Characters / Saw: John Kramer

Saw Main Character Index
Jigsaw and Accomplices (John Kramer) | Other Antagonists | Law Enforcement (Metropolitan Police Department) | Other Characters (I-III, IV-VI, 3D-X)

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WARNING: All spoilers in this Character-Specific Page are unmarked. Read on or go back — make your choice.

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John Kramer

"I want to play a game."

Portrayed By: Tobin Bell (movies)

Voiced By: George Williams (Saw: Rebirth), Tobin Bell (video games)

Appearances: Saw, Saw II, Saw III, Saw X, Saw: The Video Game, Saw II: Flesh & Blood (onscreen) | Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, Saw 3D, Jigsaw (in flashbacks)

"Yes, officer, I'm sick. Sick from the disease eating me away inside, sick of people who don’t appreciate their blessing, sick of those who scoff at the suffering of others. I'm sick of it all!"

— John's speech to David Tapp in Saw

John Kramer was once an accomplished civil engineer who was driven to become the Jigsaw Killer after a series of tragic events and circumstances — his unborn son was killed when his wife, Jill, had an accidental miscarriage; this caused John to drive her away, making her divorce him. John was later diagnosed with an inoperable tumor in his brain, which led to cancer. When his insurance company turned down an experimental treatment that could have potentially saved his life (or at least prolonged it), John attempted suicide. When he survived, his new outlook on life became his motivation to become the Jigsaw Killer.

Jigsaw kidnaps people that he believes aren't valuing their lives or are intentionally hurting others, then forces them to go through sadistic "games" where there are usually only two outcomes: live (and gain a new outlook on life) or die. John was eventually killed by Jeff Denlon, one of the last of his direct victims. Events ensuring his legacy would live on, however, were already in motion — Mark Hoffman, one of John's apprentices, continued Jigsaw's work after his death.

