Top Ten Tuesday: SAW Traps

With the release of Saw in 3D… we are dedicating this weeks Top Ten to Saw Traps. Sure, they are creepy and deadly, but they are also intricate!

TOP TEN SAW TRAPS

Full Carousel Trap- SAW VI

The carousel trap consisted of six of William’s junior associates: Aaron, Emily, Gena, Dave, Shelby, and Josh (in order of when they were stopped by the carousel), chained to a rotating roundabout-like object inside of a large metal cage. At the front of the cage was a large metal device attached to a shotgun which was pointing at the carousel. The carousel repeatedly slowed to a halt with a random victim facing the gun. William was forced to choose to place his hand inside a metal box and press a button, causing a metal rod to pierce his hand in order to prevent the selected victim from being shot, or choose not to and let the victim be shot point-blank in the chest by the gun, thus killing the person that was in the gun’s path. Unfortunately, William was told that he could only save two of the six people on the carousel and in the end, William chose to save Emily, the second and Shelby, the fifth person to be stopped by the carousel, while the other four associates: Aaron, Gena, Dave, and Josh were shot and killed by the gun. William finds a key in the next room, unlocking the final strap on his body, and proceeds to his final test.

Barbed Wire Noose Trap- SAW VI

In William’s second test, he reached a dimly lit reptile room with two small screens on the railing, flashing the words, “Take Them” (referring to two chains with handles connected to the railing), and a large window in front of him. Originally William refused to take the chains, but when he attempted to continue through the room, the bomb on his wrist began to blink, forcing William to retreat and pick up both of the handles. Picking up the handles in turn activated two spotlights, illuminating two plank-like platforms behind the glass on one platform stood a young company file clerk, Allen, and on the other, William’s elderly secretary, Addy. Each person had a barbed wire noose around the neck and was gagged, with their hands tied behind their backs. To move on, William was instructed to release one chain, causing the corresponding person’s platform to retract and hang them, guaranteeing the other’s safety.

Freezer Trap- SAW III

Words inscribed on the door to the Freezer Room read: “Face Your Fears.”

Danica Scott was suspended by her arms in a walk-in freezer, where she was stripped naked and had her body systematically sprayed with water from twelve hoses, linked along two vertical poles on either side of her. Jeff was forced to decide whether or not to assist her or let her freeze to death in the freezer room. Danica was the witness to the accident which killed Jeff’s son, but she fled the scene of the accident and refused to testify against the man responsible. After Danica pleaded for her life and apologized to Jeff, she was able to convince Jeff to try to save her although he appeared unwilling at first. Jeff’s task was to retrieve the key that would unlock Danica’s bindings, as well as the door to the next room and to escape the Freezer Room. The key was suspended behind a wall of icy cold pipes, just out of Jeff’s reach and the only way he was able to retrieve the key was by leaning just far enough for his face to press against the pipes, causing the flesh of his cheek to stick to them. Grabbing the key, Jeff pulled back, tearing away part of the flesh from his cheek, however, by the time Jeff had obtained the key to free her, Danica had frozen solid to death, becoming completely encased in ice.

The Fatal Five Trap- SAW III

Five victims (Brit, Charles, Luba, Mallick, and Ashley) awakened to discover that they were trapped in a sewer, with the intention of reaching the exit. Jigsaw captured each of them because the five were all involved in a fire that resulted in the deaths of innocent people, and their actions or inactions were a result of avarice and self-serving needs. The five were subjected to four tests, all involving teamwork. Each test, and the whole series, was subjected to a time limit. When the door to the previous room was closed, a fifteen-minute timer would begin to count down in the current room, and a cluster of nail bombs (similar to the bomb in Troy’s Classrom Trap) would go off when it expired. The doors would also seal after a time limit, so the subjects were required to be prompt, lest they all die by the bombs. The tests were designed in such a way that the participants would either have to work together and escape with only minor injury (a concept that was not realized until their final test), or would gradually kill them one-by-one (one person per room) if they would not co-operate. The notion of teamwork was exemplified by the final two traps, which were designed in such a way that if for whatever reason there was only one survivor when facing either of the traps, he or she would not be able to complete the trap and would be killed by the nail bombs.

The Reverse BearTrap

This trap was applied to a heroin addict named Amanda Young, whose wrists were bound with duct tape to armrests on a chair in a dimly-lit room, with a heavy metal apparatus hooked into her upper and lower jaw. The Jigsaw Puppet (a.k.a Billy) appeared on a television screen before her and revealed that Amanda had a short amount of time to remove the trap from her head before it would snap open in a similar fashion to that of a bear trap in reverse, which would rip her jaws wide open in the process. To emphasize this point, a demonstration was shown to Amanda, who watched as the device went off on a mannequin head, which exploded as the device activated. The puppet told her that the key that she needed to remove the device was in the stomach of the “dead” Donnie Greco lying across the room from her.

Classroom Trap or The Body Chains- SAW III

This trap featured Troy, who awoke in an empty school classroom, with eleven chains hooked into his flesh at various points on his body. Upon awakening, a television placed directly in front of him switched on and Billy the puppet appeared on the screen, informing Troy that his reason for being tested was because he had been sent to jail on many different occasions (for unspecified reasons).The recording continued on to explain that if he wished to survive, he would have to break free of the chains attached to his body before a timer expired, which would detonate a nail bomb also placed in front of him, and he would die in the resulting explosion. The chains were hooked into his lower jaw, shoulders, arms, hands, obliques, legs, and Achilles tendons. When the recording finished, the timer initiated and Troy began to painfully rip out the chain links from his skin, one chain at a time. Troy managed to detach all of the chains from his body with the exception of the one attached to his jaw. The chain ring was looped through his lower jaw, which appeared to be impossible to remove in time. Because he was unable to unhook this last ring, he was killed when the timer triggered the bomb. It was later revealed by Kerry, as she studied his nail-ridden corpse, that there was no escape route for Troy even if he had succeeded in removing the last ring, as the door to the room had been welded shut. Also, because the final chain was attached to the strongest bone on the human head, there would be no way for him to have removed it with just his bare hands.

