Setting off Jigsaw’s traps in Saw X

John Kramer (Tobin Bell) is dead. Long live the Jigsaw Killer. The latest film in the Saw franchise brings John/Jigsaw back from the grave and sends him back in time to fill in the gap between Saw I and Saw II. What it’s filled with is mostly blood, guts, eyeballs and twisted metal, as John sets up a series of elaborate “games” with deadly consequences. He wants his victims to stare their own death in the face and learn something from the experience, or die trying. It’s nice that he has a hobby. 

“John has been a civil engineer and architect for almost 40 years,” says Tobin Bell, “He’s so well versed in philosophy, science, even theology. John is well read, intelligent, and above all, committed…unlike many of us who look around and complain about things and do nothing about them. However extreme John’s methods, it’s my job to flesh him out, to be on his side, and to draw audiences into his thought processes. He deals with a lot of evil around him in a way we haven’t seen before.”

This time, the people Jigsaw targets to learn a lesson are the medical scammers who lure him to Mexico for an “experimental” treatment for his cancer. “Audiences have been telling us they wanted a Saw film in which John Kramer was key to the action and at the centre of the story. This is the first time you get to see him setting things in motion and then executing his traps,” teases producer Oren Koules who, like Tobin, has been part of the Saw machinery since its launch in 2003. 

Stream Saw X now.

A crawl down needle-pit memory lane

“We spent several months testing the traps,” reveals production designer Anthony Stabley. “We wanted these new ones to reflect those of the original Saw, so they have a lot of oxidised metal. You see components that you believe John Kramer could construct. We also connected each of the traps to the medical themes of this film. They merge grittiness and beauty.”

Seeing John build and plan his traps meant creating an intricate journal in which he could jot down his thoughts and draw out his schematics. It became prop master Devorah Galvan Caballero’s favourite Saw item. “I’ve been a fan of the Saw films since the original short, so I liked to imagine what John would be writing or drawing, and what else would be in that journal,” she says.

The film also sees the return of fan favourite props like John’s Pighead mask, which hides his identity. “Oh, Pighead is one of the most important characters in the movie!” says costume designer Jimena Tenerio Martínez. “We made a Pighead mould for John, and one for Amanda (the sole survivor of the Original Saw film, played by Shawnee Smith), and it was a beautiful process that has been used to create this character for years, so it was exciting to work on.”

Further protecting John’s identity is the tape recorder that he uses to convey his instructions to his unwilling students. “The original recorder was pretty cool,” says prop master Jorge Iván Sanders, who searched auction site eBay to track down vintage technology, “so I wanted ours to be as close as possible to the one John uses in the first Saw.” 

Saw X’s ancient inspiration

Setting Saw X in Mexico City gave the film’s production team some local colour to draw on when it came to traps. Director Kevin Greutert (who also edited the first five Saw films) explains, “My mind immediately went to the history of the Aztecs and their temples and pyramids for human sacrifices, at the centre of the city. I started thinking of ways to incorporate these themes and images into the movie. While local laws and other practicalities prevented me from doing as much as I’d like with the exotic setting (and we even shot during the Dia De Los Muertos festivities), we still managed to incorporate ideas inspired by the setting.”

Six traps snap shut

1. The janitor (Isam Beomhyun Lee): Hand-eye coordination

Even before John’s trip to Mexico, he’s obsessed with his machinery of death. When he catches a cleaner about to steal a poor patient’s belongings, he mentally sets up one of the film’s most gruesome traps. A device with tubes attached to a mask will use vacuum forces to suck out the man’s eyeballs unless he can stop it by twisting a dial through five positions. But every time he twists the dial, the other device locked around his hand will force one of his fingers back until it breaks. The lesson? Keep your eyes to yourself, and no more five-finger discounts. 

2. Diego/Dr Cortez (Joshua Okamoto): Disarming a trap

The driver who takes John to the Mexico City clinic is a chatty tourist guide on the surface. But he’s also the lead “surgeon” on John’s surgical care team. To teach him the perils of overreaching, John straps a pipe bomb to each of his forearms with wire (complete with countdown timers) and partially sews them into his skin, then covers his hands with silver duct tape, strapping two scalpels to them. He’s forced to cut out his own “cancer”, but without any of a surgeon’s dexterity. Get one bomb off, and you better hope you’ve left enough muscle on your now-free arm to hack away at the other one. 