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A-D

• Advertised Extra: To say nothing of keeping Tobin Bell in the top billing, plenty of the promotional posters between Saw IV and 3D depict a presentation of John's face in one way or another, despite him only appearing in flashbacks and tapes in those movies, not to mention the fact that Hoffman is the Big Bad rather than him. Saw 3D receives a special mention for the fact that John only has two minutes of screentime in the actual movie. It is not until Jigsaw that he is hidden from the credits, though mostly because the question of if he was going to physically appear in that movie was being teased.
• Affably Evil: He's fairly approachable, polite, and truthful to the victims whom he tests and places in life-threatening, yet, escapable traps. Unlike his apprentices, John appears to genuinely want his victims to pass their tests and survive his traps.
• All for Nothing: By the time of Spiral, the only thing John had left behind is a murderous legacy that is the antithesis of everything he claimed it to be. All but one of his accomplices go wayward with murderously malicious or self-serving intentions, and the closest candidate to succeeding him has seemingly put his villainous life behind him. A new criminal also emerges copying his methods for his own ends rather than following his philosophy.
• Ambiguously Evil: While his "games" are intended for the victims to survive and change their lives for the better, he has come across as hypocritical, petty, and flat out subjecting many of his victims to excessive or undeserved torture. However, considering that he has severe brain cancer, there's a possibility that his flip-flopping morality may be caused by his mind deteriorating due to his disease. This could also explain why he has the insane logic that his traps are helping people; he's not thinking straight.
• Anti-Villain: His intentions are noble in that he believes he's trying to reform his victims, but that doesn't make his methods any less evil. This trope is further tested when later films reveal just how petty and spiteful John actually is behind his claims.
• Appropriated Appellation: Actually averted. John admits that the police and the press are the ones who coined him "Jigsaw." He never encouraged or claimed the name, and in Saw II, he introduces himself by his real name to Eric.
  John: We haven't been properly introduced. My name is John.
  Eric: I thought you liked to be called Jigsaw.
  John: No. [laughs] It was the police and the press who coined the nickname Jigsaw. I never encouraged or claimed that. The jigsaw piece I cut from my subjects was only ever meant to be a symbol that that subject was missing something, a vital piece of the human puzzle. The survival instinct.
• Arch-Enemy: To Eric and Jeff. Eric hates John for kidnapping his son Daniel, while Jeff gets his revenge on him for kidnapping his wife Lynn (though he was ultimately triggered by Amanda shooting her).
• Asshole Victim: When he finally does bite the dust, no one mourns him, sans perhaps Jill, and given the depraved nutcase he was, it's not hard to see why. That said, nobody's celebrating either, as his twisted games are still being carried out long after his death.
• Badass Bookworm: Do not underestimate him for being an old man with cancer. He's a skilled inventor with a penchant for nasty death traps, and is still fast and strong enough to put you in said death traps.
• Badass Longcoat: He is frequently seen in a hooded black robe with a red interior.
• Bald of Evil: John completely shaves his hair when he's out personally conducting villainy, but he can be seen with messy hair grown back every so often.
• Batman Gambit: Every single one of his plans is this to varying degrees, some even predicting extremely convoluted and unexpected things. He sums it up with his reasoning in Saw V:
  "If you're good at anticipating the human mind, it leaves nothing to chance."
• Beard of Evil: He has a noticeable full beard in Saw X. He previously had a soul patch in the first movie, but it wasn't as visible in comparison.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Despite all evidence to the contrary, John is not only convinced that his methods are effective, but that he's not really a Serial Killer because he's never intentionally tried to kill anyone. To him, people who die in his traps lacked a survival instinct. In fact, John is so adamantly against murder that when Hoffman built his own trap to kill a criminal and framed him for it, John personally kidnapped him to lecture him on his methods and try to convince him that his are more effective. At his core, his intentions really are noble.
• Beneath Suspicion: Nobody, not even the audience, ever thinks at any point in the first film that the "dead" body in the bathroom where Adam and Lawrence are trapped in is just him Playing Possum. At best, they'll think that the mastermind is Zep (one of the victims in the main game) before The Reveal at the end, due to him having been provided plenty of "mastermind equipment" like cameras.
• Big Bad: Of the first three movies, and becomes the Greater-Scope Villain after his death in Saw III.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • With Logan and Halloran in Jigsaw, as John is the mastermind behind the barn game and Logan is using said game over a decade after John's death to carry out his murderous plan against Halloran, a Dirty Cop responsible for numerous criminals being set free.
  • In Saw X, where he's the Villain Protagonist and his main opponent, Cecilia Pederson, is even worse than him in some ways.
