Saw Timeline: Every Film in Chronological Order

Saw (2004) is the first entry in both orders, and it was directed by James Wan. Its setting is a single grimy bathroom where photographer Adam (Leigh Whannell) and oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) wake up chained at opposite ends, with a corpse, a revolver and a tape recorder between them. Lawrence has until 6:00 to kill Adam, or his wife Alison and daughter Diana die.

The backstory arrives in flashbacks. Detectives Tapp and Sing had tracked the Jigsaw Killer to a warehouse, where Tapp was badly wounded and Sing died in a shotgun trap. Amanda, one of the few people to survive a Jigsaw trap, features in the testimony Lawrence had seen. The captor watching the bathroom on a hidden camera is hospital orderly Zep Hindle, who is himself obeying Jigsaw in return for an antidote to a slow poison. Lawrence saws off his own foot and fires at Adam, and Adam later beats Zep to death with the toilet tank lid.

The final reveal anchors everything that comes after it. The body on the floor rises and is John Kramer, the real Jigsaw. He shocks Adam through the chain, locks the door and leaves him there, while Lawrence crawls off to find help. Every later date on this timeline is measured from that locked door. The film's own page is saw 2004.

Saw X fits between Saw (2004) and Saw II, which makes it the second film in chronological order even though it was the tenth to reach theaters. Kevin Greutert directed the 2023 release, and Yahoo reported that the filmmakers set the story in the gap between the first two films and decided not to de-age Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith.

John Kramer is dying of brain cancer when a fellow patient named Henry tells him about an experimental treatment in Mexico. John travels to a clinic outside Mexico City, where Cecilia Pederson and her team operate on him, and he believes he is cured. He then finds the clinic empty and learns the whole treatment was a scam aimed at the desperate.

With Amanda Young's help, John captures the con artists, including Mateo, Valentina and Gabriela, and puts each through a trap. Valentina dies after cutting off her own leg without gathering enough bone marrow, and Mateo dies when a heated mask closes over his face. Parker, the man behind the scam, dies in a gas filled room and Cecilia is left behind. In the closing scene Henry wakes in a bathroom with a trap attached to his stomach, watched by John and Mark Hoffman. A short post credits scene gives Costas Mandylor a cameo as Hoffman. See saw x for the full page.

Saw II (2005), directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, is the third entry in chronological order and the film that puts Jigsaw in custody. A police informant dies in a head trap, and Detective Eric Matthews, played by Donnie Wahlberg, is led to a factory where he and a SWAT team arrest John Kramer.

Screens in the factory show eight people locked in a house filling with a nerve agent that will kill them in about two hours, and one of them is Eric's teenage son Daniel. John tells Eric to sit and talk and promises Daniel will be safe if Eric plays by his rules. Inside the house the captives search for antidotes while traps kill several of them, and they realize everyone except Daniel has been in prison. Amanda works with Daniel while the violent Xavier hunts the others.

Eric loses patience, beats John and forces him to lead the way to the house, and a colleague realizes the footage was recorded earlier. Daniel is found alive in a safe at the factory, but Eric ends up chained in a bathroom. A tape reveals Amanda survived her own test and became John's accomplice, and she leaves Eric locked in to die. The film is covered on the saw 2 page.

Saw III (2006), directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, is the fourth film in the timeline and ends the story of Jigsaw himself. Dr. Lynn Denlon is taken from her hospital to a hideout where a dying John Kramer lies in bed, and Amanda fits Lynn with a shotgun collar wired to John's heart monitor so she must keep him alive.

The second game belongs to Jeff, a man consumed by grief and revenge over his son Dylan, who was killed by a drunk driver. He crosses a run down meatpacking plant and meets the people he blames. Danica, the only witness, dies in a freezer before he can free her. Judge Halden, who gave the driver a light sentence, is saved by Jeff from a vat filling with rotting pig carcasses. Timothy, the driver, is locked in a machine that twists his body.

