Saw Traps: Every Major Trap in the Franchise, Explained

The bathroom trap in Saw (2004) chains photographer Adam and oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon by the ankle to opposite pipes, with a dead man lying between them. The corpse holds a revolver and a microcassette recorder, and Lawrence's tape tells him to kill Adam by 6:00 or his wife Alison and daughter Diana will die.

Hacksaws found in the toilet cistern hint at a way out, but the trap is built around a harder idea. Lawrence hears only gunshots, believes his family is dead, saws off his own foot and shoots Adam. Adam survives the shot and beats the orderly Zep Hindle to death with the toilet tank lid, just before the twist arrives.

The supposed corpse then stands up and is revealed as John Kramer, the real Jigsaw, who has been controlling the room from the floor. He tells Adam the key to his chain went down the drain when Adam emptied the tub. Kramer shocks Adam through the chain, leaves and seals the door, so Lawrence is the only one who gets out. The trap needs no machinery beyond a chain and a hacksaw, and the only way to win it is to do something terrible.

The nerve gas house in saw 2, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman in 2005, locks eight people inside a house filling with a nerve agent that will kill them in about two hours. One of them is Daniel Matthews, the teenage son of Detective Eric Matthews, who has just helped arrest John Kramer at a factory.

The captives hunt for antidotes while smaller traps kill several of them, and they realize every captive except Daniel has been in prison. Amanda Young, a survivor of an earlier game, works with Daniel, while the violent Xavier stalks the others and kills Jonas. Laura dies of the gas, and Xavier leaves Addison to die in a trap.

The twist is the deception. John tells Eric to sit and talk and promises Daniel will be safe, but Eric's colleague realizes the monitor footage was recorded earlier and is not live. Daniel is found alive in a safe at the factory, kept apart from the house. Daniel kills Xavier, and Eric ends up chained in the house's bathroom, where a tape reveals Amanda is John's accomplice and the test was meant for Eric all along.

The shotgun collar in saw 3, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman in 2006, is wired to the heart monitor of the dying John Kramer, so the person wearing it must keep him alive. That person is Dr. Lynn Denlon, taken from her hospital and brought to a hideout where John lies in bed with terminal cancer.

Amanda Young fits the collar, and Lynn performs rough surgery on John to ease pressure on his brain. She begs Amanda to take the collar off, but Amanda refuses. The trap works on the viewer as well as the wearer, because the monitor that keeps John alive is also the trigger.

The ending shows how tightly it was built. Jeff, Lynn's husband, is offered a last choice between calling an ambulance for her and taking revenge on John. He cuts John's throat with a power saw, which sets off the collar, and Lynn dies too. John's final tape adds that a girl named Corbett has also been taken, and that only John knew where she is.

Jeff, a grieving father, crosses a decaying meatpacking plant in saw 3 while three people tied to the death of his son Dylan wait in separate traps. A drunk driver killed Dylan, and the tests ask whether Jeff can forgive instead of punish.

A freezer holds Danica, the only witness to the crash, and she is dead before he can free her. Judge Halden, who handed the driver a light sentence, hangs over a vat of rotting pig carcasses, and Jeff gets him out. Timothy, the driver himself, is strapped into a machine that twists the body, and Jeff arrives too late to reach him.

The tally is one person saved and two lost, which looks like a failure of nerve until Amanda Young later admits she rigged her traps so nobody could win. Read that way, the plant was never a fair exam. That admission is why this set of tests anchors the Amanda section further down the page.

The final test of saw 4, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman in 2007, plays out at the Gideon Meat Factory and is aimed squarely at Officer Rigg. Rigg cannot walk away from anyone in danger, and the game turns that instinct into the weapon.

People he is trying to rescue sit at the center of every earlier trap, among them Detective Eric Matthews, who turns out to be alive. Along the way, Agents Strahm and Perez chase the case, and John Kramer's widow Jill Tuck is questioned about a loss that shaped her husband.