• Blood Is the New Black: He ends up covered in blood from the Bloodboarding Trap in Saw X, even more than he was in the first film when he got up from the puddle of fake blood in the Bathroom.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: John has a code which he fervently believes in and sticks to adamantly. It's just one that is incomprehensible to almost anyone else. He genuinely wants or at least believes he wants to help the people he kidnaps and for them to live better lives and he is always honest and gives them a chance to escape, however unlikely, but sees no issue with holding them hostage, putting them through unspeakable physical and psychological torture or endangering others to achieve that goal and blames them if they fall short, seeing it as proof that they didn't want to live badly enough, and his sense of pride prevents him from even considering that he might not be helping and in fact is just making things worse.
• Bungled Suicide: In Saw II, he reveals to Eric that he had one, which ended up becoming the main impetus for his, er, line of work. He responded to the news of his being terminal by driving off a cliff, which he survived, with his survival even giving him the willpower to pull rebar out of his side. Reportedly, no one was more amazed by his survival than him, so he made it his life's mission to test the will to live in others.
• The Bus Came Back: After only appearing in flashbacks for most movies after Saw III and not appearing at all in Spiral, John returns front and center in Saw X. The tagline on the latter film's teaser poster even says "Witness the return of Jigsaw".
• Busman's Holiday: In Saw X, John takes a sabbatical from his life as Jigsaw in order to focus on his health, and goes to Mexico to undergo an experimental procedure to cure his cancer. After discovering that he was actually conned by the supposed doctors, John starts another Jigsaw game involving said conmen as his victims.
• Calling Card: He carves a puzzle piece-shaped chunk of flesh from his deceased victims, to represent the "missing piece" of the "human puzzle" they lacked: the survival instinct. It's what led the press to dub him "Jigsaw."
• Canon Discontinuity/Canon Marches On: John's backstory, as well as his personality outside of the Jigsaw persona, was first addressed by the Saw: Rebirth comic book that was published in correlation with Saw II, which was accepted by the original writers as canon. The comic's events were retconned by Saw IV, which brought new writers who decided make a version of John's backstory for the movies. Case in point, John was an unambitious and dull toymaker in Rebirth, while Saw IV establishes him as a successful and supportive civil engineer.
• Character Catch Phrase:
  • "Hello, X" (the name of victim)
  • "[…] to play a game." ^note How it starts varies from "I want", "I'd like", or "It's time"
  • "Live or die, make your choice."
  • "Let the game begin."
  • "How much blood will you shed to stay alive?"
  • "Game over."
  • "Play Me" comes off as a written one on cassette tapes and players he puts out to his victims
• Characterization Marches On: The movies with James Wan and Leigh Whannell's involvement (I to III) have John as a vengeful hypocrite who likes to hurt people and mostly uses his idea of helping them as a cover for that. Though he was still able to feel love, care about others, and still had a sense of fairness, Whannell and Wan made it clear that John is very unambiguously a horrible person. The later movies play up his Tragic Villain angle and make his desire to help people genuine and misguided, but also somewhat oddly they up his Evil Is Petty angle, as plenty of his targets are people who slighted him and he more frequently tests them for sometimes silly reasons, such as smoking or lying. A lot of John's characterization from the Wan/Whannell movies is passed onto Hoffman instead, who has a similar vengeful and sadistic perspective regarding the games.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Before his identity as Jigsaw is revealed in the first movie, he's shown as the cancer patient that Dr. Gordon is going over with his interns.
• The Chessmaster: John practically prepares for every eventuality, especially with his imminent death in mind. The sheer scope of his plans carried on post-mortem is frightening to behold.
• Classic Villain: Of the Envy and Pride vices. He's so convinced that his philosophy is correct and he's genuinely helping people whom he can't conceive of the opposite. Also, his viciousness stems from resentment towards people wasting the gift of life that he's being denied.
• Control Freak: John has an obsession with being in control, as shown by how he planned for his son to be born in the year of the pig. John was ultimately driven mad by how much control he's lost (an inoperable cancer, the miscarriage of justice, etc.), and his traps target the people who made him lose control.
• Crazy-Prepared: As the series progressed, it becomes frightening how far ahead he'd planned and prepared. Even his own death factored into his plans.
• Creepy Monotone: His preferred method of speaking.
• Cruel to Be Kind: He certainly sees himself as this, making people suffer and fight to survive in order to appreciate life. The reality is far less noble.
