LACK OF ‘AUTHORIAL VOICE’: THE DIFFERENCE OF THE SAW FILMS

Directors like Roth and Zombie utilise the DVD platform to frame their films in a wide variety of ways. Roth seems preoccupied with fashioning an image for himself as an artist–provocateur on DVD, while Zombie's DVDs emphasise the different modes of identity transformation, both in the supertext of the DVD and in the fantasies of spectators. The case with the Saw films, as they appear on DVD, is very different. Perhaps one should expect this difference with regard to the Saw films. One way in which they are dissimilar from the films of Roth and Zombie is that they have been extremely successful financially. While Roth's and Zombie's films have been successes for Lionsgate – especially on DVD – the seven Saw films (released between 2004 and 2010) have grossed over $750 million dollars in box office returns; this formidable figure does not even take into account DVD and other video sales. Indeed, the Saw films are the closest of all Splat Pack films to the realm of the Hollywood blockbuster.

The Saw films are different in other ways as well. When Jones compiled his initial list of Splat Pack directors in Total Film in April 2006, his list did not include the Saw triumvirate of James Wan, director of the first Saw film, Leigh Whannell, writer of the first three Saw films (not to mention one of the lead actors in the first film), and Darren Lynn Bousman, the director of Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV. In fact, Jones's article barely mentions the Saw films. Wan, Whannell and Bousman were not discursively inaugurated into the Splat Pack proper until October 2006, when Tucker and Keegan included them in their overviews of this new ‘movement’ in modern horror. Cynical observers might note that Wan, Whannell and Bousman were added to the list because of Saw's breakout success in the United States; cynics might also note that the trio were included because Tucker's and Keegan's articles arrived just in time to promote the American release of Bousman's Saw III. For whatever reason, the creative minds behind the Saw series are placed apart from other Splat Packers simply because they were late to the party.