Amanda admits she has stopped believing in John's ideas and rigged her traps so nobody could win. She shoots Lynn, and Jeff shoots Amanda dead. John then reveals that Lynn, Jeff's wife, was Amanda's real test. Jeff cuts John's throat with a power saw, which sets off Lynn's collar. John's last tape says a girl named Corbett is also missing. Our saw 3 page has more.

Saw IV (2007), directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, is the fifth film in chronological order, and it opens on a mortuary table. Jigsaw's body is being examined, and a microcassette is found in his stomach. The message on it is addressed to Detective Hoffman and says the games are not finished.

The main thread follows Officer Rigg, a cop who cannot stop trying to rescue other people. A new run of traps puts the lives of those people in his hands, and Detective Eric Matthews, who had been left for dead in Saw II, turns out to be among them. Agents Strahm and Perez work the case from the outside. Along the way, Jill, Kramer's widow, is questioned about a miscarriage that shaped him, and flashbacks show how he turned into the man behind the puzzles.

Everything converges on the Gideon Meat Factory, where Rigg has to decide between obeying the rules of the game and breaking them to save a victim. The closing reveal is that Hoffman has been a second apprentice all along. He shuts Rigg and Strahm inside the building and walks away. The film has its own page at saw 4.

Saw V (2008), directed by David Hackl, sits sixth in the timeline and follows Agent Peter Strahm's attempt to expose Detective Mark Hoffman. A convicted killer named Seth dies in a pendulum trap, Hoffman is praised for closing the Jigsaw case, and Strahm, who survived a trap of his own, distrusts the tidy story.

While Strahm studies the evidence, five strangers named Ashley, Brit, Charles, Luba and Mallick are forced through a run of rooms that punish selfishness, and several die in the early rooms. Flashbacks show that John Kramer forced Hoffman to take part in the games after learning that Hoffman had killed Seth. In the last room the survivors, Brit and Mallick, learn the group shared a link to a deadly fire, and they work together to supply the blood needed to open the final door, though Mallick dies.

Hoffman frames Strahm as Jigsaw's successor by planting evidence. Strahm tracks him down and locks him in a glass box, but then Strahm is trapped in a room with closing walls. Hoffman watches him be crushed and is left as the keeper of Jigsaw's legacy. See saw 5 for more on this entry.

Saw VI (2009), directed by Kevin Greutert, is seventh in chronological order and aims its games at a health insurance firm. The opening trap locks two predatory lenders, Eddie and Simone, into head harnesses and demands they cut their own flesh. Simone gives up her arm, the scale tips against Eddie, and he dies.

Hoffman survived the trap that crushed Agent Strahm, and he now plants Strahm's fingerprints at the scene so the FBI keeps looking for a man who is already dead. Meanwhile executive William Easton faces tests that echo how his company turns down claims. The cruelest is a rotating roundabout where he can save only two of six employees. Agent Erickson spots odd details in the prints and goes after Hoffman, who kills Erickson, Agent Perez and a technician.

Then Jill Tuck, John Kramer's widow, turns up with a letter Hoffman once wrote to Amanda Young. Following instructions from John's will, she locks a modified reverse bear trap onto Hoffman's head. William's own game ends when Brent pulls a lever and acid kills him. Hoffman snaps his own wrist to get free and leaves with a badly torn cheek. The film's page is saw 6.

Saw 3D (2010), directed by Kevin Greutert, is eighth in the timeline and closes the first long run of films. Dr. Gordon is revealed to have survived the original bathroom trap by burning through his ankle and escaping, and a public trap forces two men to choose between killing each other and saving the woman who played them. They let her die.

Jill Tuck goes to Detective Gibson and offers to expose Hoffman in return for immunity. Hoffman traps a group of white supremacists in a junkyard, then kidnaps Bobby Dagen, a self help author who became famous by lying about surviving a Jigsaw trap. Bobby has one hour to reach his wife Joyce while she is slowly lowered toward her death, and his publicist, lawyer and best friend each die in a trap. Hoffman slips into the police station in a body bag, a turret kills Gibson and his officers, and Bobby fails his last test, so Joyce is burned to death.