• Cult of Personality: He's an expert at emotional manipulation and predicting people's actions. Most of his apprentices and accomplices, barring Hoffman, are drawn to him through his incredible charisma and suffering a form of Stockholm syndrome. He later passed his orating skills on to Lawrence, who was capable of swaying test survivors to his side.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: An example where the problem regards both earning and spending the cash. The first movie established John as a man who once faced with terminal cancer and decided to test people's will to live by putting them in simple Death Traps. As the following films went on to feature increasingly bigger, deadlier, and more elaborate traps, one wonders if all that was spent in gathering those resources wouldn't be better employed financing John's own cancer treatment or at least in John using his impressive engineering skills to raise the necessary money. This is even compounded in Saw VI, where he's furious at his health insurance provider for denying him coverage, despite claiming to have enough money anyway.
  • Saw X shows that John did actually seek that experimental treatment mentioned in Saw VI, but the clinic that offered the "treatment" was staffed by Snake Oil Salesmen and only cheated him out of his money without actually treating the tumor.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: John has to be kept on life support because he's dying from inoperable brain cancer, and is often shown using oxygen masks and the like. Especially prevalent in the third film, where he's bedridden and on death's door, with Lynn being kidnapped in order to keep him alive until Jeff completes his test. In the end, it's not the cancer that causes John's death, but Jeff slitting his throat with a circular saw.
• Dark Messiah: His true goal is to make people he feels are wasting their lives gain new appreciation and respect for how precious life is by putting them through hell if they want to continue living.
• Deader than Dead: His throat is sliced by Jeff at the end of Saw III. IV includes a detailed, gratuitous look at his autopsy. His body is thoroughly dissected, as if to drive home the fact that the main Saw villain up to that point is truly, unambiguously deceased.
• Dead Man Writing: He leaves multiple messages to different people for his death in Saw III, which are progressively revealed in the following films.
  • In Saw IV, it's revealed that during Saw III, he went to an insane length to make sure nobody could find one of the messages until after dying: he coated a tape with wax and swallowed it. It's only discovered while his body's being autopsied, and it turns out that the message was for Hoffman, as a warning that his death won't outright allow him to become his successor without a test.
  • At the beginning of Saw V, Jill receives a box John requested by their executor, which, as well as including a video tape where he gives a farewell message to her, contains a new Reverse Bear Trap meant for Hoffman's test, which is revealed and used in Saw VI.
  • The ending twist of Saw 3D gives the box another video tape for Dr. Gordon, where John instructs him about the final task he gave to him.
• Deadpan Snarker: His humor is very much on the dry side, usually of the Gallows Humor variety. Even in regards to his own health.
  Dr. Lynn: John, how you doing?
  John: *while getting his brain cut open* Never better.
• Delirious Misidentification: While undergoing brain surgery in Saw III, John hallucinates that he's back with Jill, mistaking Lynn for her and telling her, "Love... I love you." This makes Amanda jealous.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • In the origin storyline of VI, John is first seen meeting William at a party in Jill's clinic, where he chides him for his questionable policy on denying insurance claims. In a subsequent scene, we're shown that John unwisely proceeded to become a client of William's, so he ended up finding out just how monstrous the policy's picture was when he was repeatedly refused coverage for an experimental cancer treatment.
  • Downplayed between VI and 3D. He entrusts Jill to test Hoffman, but being wary of Hoffman's attitude, has Lawrence watch out for her based on Hoffman's reaction if he survives his test. John, however, could not account for Hoffman being insane enough to infiltrate and massacre an entire police precinct just to murder Jill, which is out of the scope of Lawrence's ability to help immediately. As a result, Jill is murdered before Hoffman is dealt with.
• Disease Bleach: Due to his terminal cancer, John has white hair at a relatively young age (canonically in his early 50s upon his death in Saw III). He still has the hair color in the flashbacks that take place long before his cancer diagnosis though, owed to his actor being considerably older and not receiving hair cosmetics.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • He really has it out for Art, his former best friend and business partner, for absolutely no discernable reason than Art upsetting him trying to reason with him at the lowest point of his life. Not only is Art forced into a game that he ultimately survives, he is dragged along into another one immediately after where his survival is not up to him.
  • The reasons he shoves people into death traps can get absurdly petty too, which he does for reasons that include a profession he considers sleazy, being a chain smoker, to wanting to help people too much.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: He spent much of the first film as a "corpse" lying in the middle of a dirty bathroom, and his connection to the story is that he's Dr. Gordon's cancer patient, who Zepp had known. It's not until the very end that he's shown to be the true mastermind. In fact, this kind of trick seems to run with his apprentices as well, since Amanda, Hoffman and Logan pull similar gambits in their respective reveals.
• Driven to Suicide: After William Easton denies him experimental cancer treatment, he fully crosses the Despair Event Horizon and drives his car off a cliff. He survives the initial fall and discovers enough will to live that he pulls out a massive steel rod that impaled him through the stomach upon crashing.

