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Way to Prep #1: Saw (2004)

Since the films got less and less relevant after the fourth film, the last film in the series may not have a whole lot to do with this latest feature. If this is not a true sequel and is more of a relaunch, than the film you’ll most likely want to see from the franchise before seeing Jigsaw is the one that started this whole torture porn mess in the first place. You already know from the commercials that the original Jigsaw is dead, so watching his death in Saw III isn’t going to enhance your experience. Your best bet is learning as much about Jigsaw’s origin as possible.

Jigsaw started as a man dying of cancer who felt that the people of the world did not appreciate their lives enough so, naturally, he began to torture them. By doing this they would learn to seek forgiveness for their sins and could fully appreciate life. As the first film in the series, Saw had the smallest budget and, as such, had the most simple death traps. This made them the most realistic which, in turn, made them the scariest. I still get nauseous when I see the pit of pig guts in Saw III but nothing compares to the chill sent through my spine while watching a fat man crawl through a field of barbed wire in the original. Somehow Saw proved less is definitely more and is the highlight in the otherwise overbearing sub-genre of horror known as torture porn.

Way to Prep #2: Hostel (2006)

This garbage is the direct result of Saw’s success. You see, what happened was that after Saw came out people starting referring to it as “torture porn” instead of “clever yet gruesome ways to murder people.” This meant that the success it had was chalked up to audience appreciation for blood and guts instead of elaborate death traps. The problem with this is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if people think you are successful for being gory than that’s what they’ll try to imitate. That’s where Hostel came in and took things to a much lower level.

The morality of “torturing people to save them” was replaced with “torturing people for pleasure.” I mean this quite literally. There is no individual killer in Hostel, no person to blame for these brutal murders or reason for them to wrap your head around. There are simply rich people of the world that will pay large sums of money to live out their most vile, twisted fantasies. This might be bearable if the deaths were even remotely creative. Instead, what we have is a detailed visual of what happens when a human eye is burst open. It isn’t scary, it’s just plain disgusting. Though you are likely to hate every minute of watching Hostel, it will definitely help set the bar of what you consider torture porn and that might help you appreciate whatever fraction of a story Jigsaw attempts this time around. It’s more than anything Hostel has to offer.

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