Ranker Spotlight:

The Saw Franchise

In 2004, indie director James Wan, then 27 years old, produced an innovative, ingenious gorefest called Saw and shocked the world. The low-budget movie had The Princess Bride’s Cary Elwes starring opposite the movie’s screenwriter, Leigh Whannell, as the victims of a sadistic serial killer named Jigsaw. While Saw’s brand of what would later be called “torture porn” struck some viewers as excessive and even offensive at the time, the movie quickly became a horror phenomenon, spawning nine other films. The most recent of those sequels, Spiral, stars Chris Rock as a detective investigating a series of grisly murders that closely resemble the work of Jigsaw.

Horror fans hope Spiral can successfully revive the Saw franchise, though the movie has tremendous shoes to fill — Ranker voters have repeatedly proven that the Saw series is one of the most popular and iconic in horror history. We’re celebrating the release of Spiral by taking a look at how the original Saw movie and its many sequels rank on some of our most popular horror lists, as well as the tastes and preferences of the franchise’s biggest fans.

How Saw Ranks on Ranker

While movie snobs may debate whether grisly torture scenes really qualify as good examples of horror, the general public has overwhelmingly positive feelings about the Saw films. No wonder they made so many of them!

The first Saw movie boasts some impressive spots on Ranker lists — it’s #2 on the list of The Goriest Movies Ever Made, with only 2005’s Hostel ahead of it. It’s #5 on the list of The Most Stressful Movies To Watch, #6 on The Scariest Movies Of The 2000s, and a very respectable #26 on The Best Horror Movies Of All Time, a highly competitive list with over 1 million votes. Meanwhile, the Saw franchise sits at #8 on our list of The Best Horror Movie Franchises, behind the Evil Dead films and ahead of the Final Destination movies.

How do fans rank the individual Saw movies against one another? Our list of All Saw Movies, Ranked Best To Worst puts the chapters in something close to chronological order, with Saw I, II, and III sitting in the #1, #2, and #3 spots, respectively. Saw 3D, also called Saw: The Final Chapter, is #9, and the first attempted reboot of the genre, 2017’s Jigsaw, is ranked at #5.

What Do Saw Fans Love?

Tens of thousands of votes have been cast for Saw movies on some of Ranker’s most popular movies lists. What and who else do those fans vote for? Ranker Insights can tell us more about the likes and dislikes of the franchise’s biggest fans.

Other Movies

Unsurprisingly, fans of the original Saw film are loyal to the franchise before any other horror movie. Insights says they’re 10X more likely than the average movie fan to love Final Destination, though they’re also 9X more likely to love copycat Hostel and fellow recent horror franchise The Purge. These fans have a clear preference for horror movies that focus on imagining outlandish, hard-to-watch deaths for protagonists/victims. Many of them are also fans of newer, more cerebral horror flicks like It Follows and The Babadook (which they are 6X and 5X more likely to upvote on Ranker, respectively), but significantly less so than the kind of low-budget bloodbaths in Saw’s own tradition.

Outside the horror genre, it seems that these fans are drawn to action and drama movies with Black heroes. Insights says Saw fans are 10X more likely to count themselves fans of Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood, two iconic 1990s dramas with A-list talent. They’re also 9X more likely to love Blade with Wesley Snipes, Bad Boys with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and New Jack City, another Wesley Snipes-led action flick that co-stars Chris Rock and Ice-T.

Music

Saw fans’ taste in music trends toward the alternative and edgy, which is unsurprising when you consider the kind of movies they’re drawn to. The musical acts that Insights says they’re most likely to love (3X more than the average Ranker voter) are System of a Down and Green Day. The rapper they’re most likely to love is Eminem, notable for producing the kind of gruesome lyrics that would make even the most dedicated Saw fan wince early in their career.

Books

When it comes to fiction, Saw fans stick to their genre. Their top choices are the Stephen King hits The Green Mile and Misery, both of which they’re 3X more likely to love than the average Ranker voter. They’re also 2X more likely to enjoy the classic Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird. On the other side of the coin, fans of the Saw franchise tend to actively dislike headier fare like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In total, Insights says that of 63 fans of the original Saw movie who also voted on the 1924 novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf on various lists across Ranker, only nine of those fans (less than 15%) voted the book up, while the other 54 voted it down.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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