Inside the factory, Rigg has to decide whether to obey the rules of the game or break them for a victim's sake. Then the film springs its reveal: Mark Hoffman is a second apprentice of Jigsaw, and he shuts Rigg and Strahm in. The design is closer to a moral rule than a machine, since it punishes the very act of rescuing.

saw 5, directed by David Hackl in 2008, uses three kinds of trap: a pendulum, a run of rooms that punish selfishness, and a room with walls that close in. The pendulum comes first, killing a convicted murderer named Seth and giving Detective Mark Hoffman the credit for ending the Jigsaw case.

The rooms test five strangers, Ashley, Brit, Charles, Luba and Mallick, and several die in the early rooms. In the last room, the two survivors, Brit and Mallick, learn the group shared a link to a deadly fire. They work together to supply the blood needed to open the final door, and Mallick dies.

The closing walls are saved for Agent Peter Strahm. Hoffman frames Strahm as Jigsaw's successor by planting evidence, then Strahm tracks Hoffman down and locks him in a glass box. Strahm is trapped in a room with closing walls, and Hoffman watches from the box as Strahm is crushed. Flashbacks show Hoffman was once forced by John Kramer to take part in the games, so he ends the film on the other side of the glass.

saw 6, directed by Kevin Greutert in 2009, aims its traps at the health insurance business. It opens with two predatory lenders, Eddie and Simone, fitted with head harnesses and made to carve into their own flesh. Simone gives up her arm, the scale tips against Eddie, and he dies.

The main target is insurance executive William Easton, whose company turns away patients, so his tests copy the logic of a rejected claim. Some of his staff die in traps. On a spinning roundabout he gets to save only two of six employees, which forces a coverage decision on him in the most literal way.

His last room is a cage where Tara and her son Brent, relatives of a former client, hold his fate. Brent pulls a lever and acid kills William. In the harnesses, a mechanical scale does the judging while the victim pays with their own body.

The Reverse Bear Trap is a head device that links two films: it is fitted to Mark Hoffman in Saw VI and later kills Jill Tuck in Saw 3D. In Saw VI, Jill confronts Hoffman with a letter he once wrote to Amanda Young, then locks a modified version onto his head as part of a plan in John Kramer's will.

Hoffman gets out alive. He snaps his own wrist to slip free and leaves with a badly torn cheek.

In saw 3d, directed by Kevin Greutert in 2010, he turns the device on its owner. Hoffman tracks Jill down, kills her with it and then wrecks his workshop to hide the evidence. One machine therefore marks Hoffman's closest call in one film and Jill's death in the next.

Saw 3D begins in public, with a trap that offers two men a choice: kill each other or rescue the woman who manipulated them. They hesitate, and she dies. From there the story follows Bobby Dagen, an author who built a career on a false claim that he survived a Jigsaw trap.

Hoffman abducts Bobby and gives him one hour to reach his wife Joyce, who is being lowered toward her death. The publicist, lawyer and best friend who helped invent his story each die in a trap along the way. To learn the code for Joyce's door, Bobby pulls two of his own teeth, and he reaches her.

The last test asks him to skewer himself with chest hooks and haul his body up to stop her trap. The hooks rip loose and Joyce burns to death. Elsewhere, a turret kills Detective Gibson and his officers at the police station, which Hoffman entered inside a body bag. At the end, Dr. Gordon and two masked helpers chain Hoffman in the original bathroom, toss the hacksaw away and seal the door.

The barn in jigsaw 2017, directed by Michael and Peter Spierig in 2017, holds five strangers with buckets over their heads and chains around their necks. A recording of John Kramer, dead for ten years, orders them to pass a series of tests.

A wall of buzzsaws opens the sequence, and most of the group gets past it by giving blood. Carly, a thief whose crime led to a death, dies in the next round when another captive makes her inject all three syringes. Then Ryan is told to remove his own leg to rescue Anna and Mitch, who are stuck in a silo. Mitch, who sold the faulty motorcycle that killed John's nephew, later dies in a spinning blade funnel, and Anna dies when a one shell shotgun backfires.

The larger game runs on two other men. Logan Nelson and Detective Halloran wake wearing laser collars and are ordered to confess. Logan turns out to be the unconscious man from the first barn game, spared a decade earlier and trained as John's first apprentice. Halloran confessed before Logan did, which broke the rules, and his collar kills him.