E-J

• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first film, he slashes Tapp's throat, who was trying to arrest him, and lets Sing get blown away in a shotgun booby trap, but in the second film he says he has never murdered anyone. See his third example under Hypocrite for further information. Although, it must point out that Tapp (the only person in the movie he physically attacked instead of ending up victim to a trap) actually survived the encounter (only to end up killing himself at some time between the events of the first video game and Saw V), so maybe John knew exactly how to slash his throat in a way he would survive. As for Sing, perhaps John thinks that it was Sing's fault for not looking where he stepped.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Even though she left him, suspected him of murder, and found out about his serial killing career, Jill never stopped loving him.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: And if you ever harm them, then may God have mercy on your soul, because Jigsaw and/or his apprentices won't. Mitch, Cecil and Hoffman learned that the hard way.
  • He also grew to care for Amanda, in spite of how much he ruined her life by turning her into a monster like him. When he admits that he was testing her in Saw III, he tells her he truly hoped she would succeed and seems genuinely sad as he watches her die.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • As painful and laborious as they may be, most if not all of his traps (at least, the ones that he designed himself; his apprentices often deviate from this) are genuinely survivable. They may involve self-mutilation, psychological scarring, non-intuitive thinking, deliberate deception on his part, or all four, but you can survive them. The first time the police discover a trap that's not survivable, it's considered to be a major outlier in Jigsaw's MO. That said, many of his traps require someone to die, give some of the victims no agency in their survival, or require multiple people to compete against each other. With the furnace trap in the seventh film, which it's implied he designed, saving the trapped victim required their rescuer to perform an impossible task (exposing the rescuer as a fraud), so whether Jigsaw is guilty of Blue-and-Orange Morality at best or regular hypocrisy at worst is in full effect.
  • He doesn't lie. He may use Exact Words or not fully tell the truth or give Cryptic Conversation, but he doesn't outright lie.
  • He abhors racists, sexual predators, and domestic abusers, among other scums of the earth. The traps they're put into are more likely than others to be symbolic of the crimes they've committed, and are very likely to involve more suffering as well.
  • In spite of how cruel or heartless he can come off at times, as well as the general brutality of his traps, John claims to take no pleasure in the agony and death of his victims (although several moments in the series imply otherwise, and Hoffman even confronts him about it), and invokedWord of God is that he honestly sees his actions as a Necessary Evil that will help them appreciate life as much as he did.
  • When Hoffman kidnaps Tara and Brent in Saw VI to give them the chance to exact revenge on William, John tells them through a video tape that he sincerely apologizes for putting them in cages for a time; he truly had no intention to harm or inconvenience either of them. Of course, that doesn't stop him from putting them in a situation where they're encouraged to (and Brent ultimately does) commit murder, which would traumatize them and probably result in Brent being prosecuted.
  • In Jigsaw, he saves Logan from the Bucket Room, as it wasn't fair for him to die just because he didn't wake up the same time the other four did (especially because John overdid it on the sedatives). Also, he regrets putting him in the game in the first place, since it was just an act of revenge on his part, as Logan's only transgression was a genuine mistake of accidentally mixing up the brain X-rays that led to his tumor not being detected sooner. As well as this, he and Logan have parted ways by the events of Saw, but he doesn't kill Logan off or put him in a trap to save himself - he lets him go.
  • In Saw X, John is appalled that a group of medical scammers would take advantage of dying people. Later on, when the mastermind of the scamming group, Cecilia, forces him into a trap with a young boy named Carlos, he is disgusted that she would go this far. While John isn't above involving children in his games, Carlos is just an innocent kid who just happened to be nearby. When the trap activates, John takes the brunt of the punishment to ensure Carlos won't suffer.
• Evil Genius: He demonstrates a massive intelligence, but, unfortunately for the world, he uses it for evil.
• Evil Is Petty: His motives are nowhere near as noble as he likes to think.
  • While his primary victims are "people who have wasted their lives," he also targets people who have wronged him in some way, and later in the series targets the police operatives investigating him. As the series continues and back builds his history, it becomes increasingly clear that many of his victims are people he has a personal connection with and he just doesn't care for how they chose to live their lives.
  • His criteria of targeting "people who have wasted their lives" or lived lives that caused harm to others is pretty broad. His victim roster ranges from drug dealers, rapists, prostitutes and drug addicts, to people feeling suicidal and practicing self-harm, and even people who suffered Bystander Syndrome and did nothing while seeing something terrible happen. In his mind, all of these offenses are deserving of death if the perpetrators refuse to "rehabilitate" themselves.
  • One of the most infamous examples comes in VI, where one of the victims, Hank, was placed into the Oxygen Crusher despite the fact that he was only a janitor at William's company. With no role in policy-making nor complicity in his corruption, why was he there then? John was disgusted that the man was a smoker despite his history of health issues.
• Evil Old Folks: Downplayed. As revealed during his autopsy in IV, John was 52 at the time of his death, which is quite a bit younger than he looks.
• Evil Puppeteer: A non-supernatural variant. He often uses an eerie puppet of his own creation named "Billy" to announce his presence.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He speaks in a whispery, almost mechanical-sounding low tone.
• Evilutionary Biologist: He isn't a scientist, but an engineer, which still fits the trope well; instead of participating in scientific experimentation, he uses the applied science of engineering to build Death Traps. Similarly, his concerns are social rather than biological or genetic — he's disgusted with the indolence and sloth he sees surrounding him; without the "will to live", humanity would face extinction. His preferred solution is to force people in Deadly Games where they have to mutilate themselves or kill someone else.
• Evil Wears Black: Asides from his signature red and black robe, John also has a tendency to wear black outfits in the testing field without the robe. Of particular note is the black business suit with gloves that he wears as part of a disguise to abduct Hoffman in a flashback in Saw V.
