the run time, at least in the past, Rigg gets to run through various rooms deciding the fates of people. Some of them set into their own traps that he tries to save like a Trafficker that is in danger of being scalped or the apartment manager that he is instructed to put into the trap and decide his own fate. Later, Rigg is tasked with confronting a woman who already won her designated trap but leaves her to be rescued.

The traps in this movie run the gamut from being particularly grisly like the hotel manager having to put his own eyes out or be dismembered to the more mundane of the couple trapped together with spikes that must be removed. The special effects team was split between practical and CG special effects with a whopping 36 team members working on it. These are complimented by production designer David Hackl who, as we discussed, would go on to direct the next film. Rigg eventually finds both Hoffman and Donnie Wahlberg’s Eric in their respective traps while Strahm finds out about Jill Tuck, Jigsaw’s wife, and a bit about the past of John Kramer which is another easy way to work in Tobin Bell. All signs lead to their lawyer being the secret apprentice and the on-screen evidence of both the lawyer being the surviving victim in the first trap and us seeing him hold Hoffman and Matthews hostage are staggering.

The movie ends with us seeing all of these traps and characters that took place during the same timeframe as the previous movie. It wraps up every loose end from that movie while also setting up the new series with Strahm and Hoffman and revealing that Hoffman was the other apprentice. The movie was filmed over 32 days in Toronto on a budget of 10 million dollars. It was then shipped to theaters under the code name Angel Fish and released on October 26th, 2007, in what had become the standard release timeframe for the series. It would make almost 140 million which is still the third highest in the series behind parts 3 and 2. Critically, it holds an 18% on rotten tomatoes which is the third LOWEST of the films and a solid B cinema score from the viewing audience. The series would not slow down for an additional 3 years with the remainder of this trilogy hitting screens each October followed by Saw 3D which would put an end to yearly releases. Saw IV was a no brainer for productions and now we know exactly what happened.

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