The Collars

The five subjects awoke in individual stalls inside of a room with five keys located in five boxes at the other end of the room. Each person was equipped with a collar attached to a cord, which fed back into their stall. This trap involved one person pulling against the five cords, each one linked to the collar around the others’ necks, to retrieve the keys at the end of the room and unlock their collars. The obstacle of this test was that as one person ran forward (pulling on his/her own cord) the other four people would be pulled backward towards their own pulleys. The consequence for not completing the trap was decapitation as, in front of the pulleys for the cords, rested mounted razors, which would decapitate them should one person fall back too far, or the timer run out and pull all of the collars into the wall. Mallick became anxious and ran ahead, starting the timer. In the end, the whole group, except for Ashley, managed to retrieve their keys and unlock their collars. Ashley was eventually beheaded by the blade, when the timer counted down to 0 (from 60 seconds), and the cords were pulled tightly into the wall. Had they used teamwork to free themselves, they would have all survived, as only one key was needed to release the lock on all of the collars. They would have been able to simply pass the key from person to person.

Angel Trap or The Ribcage Harness

Allison Kerry, a detective who worked on the Jigsaw cases, woke up suspended above the floor of an abandoned building, in a contraption which consisted of a leather harness, hung from the ceiling by numerous chains, lining her torso with two sets of needles on either side. Upon further examination of her harness, she found that the two sets of needles attached to her torso were connected to her ribcage, each needle hooking into an individual rib. Each array of needles was attached to one of two metal arches resting behind her, that, for the time being, remained folded. Hanging before her was a jar filled with acid into which a key was dropped upon her regaining consciousness. The jar was also suspended by chains, and was tightly fastened so as to be unable to tip over. A television turned on in front of her and delivered the instructions to Kerry’s test. Billy informed Kerry that she was placed in the test because she was “dead on the inside,” explaining why she was so adept at her job as a Forensic Detective. He also implied that the device Kerry was equipped with would tear her ribcage from her body, knowing that Kerry would understand from her experience with Jigsaw’s previous tests. Billy told her that she would have one minute to retrieve the key from the jar before the key was dissolved by the acid and before the timer on the device ran out. After hesitating, Kerry plunged her hand into the jar, severely burning it, but failed to grab the key. Screaming in pain, she plunged her hand in a second time and successfully retrieved the key. She pulled out her bloodied, severely corroded hand, and unlocked the padlock on her harness. Upon removing the lock, however, she found that she was unable to remove the harness itself. It is then that she realized that the trap was never intended to be escapable, as each of the pins were hooked directly into her ribcage, and there was a second lock at the back of the device that held it in place. As Kerry realized this, Amanda entered the room, revealing herself as the inventor of the trap. With that revelation, Kerry raised her arms and clenched the chains she was hanging from as the two arms attached to the harness swiftly arched upwards in a similar manner to a pair of wings (hence the name of the trap), and pulled each side of the harness with them, causing the needles embedded in her torso to rip both sides of her ribcage out in opposite directions. She soon collapsed and died in the leather straps as her internal organs spilled out onto the floor.

The Cube Trap

Immediately after killing Jeff, and being locked in Jigsaw’s operating room by Hoffman, Agent Strahm located a hallway revealed to him by glow-in-the-dark paint. In the hallway he discovered a cassette player that warned him not to proceed any further, lest the room become his tomb. Refusing to comply, Strahm proceeded down the hallway and was then tranquilized by Hoffman. Strahm woke up with his head encased in a clear glass box with tubes connected to it, and his gun confiscated. The box started filling with water, eventually filling completely with the intent to drown Strahm. Thinking quickly, Strahm pulled out his pen and stabbed it into his throat, performing an emergency tracheotomy to sustain his breathing until help arrived. Strahm ultimately survived the trap, being wheeled out by paramedics, much to Hoffman’s surprise. The irony is that Strahm managed to survive a trap that was constructed with no intended means of escape.

The Venus Fly Trap

This trap was similar to an iron maiden device, but on a much smaller scale. The trap consisted of a harness, attached to the victim’s chest, which was only removable if the key to the padlock was obtained. Attached to the harness was a contraption which consisted of two metal masks, opposite from each other and angled down from the victim’s head. Each mask had several nails protruding inwards from the interior. The device was connected to a spring timer, and if it wasn’t removed in time, the two masks would clamp together on the victim’s head, in a smiliar fashion to that of a Venus Flytrap, and drive the nails through his skull. The victim of this trap was Michael Marks, a police informant. He woke up in an empty room, and found himself in the helmet. In order to remove the device, Michael was instructed that he would have to find the key to the harness, which he soon learned, from a video tape and some X-rays of his own skull, was hidden behind his right eye. Supplied with a scalpel, he attempted to surgically remove his eye, but found that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and threw the scalpel across the room in anger. The timer expired, and the masks snapped shut on his head, killing him. Fans have speculated that Michael could have used the chair that he had awoken on to drag the toolbox that held the surgical knife, and cut the key out of his eye without ever triggering the spring timer.

Descriptions from SAWPEDIA.

Which are your favorite SAW traps ala Jigsaw? Let us know in the comments section below,

And remember, on October 29th, the traps come alive when SAW 3D in Real D 3D hits theaters. Attend a midnight showing of SAW 3D on Friday, October 29th and get a free pair of custom SAW 3D glasses! (While supplies last.)

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