Top 10 Jigsaw Traps!

Last Updated on August 3, 2021

Ah yeah, today’s the day friends, the long-awaited return of JIGSAW to the big-screen. How many of you are going to check out what old master-murder-manipulator has in store 7 years after his latest deadly designs were exacted? A perfect Halloween horror-show right? Well, for a terminal cancer patient, this Jigsaw fella has a lot of goddamn time on his hands. But you know what, given the countless victims he’s gorily tortured over the years, he has even more blood on his hands. Even in death this dude continues to serve his twisted brand of vengeance.

But which among Jigsaw’s homicidal handywork is the best? So many options to choose from, but below we’re going to try to narrow down the nastiness to the ten most memorably brutal death-traps. And so as not to offend or omit, we’ve included at least one gnarly contraption from each of the preceding seven flicks. Think your favorite will make the cut? Find out underneath via our Top 10 Favorite Jigsaw Traps!

#1. REVERSE BEAR TRAP (SAW FRANCHISE)

In what’s clearly the most iconic and recurring of all Jigsaw’s death-weapons – the reverse bear trap – we finally get to see medieval looking contraption get used in SAW 3D. On Jigsaw’s wife Jill, no less. Remember, this rusted death-helmet was initially clamped to Amanda’s pretty little head in the original, and notably once more on Hoffman in SAW VI, but good gravy, they really did wait for the most evilly opportune time to depict a three-dimensional explosion of gruesome viscera in the so called FINAL CHAPTER. Jill gets the bear-trap strapped to her head at the vengeful hand of Hoffman (who escaped it himself in VI), and when he finally releases the sucker, her entire face erupts into a gorgeous pulpy geyser of grue!

#2. ANGEL TRAP (SAW III)

A devilish dessert in the form of an angel! Man this one smarts to even write about, as detective Alison Carey awakes to find herself suspended with hooks dug into both sides of her rib-cage. She’s warned by Jigsaw that a one-minute clock will begin at the end of his video instruction, and that all she has to do is reach out and grab a key submerged at the bottom of a large jar of liquid in order to unlock the harness. Well, turns out the liquid is a caustic acid that burns the skin right off the poor gal’s arm, and when she fails at completing the mission, the contraption hoists her body up, ripping the hooks and concomitant flesh off her torso and splays her remains out as if she had angel wings. It’s an unthinkably cruel stint of body evisceration that calls to mind what Lecter did to that cop in LAMBS!

#3. GARAGE TRAP (SAW 3D)

Because of the way it dispatches four victims in one fell swoop, I’ve always been a bit partial to the horse-power car-trap in the garage sequence of SAW 3D. Shit’s choreographic carnage at it most poetic! Here’s how the wheels are literally set in motion. Hoffman puts Evan in the driver’s seat of a car, his skin soldered to the seat in order to make him painfully pry his body off of the leather to reach a release lever. When he finally does, the car drops its wheels on to the head of Evan’s girlfriend, splitting it like a watermelon. The car then lunges forward, ripping another dude’s arms clean off his shoulder-blades. The car then rams into another tied-up fella straight ahead, cutting his body in half before Evan is thrown through the windshield and lands on the hood of another vehicle altogether.

#4. THE RACK TRAP (SAW III)

Straight up, when Jigsaw goes on record claiming it as his favorite of all his kill-contraptions, you know it must be awarded a high mark. As such, you’re goddamn right, The Rack Trap in SAW III has cracked the top 5. And that’s not all it’s cracked! Unfortunate Timothy Young is bound to a crucifix-like structure, with each body part ensnared in its own autonomous mini-trap. As the gears and cogs begin to grind, Tim’s bones get twisted, crunched, disfigured and crushed to gory oblivion…even when the father of a kid Tim killed retrieves a key in time. No matter, a judge on the scene gets his dome blown to smithereens with a shotgun meant for the dad, and when the entire rescue plan goes to shit, Tim is left to witness his own neck getting snapped like a twig. Easily one of the most excruciating death-traps to lay eyes on!