Hoffman kills Jill with the reverse bear trap, and as he tries to leave town three pig masked figures capture him. Their leader is Dr. Gordon, who chains Hoffman in the original bathroom, throws away the hacksaw and seals the door. More on the saw 3d page.

Jigsaw (2017), directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, is the ninth film in chronological order. It is the big time jump of the series, set ten years after Saw: The Final Chapter, according to /Film. The story opens with a foot chase: Detectives Halloran and Hunt pursue Edgar Munsen, who announces he must start a game to stay alive and is shot down after triggering a remote device.

Five strangers then come to in a barn with buckets over their heads, and a recording in John Kramer's voice sets their tests, even though Kramer has been dead for a decade. Most of them survive the first round by giving blood to stop a wall of buzzsaws. The second claims Carly, a thief whose crime led to a death, when a fellow captive forces her to inject all three syringes. In the third, Ryan has to cut off his own leg to free Anna and Mitch from a silo. Elsewhere, pathologists Logan Nelson and Eleanor Bonneville draw suspicion after Eleanor admits she is a Jigsaw fan.

The twist is that Logan is the new Jigsaw. He was the unconscious man in the original barn game, spared ten years before, and he stages the whole thing as revenge against Halloran for his wife's death at Edgar's hands. Halloran forces Logan to confess first, which breaks the rules, so his collar reactivates and kills him. More is on the jigsaw 2017 page.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw, released in 2021 and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, comes last in chronological order as a spinoff set after the original run, in a world where the Jigsaw Killer is already dead. Its place at the end comes from the plot, which centers on a copycat working in Jigsaw's style, rather than from a dated setting.

After Detective Marv Bozwick dies in a subway tunnel, Zeke Banks, played by Chris Rock, is assigned the case with rookie William Schenk, and Zeke recognizes the trap as the work of a Jigsaw style killer. Detective Fitch dies in a trap that tears off his fingers, Captain Angie Garza dies in a cold storage trap involving boiling wax, and Zeke's father Marcus, a retired police chief played by Samuel L. Jackson, is abducted.

Schenk is revealed to be alive and to be the killer, having faked his death with another body. His real surname is Emmerson, and he targets officers who covered for corrupt colleagues under a rule called Article 8. He offers Zeke a revolver with one bullet and a choice, and the SWAT team that arrives shoots Marcus dead as a suspected gunman. Schenk escapes. The film is covered at spiral saw.

The Saw films connect as a relay of apprentices, and Saw X is the only film out of order. In my opinion, the series works because John Kramer hands the games to Amanda, then Hoffman, then Dr. Gordon, then Logan Nelson. The chronological order differs from the release order only because Saw X slots in second, which pushes Saw II through Spiral back by one place.

Why does Saw X slot between the first two films, and does it work? It could be argued that it works very well, because Saw (2004) ends with John walking out of the bathroom and Saw II opens with the police arresting him at a factory. Saw X shows Amanda already working beside him, so her loyalty in Saw II reads as something that had time to grow. Its closing image of Henry in a bathroom with Hoffman watching also hints at how many hands were involved.

What about the later films? Saw III ends with Amanda and John dead, yet the series continues through Hoffman in Saw IV to Saw 3D, which loops back to the bathroom of the first film. The pleasure of Saw 3D, for me, is that Dr. Gordon returns to the room where he lost his foot. Jigsaw then jumps ten years, and Spiral steps outside the Kramer lineage with a copycat who targets corrupt police. As such, Spiral is the one entry a newcomer can safely skip.

As for how to watch, I would start with release order, because the twist in Saw (2004) lands harder when you do not know it. Once you have seen the series, the chronological run makes a good second pass. For the full setup see the saw movies in order guide, and for who is who, the saw characters page and the john kramer saw profile.