The horror icon who hates their most famous creation: “It’s a double-edged sword”
In 2000, a couple of young aspiring filmmakers were inspired by The Blair Witch Project to make their own low-budget film. An idea soon began to form about two memory-deficient men who wake up in a dingy room at the mercy of the criminal mastermind who trapped them there. Over the next three years, this idea became a low-budget horror movie that performed above and beyond anyone’s expectations. Unfortunately for the film’s director, though, their little movie spawned a billion-dollar franchise that took “torture porn” to the masses – and he hated being associated with these gorefests.
Fascinatingly, James Wan and his filmmaking partner Leigh Whannell had to leave their native Australia to get their movie made. The film industry at home wasn’t interested in horror movies, and no matter how much they insisted their film wasn’t part of the horror genre, they couldn’t convince anyone to finance it. To them, their story was a grisly crime thriller in the vein of David Fincher’s Se7en, not a horror flick, and this disconnect would come back to haunt them over the years.
Of course, the movie in question was Saw, which hit screens in 2004. Wan and Whannell took a short film version of the story to Los Angeles and shopped it around, which convinced Lionsgate to give them $1 million to turn it into a feature. As they shot the movie, though, they found executives at the studio kept referring to it as a horror film, and again, they were stumped. Yes, the movie features the villainous killer ‘Jigsaw’ putting people in elaborate death traps. However, they were conspicuous with the amount of gore on show, and placed more focus on the twisty investigative elements of the story.
In 2014, a disappointed Wan revealed, “I remember Jason Constantine, who’s one of the execs at Lionsgate and an executive producer on the film, jokingly saying, ‘Hey, Leigh and James didn’t even realise they’d made a horror movie until it was sold as a horror movie.'”
Naturally, because Saw was such an enormous hit and gave him a career, Wan couldn’t be too mad about it being marketed to the horror crowd. However, he watched with growing discomfort over the following decade as sequels he had no part in began pushing the gruesome violence and explicit gore to disturbing levels. Worst of all, though, was the fact that general audiences still seemed to associate his name with torture porn, a genre he wanted no part of. He purposely moved on from the series he helped create after the first movie, yet fans seemingly had no idea.
Fast-forward to 2013, and Wan was on the promotional trail for Insidious: Chapter 2, the sequel to the incredibly successful haunted house movie he made in 2011. He spoke to Complex magazine and revealed he decided to return for a sequel this time precisely because of what happened to him after he bowed out of Saw.
“The flack I got for Saw is why I wanted to direct Insidious 2,” the disgruntled director confessed. “I didn’t direct any of the Saw sequels, but people thought I did. When Insidious 2 came along, I said, ‘If anyone’s going to fuck up my franchise, it might as well be me.'” He shook his head in dismay and added, “The Saw sequels went in a direction I wouldn’t have gone in.”
Ultimately, even though Wan has Saw to thank for his career, it also cast a long shadow over him that it took the better part of a decade to escape from. “Not many people can say that their first movie started one of the biggest franchises ever in that particular genre,” he mused. “But it’s a double-edged sword. A lot of people wouldn’t see my other movies because they thought of me as the Saw guy.'”