#8. MAUSOLEUM TRAP (SAW IV)

Talk about see no evil hear no evil! Oh but this isn’t a Pryor-Wilder adventure, this is Jigsaw at his most sadistically sinister. Recall the Mausoleum murder in SAW IV where two male victims, one with his eyes sewn shut, the other with his mouth sewn shut, are chained to a winch that is pulling them in from both sides so to be mechanically masticated if met in the middle? Too sick! One guy has a key hidden on his nape, but neither man can tell the other is there to work in tandem. What transpires is a brutal fight to the death with rusty rudimentary tools, ultimately ending in Art bashing the ever loving brain matter out of Trevor with a giant hammer. I know some favor the squeamish-scalp job or the infamous ice-block trap, but here we get two tortures for the price of one!

#9. SHOTGUN CAROUSEL TRAP (SAW VI)

The shotgun carousel trap in SAW VI is one that always struck us as one of the more crazily creative death-devices in the entire franchise. After all, gunfire is not Jigsaw’s murderous M.O. Yet, just like the opening death-trap of the film, this one pits potential victims against one another. Or, at least, has the option for optimal bloodshed. It goes like this. A sleazy insurance exec finds a sextet of his life-altering employees tied up on a Jigsaw-marked scary-go-round. He’s told that only two can survive, which means four are about to catch a close-range shotgun shell to the body that’ll hollow out their innards. Adding insult to injury is how each must endure torturous bodily harm while the exec is forced to decide who among the six is worth living.

#10. VENUS FLY TRAP (SAW II)

The Venus Fly Trap in SAW II is a bit more grisly than a little shop of horrors, as the dry-snitching informant Michael comes to the realization that, in order to save his own life, he must dig into his pulverized right-side ocular cavity to locate a key that will unlock an ancient looking death mask strapped to his mug. Jigsaw gives the rat-bastard a ticking clock to complete his task, and when he fails to do so after cutting a scalpel into his eyeball and digging around for a few ticks, the mask closes and crushes the dude’s face like a fresh grapefruit in a juicer. Michael twists, writhes, wriggles and screams out before falling to the ground a moribund heap as viscous red goop pours from his face!

#5. POUND OF FLESH TRAP (SAW VI)

The opening torture device in SAW VI is one for the books, namely in the way it forces two competing victims to not only self-mutilate, but indirectly murder as a means of survival as well. Remember, Simone and Eddie find themselves locked in the same room, strapped with sharp drill-bits to their temples and tasked with excoriating large chunks of their own flesh in order to outweigh each other in the allotted time. Eddie has more to carve, being the chunkier human, and when Simone feels she might be losing the challenge, she says f*ck it and relentlessly hacks her own arm off, tosses it down the shoot and in the nick of time, tips the scales in her favor. Eddie is then impaled with said drill-bits through the dome until a faucet of thick red goop discharges!

#6. FISH HOOK TRAP (SAW 3D)

For as critically drubbed, panned and discarded as SAW 3D was at the time, it sure does have some terrifyingly top-notch death-traps. One such example is the ferocious fish-hook sequence, where the fraudulent Bobby Dagen finds his publicist Nina strapped to a reclined chair with four long sharpened rods pointing directly at her primary neck arteries. Bobby is told that, in order to free her from captivity, he must reel in a fish hook embedded in her belly, catching the key along the way back up through her mouth. Of course, the sharpened poles are inching closer to impalement with each passing second. F*cked up! Not only does Bobby fail to retrieve the key in time, hooking vital innards with each failed attempt, the result ends with Nina catching a four-pronged stab-job to the throat!

#7. PENDULUM TRAP (SAW V)

Shout out to Edgar Allan Poe yo, The Pit and the Pendulum style. While there are a few wince-worthy torture modes in SAW V, the one that instantly leaps to mind is the one where a convicted murderer named Seth Baxter is unjustly let out of prison due to lack of evidence, only to face the vigilante ire of Jigsaw himself. Baxter awakes to find himself strapped down, limbs splayed, with his hands squeezed in a pair of vice-grips. Hope is feigned when he’s told he can unlock the vices and stop a giant pendulum swinging blade from cutting his torso in half, but we know what eventually transpires. That is, the pendulum cranks back up and soon Baxter’s body is butchered in half through the abdomen and intestinal tract. F*cking gnarly!