• Exact Words: He's very fond of this trope. Even if his instructions on how to escape a trap or test include a cryptic message requiring a good deal of lateral thinking (which many of his victims wouldn't be able to pull off in a time-sensitive life or death situation), it usually does adhere to exactly what he said one has to do to survive.
  • In Saw II:
    • John tells Eric that if they talk long enough, Eric will find his kidnapped son in "a safe and secure place." At the end of the movie, it's revealed that Eric's son was locked in a safe in John's hideout, just a few feet away from Eric the whole time, and quite literally all he needed to do was sit and talk to John.
    • The tape that introduces the victims in the Nerve Gas House to their game has John tell them that the numbers to the safe in the starting room are "in the back of your minds." As Xavier finds out late in the game, each of the numbers in question is written on one of the victims' napes.
    • Obi's tape ends with John saying "When you're in Hell, only the Devil can help you out." On one of the Furnace's internal walls, there's a devil-like figure drawn next to a valve that would turn off the gas. Despite him getting close enough for the drawing and valve to be clearly in his view, Obi doesn't seem to notice it, however.
  • In Saw III:
    • The big one is John's iconic "I want to play a game". First-time viewers will expect he's saying this in reference to Lynn, but eagle-eyed ones or those who were paying attention carefully might notice he's actually addressing Amanda. Those who are aware he only says this line to the person he's testing could put things together and realize that he's ultimately testing Amanda and not Lynn. Amanda's failure to notice this and follow his subsequent warnings results in her death.
    • At the start of Jeff's trial, John promises him that should he complete his tests, he will come face-to-face with "the man responsible for the loss of his child". Jeff naturally assumes the man in question is the drunk driver who killed his son in an accident. However, John never exactly said which man or child was he speaking of; only after Jeff kills him does he reveal in a tape that he is the person "responsible for the loss of his child", as only he knew where Jeff's daughter is.
  • In Saw V, John's message is more cryptic, with him telling the victims of the Fatal Five "Today, five will become one with the common goal of survival. [...] ..., your natural instincts will tell you to do one thing, but I implore you to do the opposite". It's only at the final trap that Brit and Mallick figure it out; as they all used underhanded means to get by in life, the victims were meant to do the opposite and cooperate in order to survive together, instead of killing one another in hopes of survival. Oddly enough, this is one of the few times that the characters put the message together early enough to make a difference, as Brit and Mallick agree to cooperate in hopes of both of them surviving the final test and manage to live through it.
  • Saw 3D features a retroactive example with a previous film, specifically Saw IV. In the latter film, John tells Hoffman in his farewell tape to him that "you're probably the last man standing." He didn't explicitly say that Hoffman was the only living Jigsaw accomplice by then, and as it turns out in 3D, he did have another active accomplice aside from Hoffman, even if they weren't necessarily an apprentice by his standards regarding disciples.
  • In Jigsaw, after recapturing Anna and Ryan, John shows them a shotgun shell which he loads into a shotgun, telling them that the shell is their "key to freedom" and that they've been doing everything "backwards" and need to "reverse their thinking", leading to Anna and Ryan believe that he intends for them to kill one another to survive. Unfortunately, Ryan figures out too late that wasn't the meaning and Anna fires the shotgun, which kills her and destroys the keys hidden in the shotgun shell; instead of trying to do what seemed obvious, they were to examine the shotgun and find the keys.
  • His claim that he never murdered anyone is a mix of this, Blue-and-Orange Morality and self-serving hypocrisy, as he essentially considers it not murder if they are victim of a deathtrap and killed by a mechanism, rather than his hand. These guidelines actually are consistent through the movies (the only person he actually attacked directly, Tapp, survived the wound, and Sing was instead killed by a booby trap he activated), but as the second movie points if he creates the condition it still counts as murder, no matter what he tells himself.
• The Faceless: Before the reveal of his identity as Jigsaw at the end of the first film, his face is obscured via Unreveal Angle whenever he appears onscreen.
• Fair-Play Villain: All of the traps John designs himself are survivable; they may involve self-mutilation, psychological scarring, non-intuitive thinking, or all three, but you can survive them. In III, Detective Kerry deduces that someone else is involved when one of the traps is not survivable.
• Faking the Dead: In the first movie, he spends almost the entirety of Lawrence and Adam's game lying on the floor pretending to be a corpse. Saw III shows he took a drug to slow his heartbeat and maintain the illusion.
• Fingore: When Eric Matthews is beating the living daylights out of him, he just laughs it off and taunts him. After some thinking, Eric decides to break his fingers one by one, and John decides to move on to the next part of his plan.
• First-Episode Twist: At the end of the first film, Jigsaw turns out to be the guy lying in the middle of the Bathroom, assumed to be dead. He's also the cancer patient who appears in flashbacks to the hospital where Lawrence worked in at the time. Saw II and Saw III are up-front about him as the Big Bad, and he becomes the Greater-Scope Villain from Saw IV onwards.
• Flanderization: John's argument that he doesn't kill people becomes notably messy after the first two movies.
  • In the first and second films, he believed that he never kills people because he only puts them in traps that will kill them if they fail to escape. He did set Donnie Greco as a victim by having the key to the Reverse Bear Trap surgically implanted in his stomach and telling Amanda that she needed the key from his stomach to save herself, but the trap's structure and his "no killing" rule indicates that the trap was survivable if Amanda didn't panic and stab Donnie in the neck instead.
  • From the Saw III onwards, he forces his victims to kill other people, or puts people in situations where only a "main victim" can save them. This further shows that John is willing to bend his own rules or deflect responsibility by saying it was the victim's fault for not trying hard enough to survive or move on from their past. While most of the movies after Saw II show that Hoffman, Amanda, Logan and the Spiral copycat are the ones bending the rules to ensure the deaths of their victims, John was the one who planned the traps in Saw III.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the first film, there are three hints at him being the real Jigsaw before the ending reveals it.
