'The Saw movies are torture porn for tortured gays'

Life is a constant puzzle when you're gay. Why weren't my school years like Heartstopper? Why do unattractive homophobic men assume every gay man on the planet wants them? And why did Pedro Pascal block my number with the help of a court-appointed judge? It's a lot to handle, which is why it can be much easier to escape into fictional puzzles rather than the real deal.

Enter Saw, the gruesome horror franchise where Jigsaw forces victims into deadly games that either mutilate and kill them or prove their will to live. Far removed from your nan's jigsaw, the twisted John Kramer (as he's also known) comes up with increasingly elaborate puzzles and traps which have captivated millions of horror fans over the past two decades — and queer fans especially who have noticed a surprising amount of gay subtext in James Wan and Leigh Whannell's torture porn franchise.

Because in the immortal words of Jessica Lange in The Politician, that's what gays do: find gay subtext, munch butts and celebrate Halloween.

Don't blame us. Blame the first Saw movie which opens with two strangers waking up in chains on opposite sides of a grimy dilapidated bathroom. Just a standard Sunday morning for your typical circuit gay. But then Jigsaw appears, ordering Dr Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) to kill Adam (Leigh Whannell) so that he and his family are allowed to survive.

Cue a whole lot of tension, and not just the scary kind. Because what starts off as a rivalry between Lawrence and Adam ends up following a classic enemies-to-lovers arc as they overcome their differences and help each other not just survive but thrive. Ok, "thrive" is a bit generous.

By the end, Lawrence has used a saw to cut off his own foot and escape Jigsaw's trap. But where did they find this saw? In a toilet that Kramer had marked with a heart before telling Adam to "follow [his] heart." Is it any wonder that Adam developed romantic feelings for Lawrence?

Scoff all you want, but watch them grab each other at the end, clutching on like Jack and Rose on that floating door, and it's hard not to think of something deeper going on between them. After all this time apart, Lawrence and Adam can finally embrace each other, gasping out of breath as their foreheads touch. And when Lawrence crawls away, looking for help, Adam's anguished cries of "Don't leave!" evoke something stronger too.

Is it a coincidence that The Notebook came out that same year? I don't think.

Queer fans latched on immediately, as we do, which resulted in hundreds of fan fics and art pieces giving Adam and Lawrence the ending they so desperately craved, despite Saw II confirming Adam's death in that bathroom. They're not the only same-sex Saw characters we've been shipping — or "chainshipping" — either.

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With the end of the original trilogy came a new lead in the form of Mark Hoffman, a secret Jigsaw apprentice who literally got away with murder because he was a detective in his day job. When an out-of-town special agent named Peter Strahm showed up to investigate Jigsaw, the pair began a cat-and-mouse chase which led to hate, but also an inexplicable connection between them which many gays watching liked to define as horny.

Their will-they-won't-they dynamic lasted for two films before Strahm succumbed to one of Jigsaw's traps, but they live on forever in fan fic where they instead succumb to their feelings for each other.

And who can forget Amanda? Her journey from victim to Jigsaw's best apprentice is truly transformative in a way that any queer who's ever come out can relate to. Because after she shed the feminine hair and clothes she once relied on to get by, Amanda reasserts herself with a more confident, visibly masculine outlook along with a bold new purpose. Ok, her purpose was to torture people, but still, everyone needs a hobby.

By finding that purpose in a new identity that didn't conform to society's expectations, Shawnee Smith's character earned herself the highly covetable title of "Mother". In fact, Amanda mothered so hard that she showed up again as a key player in 2023's Saw X, an interquel made over a decade after her final appearance that's set between the first and second Saw movies.

There's something freeing about embracing Jigsaw's philosophy — albeit not in real life – that makes Kramer a queer elder of sorts, someone that outsiders can look up to and be inspired by. Queerness is in the DNA of these movies, intentionally or not, which is exactly what Cooper Jordan saw and felt when he decided to create Saw the Musical: The Unauthorised Parody of Saw.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Jordan's musical tells the love story that the first Saw couldn't, using songs like Filthy Things and Saw Right Through Me to reimagine Adam and Lawrence's love story in the way so many queer shippers already had in their minds and in their fan fiction.

Eight movies in, the franchise itself started to pick up on its sizeable queer fandom with a surprising ad campaign for Jigsaw that pushed back against homophobic laws that require gay and bisexual men to be sexually abstinent for a year before giving blood in the US. The Jigsaw campaign even enlisted queer stars such as gay model Shaun Ross and nightlife legend Amanda Lepore who all dressed up in creepy nurse costumes

Yet despite this impressive — and entirely unexpected — bout of LGBTQ+ activism, the Saw movies haven't since done much to centre the queer experiences that form the backbone of this franchise. With Saw XI due next year, it's about time that we rip this backbone out, vertebrae and all, putting it on full display with some bonafide gay characters who can play the victim moving forward. Because what's really puzzled us most is that this hasn't happened sooner.

The original Saw trilogy is available to watch on Netflix, Saw X is available on Prime Video.