The traps in spiral saw, the 2021 spin-off Spiral: From the Book of Saw directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, go after police officers. Off duty Detective Marv Bozwick follows a thief into a sewer, meets a figure in a pig mask and wakes in a subway tunnel, where a train kills him.

Zeke Banks and his rookie partner William Schenk are handed the case, and Zeke reads the work as Jigsaw style. Detective Fitch loses his fingers in a trap, and Captain Angie Garza dies in cold storage, where boiling wax is involved. Peter Dunleavy, Zeke's old partner, is sealed in a glass crushing device that Zeke cannot open in time.

The last trap is a revolver holding one bullet. Schenk, alive and behind everything, offers Zeke two options: shoot a target and free his father Marcus while Schenk walks, or kill Schenk and leave Marcus to die. Zeke hits the target. A SWAT team then trips a wire that lifts Marcus with a gun strapped to his arm, and they shoot him as a suspected gunman. Schenk slips away.

John Kramer builds the traps of saw x for con artists who exploit dying people, and he knows the scheme firsthand. Terminally ill with brain cancer, he travels to a clinic outside Mexico City for a promised cure, then returns to find the place empty and the staff exposed as frauds.

Aided by Amanda Young, John captures Cecilia and her accomplices. Diego, the fake doctor who is really John's taxi driver, faces a trap first. Valentina amputates her own leg and still cannot collect enough bone marrow, so she dies. Mateo dies when a heated mask closes on his face. Gabriela survives her test, only for Cecilia to kill her afterward.

Cecilia next chains John and a child, Carlos, into a trap, but John has already lured Parker, the man behind the scam, into the plan. Parker and Cecilia end up in a room filling with gas, where Parker dies in the struggle and Cecilia is left behind. The story takes place between Saw (2004) and Saw II, and a brief post credit cameo shows Costas Mandylor as Mark Hoffman.

Amanda Young made her traps inescapable because she stopped believing in John Kramer's ideas, and in Saw III she says so out loud. When Dr. Lynn Denlon begs her to remove the collar, Amanda admits she rigged her traps so nobody could win. In my opinion, that is the franchise's sharpest piece of characterization, because it turns the lessons of a game into a lie.

John's design always claimed the victim holds the key, and the apprentice who learned from him broke that promise. John's reply is a trap built for her. Lynn, Jeff's wife, was Amanda's real test, because he would not let a killer carry on his work. Amanda, after all, had been a survivor first: Saw II introduces her as a survivor of an earlier game, and the same film shows her leaving Eric Matthews in the bathroom.

It could be argued that Saw X pushes the idea in the opposite direction. There Amanda helps John plan traps for the clinic scam, and Gabriela, at least, gets through her trap. So, if you want to see the difference between a Jigsaw trap that can be beaten and an Amanda trap that cannot, watch Saw III and Saw X back to back.

In my opinion, the hardest Saw trap to beat is Jeff's trio of tests in Saw III, and the reason is that Amanda built them so nobody could win. Here is my ranking of the five traps that give a victim the least room, with the most winnable trap at the end for contrast.

1. Jeff's tests in Saw III. Danica dies in the freezer before he can free her, and Timothy is out of reach. Amanda later admits she rigged her traps, so I rank this first because the failure is by design.

1. Bobby's final test in Saw 3D. Bobby pulls out two of his own teeth and still cannot save Joyce, because the hooks tear free. The earlier steps made him earn the last one, which makes the loss feel like theft.

1. Zeke's choice in Spiral. Shooting the target saves Marcus on paper, and the SWAT team kills him anyway. Every route ends in a loss, which is why I put it above the physical traps.

1. The roundabout in Saw VI. William Easton can save only two of six staff members. The trap asks for a policy decision and gives no good answer.

1. Valentina's trap in Saw X. She cuts off her own leg and still fails to get enough bone marrow, so the sacrifice does not buy the result.

For contrast, the most winnable traps are Lawrence Gordon's bathroom in Saw (2004), where he escapes by sawing off his own foot, and Hoffman's escape from the modified reverse bear trap. Both victims pay in their own bodies and live. If you want to see how these films stack up as a whole, read saw movies ranked.