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Aston, James, and John Walliss, eds. To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013. 208pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-7864-7089-1. $40.00.
To See the Saw Movies is an expansive, accessible collection of essays, an assembly that will be of significant interest to scholars engaged in the study of the history, philosophy, and criticism of the horror genre. Not all essays in the volume seem equally invested in the overarching project proposed by the editors-the examination of the Saw franchise as a distinctive product of post-9/11 American culture-but each entry offers a thoughtful, nuanced response to the provocations of Jigsaw and so-called torture porn.
The book includes an introductory overview and a series often individual chapters, all of which address the contemporaneity of the Saw films in distinctive ways. The first three essays dwell on the staging of Jigsaw's traps and their bodily consequences, particularly in terms of twenty-first-century variables {prevailing cultural pessimism, compromised corporeality, technologies of monitoring, and strategies of gamiiication) that complicate and often compromise the corrective potential of Jigsaw's ethical project. The middle chapters seem somewhat less invested in treating Saw as a post-9/11 phenomenon than the initial trio, and their authors recruit a wide array of critical thinkers (Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Kristeva, and Creed among them) to consider issues of free will, responsibility, ethics, and gender as they occur within the franchise. The last chapter, Jeffrey Bullins's study of sound design, seems at first to be an orphan essay, but in its reflections on bloody sound effects (which hearken back to the body horror treated in the second chapter), its discussion of hyperreal space (which ties it to the gamification detailed in the third), and its handling of Jigsaw's recorded voice (which recalls a discussion of the acousmêtre in the filth), it effectively sums a number of currents in play in the volume. Although an assortment of critical allegiances are on display in its pages, To See the Saw Movies is satisfyingly coherent.
The editors, James...