“Yeah, that one’s pretty brutal,” admits prosthetics makeup department head Ozzy Alvarez. “The prop and art departments made the pipe bombs, with blood tubing running through it. So, we were pumping blood as the character begins cutting off each piece of skin that’s connected to the bomb.”

3. Gabriela (Renata Vaca): X-rayted destruction

Drug addict Gabriela gets close to John to lure him into trusting her and the scammers, claiming that the clinic’s staff cured her illness. Once he knows who she is, he can see right through her. So her trap involves an X-ray machine’s deadly rays, along with a hammer, to hammer home his point. The heavy chains around one of her wrists and one of her ankles tighten when it’s her turn, hoisting her up until she is suspended from the ceiling by her wrist, and stretched to the floor by her ankle.

She is then told that she must use a sledgehammer to break her bones so that she can “slip” free from the shackles. The X-ray radiation machine (or linear accelerator), which has had its safety features removed, will stay focussed on her long enough to kill her through her radiation burns, going up level by level the longer she takes to free herself.

4. Mateo (Octavio Hinojosa): It’s not brain surgery (but it is)

Mateo masquerades as an anesthesiologist but he’s really a drug pusher who works in a vet’s office. He’s decidedly not one of the scam’s masterminds. So his “trap” is brain surgery, which he has to perform on himself to extract some of his own brain tissue. He’s prepped for surgery – strapped to a moving chair with an altered halo device screwed around his head and a bald spot shaved into his hair. He has to carry out his surgery within three minutes – drilling into his skull until he can lift the top off like a cookie jar – and extract some of his brain tissue, to dissolve in a vat of enzymes. 

If he succeeds, this will close a circuit and release a key that he can use to escape. So don’t be stingy now! If not, the device around his head will snap an Aztec mask over his face, backed with heating elements in each half, which will roast his face off like a rotisserie chicken. “That was a fun one,” enthuses prosthetics makeup department head Ozzy Alvarez. “It had two components: a prosthetic cap worn on the head that had a ‘shaved’ spot; and then a fake head of Mateo, from which we could pull out a piece of his skull and remove a piece of his brain.”

5. Nurse Valentina (Paulette Hernandez): Cutting corners

Valentina is a prostitute masquerading as a nurse. A sharp-edged wire saw is placed in front of her neck in a frame attached to an industrial piece of machinery, that’ll slowly drag it back with enough force to sever her head at the neck – along with her fingers if she tries to grab hold of it. To free herself, she’s given a box with a surgeon’s hand-operated, flexible wire amputation saw. 

And she is told that she has just three minutes to saw her leg off at mid-thigh, then suction out enough thick and goopy bone marrow from the remaining stump to fill a slotted spoon which is set to go down on one side when it’s heavy enough, preventing the industrial machine from starting up. The moral? She might have thought of herself as just being a small part of a larger machine, but every part is dangerous.

6. Dr Cecilia (Synnøve Macody Lund): A sneaky switch

“Cecilia is not one of John’s typical victims. She challenges him, questions his whole code, and tries to break him,” says Synnøve. As leader of the operation, Cecilia’s trap is by far the most complex, and will involve allowing her to think she has the upper hand, even locking John in one of his own traps – a see-saw that forces both people sitting on it to choose which of them gets drowned in blood.

But that’s just to lure her into the real trap, in a room that fills with poison gas once she unwittingly sets off the trigger. There’s only one escape route for her and her secret co-conspirator: a small window just big enough for one person to stick their head through and breathe while the gas continues to corrode their skin for 10 minutes, forcing the smug conspirators to turn on one another to survive. Well, no. Actually, they could take turns. But Cecilia is not the type. 

Now do you want to play a game? Stream Saw X. And for more horror options, check out our 31 Days of Halloween Countdown.