    • When Lawrence introduces his two students to John, you can see two drawings on a desk near him: one for what appears to be the concept design of the Reverse Bear Trap, and another that depicts an "X" that looks like the same one in the Bathroom. If you manage to catch your eyes on them and compare them to the aforementioned objects (which are introduced later), you might be able to deduce who is the actual Jigsaw.
    • During his Motive Rant to Tapp and Sing, John mentions a "disease eating away at me from the inside". This line is rather subtle and easily ignorable, but can become questionable if one were to look back at John's appearance in the flashback of Tapp and Sing calling Lawrence.
    • As Lawrence is loading the cartridge into the revolver to shoot Adam, the camera briefly shows all six chambers of the cylinder to be empty. Revolvers don't eject spent cartridges, and yet John was disguised as a guy who was supposed to have shot himself. What looked to be a simple prop error is actually a subtle foreshadowing to the twist ending.
  • In Saw III, John is briefly seen playing around with some melted wax in a quick shot that's easy to overlook. In the next movie, it's revealed during the autopsy of his corpse that he was using the wax to coat a tape, so he could store it in his stomach and leave a message to Hoffman.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The police do have sympathy towards John for having cancer and trying to take his own life, but in Saw II, they make it clear to him that he has neither the right nor the authority to put people through his death traps.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He was just a man with a normal life, left suicidal after a cancer diagnosis. When the attempt failed, his outlook on life changed, and he turned into a diabolical mastermind, able to set up and start incredibly complex games right under the police's nose, avoiding capture unless he chose to be found, and even able to inspire a cult following and train several disciples.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Designing and building his numerous traps requires a great deal of technical expertise and ability. It is revealed in later movies that he is an engineer.
• Gambit Roulette: Pretty much everything that happens from the first movie to Saw 3D is at least partially according to his design, in spite of the fact that he dies in the third movie.
• A Glass of Chianti: In Saw V, he drinks wine from a teacup before interrogating Hoffman about why he tried to frame him with an inescapable trap just to murder someone.
• A God Am I: In a rare instance of John conducting a game directly than through Billy, he explains to his hapless victim in the opening of a speech he had given him the life he had supposedly squandered.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For all films after Saw III, John may be dead, but his legacy drives all the future villains from there on.^note While he's technically alive for the majority of Saw IV, he still counts as this for that film, since he's preoccupied with the concurrent events of Saw III, leaving Hoffman to directly threaten the film's protagonists for him. Hoffman and Logan only became Jigsaw killers thanks to his teachings, while Schenk was personally inspired by his methods.
• Grief-Induced Split: He fell into grief when Jill suffered an untreatable miscarriage of their soon-to-be-born son Gideon, to the point that he cut social ties with most other people, including his friend and business partner Art. Downplayed in that while he and Jill ended up divorcing, John still cared for her.
• Handicapped Badass: He's dying a slow death of cancer, and is in a lot of pain. He even says so in the second movie. Doesn't seem to slow him down all that much.
• Hannibal Lecture: He's fond of doing this, most prominently in Saw II, where he talks to Eric as part of a "game", promising that he'll see his son again if he adheres to the rules.
• Happily Failed Suicide: He attempted suicide after being diagnosed with cancer, but when he failed to die, it reinvigorated him by instilling the belief that everyone else is wasting their lives by dwelling on past traumas.
• Happy Flashback: There are numerous flashbacks to his comparatively joyful life before his Start of Darkness, the first one being hallucinated by him in Saw III.
• Heel Realization: Subverted in Saw III. After hearing Lynn's sincere words of wanting to turn her life around, he orders Amanda to release her shotgun collar and seems to genuinely see the error of his ways. Unfortunately, Amanda refused to do so, and once John sees Jeff learned nothing from his test, he decides to condemn everyone in his room to death.
• Heinousness Retcon: Zig-zagged. In the first three films, John was consistently depicted as a fearsome yet professional mastermind who abducted people who had done something "wrong" but relatively light in their life, taunted or showed notable sadism about their struggles and (almost always) incoming fates, and wasn't above putting victims' relatives and children in harm's way. What was described of his backstory did little to garner him sympathy. Starting with the flashbacks he appears in from Saw IV onwards, while his previous acts and events are still acknowledged from time to time, he's portrayed in a more sympathetic light, with extensions to his backstory that retcon supplementary details from the Rebirth comic, and him appearing to have more genuinely good intentions as he's said or shown to be more restricted to outright criminals for the most part. That said, the present plots clarify (likely unintentionally on the producers' part) that he's noticeably gotten even worse, having pettier targets and more Kick the Dog acts in his posthumous schemes.
• Horrible Judge of Character: John has an ironically prominent amount of this, despite championing himself as judge, jury, and executioner by setting traps for people so they would appreciate the value of life. Although he can predict what a person can or will do, he's not very good at judging a person's true character.
  • His disciples tend to be not as devoted to him as he thinks.
    • He calls Amanda his first true success due to her initial loyalty to him. Later, however, Amanda hypocritically twists her traps so they just kill people instead, believing that they don't deserve second chances. She's also seen engaging in self-harm after her time with the Reverse Bear Trap, implying that John's teachings didn't really help her and that she had simply traded one bad habit for another.
    • Much like Amanda, Hoffman would later simply murder his own victims, either to punish them for crimes normally frowned upon or to save his own skin when the police begin to suspect him of being a Jigsaw Killer. In fact, Kramer chose Hoffman as one of his disciples after learning that Hoffman tried to avenge his sister and tried to frame Kramer for it by making the murder look like a Jigsaw trap.
    • Logan Nelson was unfairly judged by Kramer as he simply mixed up the name tag on his X-rays. John saved him from his trap after the sedative didn't wear off in time and forgave Logan for what was an honest mistake and allowed him to become John's disciple. However, after John's death and Logan's return from the war in Afghanistan, Logan developed PTSD and became increasingly anti-social and violent, attacking his neighbor and later his wife's physician.
