It’s been a long time coming, with production having wrapped in August 2019 before the Coronavirus pandemic saw it delayed by an entire year, but Spiral: From the Book of Saw is finally headed to theaters just three weeks from tomorrow. The ninth installment in the horror franchise only needs to earn $24 million to turn the long-running series into a billion-dollar property, but if the reaction to the final trailer is any indication, it’s set to soar a whole lot higher than that.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman is a Saw veteran having directed the second, third and fourth installments, but he’s promised that Spiral will be veering away from the established torture porn template that eventually had Saw reduced to basically a gimmick where the elaborate traps and nothing else were relied on as the brand’s main selling point.
The filmmaker admitted that he drew some of his inspirations from David Fincher’s Seven, and the most recent promo certainly hammered that notion home, while the idea of seeing Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson co-starring in a psychological crime thriller with horror elements set in the Saw universe is a tantalizing prospect to say the least.
In a new interview, Bousman teased that Spiral would retain the traps associated with the franchise, but is putting its own unique spin on the mythology.
“The DNA of the movie comes from the universe of Saw, no doubt, but it’s its own thing. I love the world and script that Josh Stolberg, Pete Goldfinger, and Chris Rock created here. It feels familiar, yet it’s completely unique and different from what has come before it. I think this movie honors the mythology of the past films, yet charts course for something entirely different. Longtime fans will still get the things they crave; macabre traps, unexpected twists, and even a puppet, but Chris, Max Minghella, Samuel, and Marisol Nichols elevate this into something truly unique and special.”
If Spiral lives up to the potential we’ve seen from the footage, then we’re comfortably talking about the best Saw movie yet. James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s original is still the highest-rated effort but only holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 49%, and having been heavily involved in the development and scripting process, you can be sure that Rock will be hoping to deliver something special.