I cannot tell you how excited I am to play a game again!Spiral: From the Book of Sawis the latest, upcoming chapter in the bonkers-confusingSawfranchise, a horror-thriller mythology predicated on the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell,who straight up wouldn’t tell me if he’s inSpiral) and his predilection for morality testing-and-proving torture traps.Spirallooks to be an intriguingly different film in the franchise — especially because of the chief creative and performing involvement ofChris Rock— and this new image from the film seems to tantalize this direction.
Spiral’s directorDarren Lynn Bousman, who also directedSawsII-IV, spoke to Empire about the film’s new direction, stating that “we wanted it to feel much more likeSeven. But it has so many ties to the mythos ofSaw.” Given how much of the originalSawalready feels likeDavid Fincher’s classic neo-noir horror-thriller, this strikes me as a pleasingly back-to-basics approach to what made the original cook, and a nice movement away from the dense trickeries of the bloated sequels. Bousman also revealed that the film’s purview will be less about gore and more about suspense, dunking on his own work in the process: “I was a younger person. Gore and violence was the gimmick, I think. Gore and violent is no longer a gimmick – it just serves the story. This is much more about character, tension and fear.”
And how exactly involved is Rock in the new film? According to Boseman, foundationally so: “Chris came in with a thriller concept. He pitched this very elaborate, dense idea.” And while the broad strokes about what we know about the plot thus far — Rock as a detective obsessed with a newly active serial killer who seems to be inspired by Jigsaw — feel pretty par for the course for a serial killer thriller, that may be exactly the grounded base reality to elaborate upon that the franchise needs
Spiral: From the Book of Sawis scheduled to be released August 25, 2025. Check out the new image below.