  • Also, many of John's victims are people he already had a pre-existing relationship with or had met at least once; he didn't just pick them out at random and psychoanalyze them through his traps. These people included ones he blamed vicariously for his ex-wife's miscarriage, insurance providers who didn't give him proper health insurance, and random fellows who were simply not nice enough to him while he was suffering from cancer. Besides, much of the personal information he knows about his victims was likely either because he already knew them well before becoming Jigsaw, or due to Hoffman's access to police records (rather than John directly talking to them or spying them for the most part).
• Humans Are Bastards: Surprisingly inverted. John despises people who don't appreciate the blessings of their own lives, but in a twisted way, he believes that almost anyone — including murderers, rapists, domestic abusers, and even the man who killed his own unborn son — can change their ways and be better after going through his traps.
• Hypocrite: As the series goes on, it becomes clear that despite his purported philosophy about life and his "games", John breaks his own rules again and again, or doesn't really believe in them at all.
  • He claims to despise murderers and insists he has never intentionally killed anyone, a claim that is anchored in his view that his traps are survivable and thus his victims only died because they lacked the "survival instinct". This is at best a Distinction Without a Difference, because he is the one putting them in that situation to begin with. He also designs games that will likely if not definitely kill one or more participants (seen in the very first movie with Amanda's first game, or the fact that Adam, Gordon and Zep's game was made so that at most two of them could survive it), so he is intentionally killing people even if he's leaving the victim up to chance.
  • The games often include people who don't deserve to be there (like Matthew's son) and/or have no control over the game but can end up victim to it (Amanda's cellmate, Gordon's family), which is neither testing their "survival instinct" nor teaching them anything, something lampshaded by detective Matthews in the second movie, to which John has no answer.
  • The traps themselves are supposed to teach a lesson, but many of them are extremely complex and deliberately deceptive, to the point that Jigsaw seems more intent on outsmarting his victim and tricking them into dooming themselves than making them think. To be fair, John was very straightforward with what the victims were supposed to do in the first four movies, and the tricks were more about the real stakes or the actual participants in the game. The trend of the traps tricking people into dooming themselves starts from the fifth movie on and could be partially blamed on Hoffman and the other disciples perverting Jigsaw's philosophy. Even so, the philosophy wasn't exactly solid from the beginning.
  • Despite his claims that he actually wants his victims to win their games, he put Art through another game after he won his first, and it's implied he would have kept doing it had Art survived again. He also looks disappointed when Jeff chooses to spare his life and then seems excited when Jeff instead decides to kill him, failing his game.
  • He despises people like Adam and Michael for being "voyeurs" who profit off of spying on people and selling information. John himself chooses his victims by spying on them for prolonged periods of time and often learns secrets about them that they're trying to keep hidden.
  • John tells Logan that they can never act out of anger or vengeance, Logan himself having taught John that since his mislabeling of John's x-ray was an accident and he didn't deserve to die for it. Over the course of the series, it is revealed that many of John's victims are people who have wronged him and he is taking revenge, and it could easily be said that his whole motivation is hatred and disgust for people who are wasting their lives. He's also keen to target people who have harmed his family, when he often has the families of his victims (particularly their children) involved in his games too, just to torment them.
  • He scolds Hoffman for not giving Seth (a domestic abuser) a chance and that everyone he tests has a chance to live. Never mind that he later didn't give Rex, who's very similar to Seth, a chance to escape from his trap, as he was pierced through his vitals areas with spikes that his wife Morgan removed.
  • He puts Jeff through tests because he refused to get over the death of his son, ignoring that his own career as a serial killer revolves around his grief over the death of his unborn child, Gideon. Billy the puppet being meant as a toy for him, his birth year being the year of the pig, etc.
• Idiosyncrazy: John is compulsive about his sadistic torture games, which he becomes infamous for, and his whole life seems to have revolved around them ever since he began making them. In fact, a major plot point in the later movies is being able to tell John's death traps from those of an apprentice or copycat by using this trope; he always has to give the victim a means of freeing themselves from the trap (as he firmly believes he's "helping" them appreciate life by facing their sins through the games), whereas the apprentices/copycats usually make the traps inescapable.
• Idiot Ball:
  • In the origin storyline for Saw VI, John is first seen meeting William at a party in Jill's clinic, where he chides him for his abhorrent policy on denying insurance claims. In a subsequent scene, we find out that, John very unwisely proceeded to become a client of William's, despite already knowing that his policy routinely screws people over. That is somewhat realistic, as John was shown to be reasonably wealthy and with a connection to him, and as such likely believing he would not be among the people screwed over, but also interestingly happens before his Start of Darkness, so it can be seen as a way to show his change from a clever but naive guy to an actual mastermind.
  • Saw X has John, already Jigsaw at that time, falling for a scam about a cure for cancer, so John likely has a huge blind spot when it comes to medical care and practice.
• Immortality Through Memory: In Saw II, John and Amanda state that they believe that "the cure for cancer" is immortality through memory. So long as his work outlives him and his legacy is remembered, he will live on.
• Inconsistent Dub: The Hungarian dubs of the movies shift back and forth between using "Kirakós" (jigsaw) or "Fűrész" (saw) to refer to John. The Hungarian words for "jigsaw" and "saw" have no relation, so it comes out of nowhere when John is called "Fűrész".
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • John insists that he's not a murderer because he has never killed anyone. He's ignoring that he has directly caused the deaths of dozens of people, and believes that their deaths are their own fault because he allowed them the possibility to live, but they lacked the "survival instinct" to push themselves to do whatever they must to win his game. Needless to say, this is not a distinction that would have held up in a court of law, to say nothing of John's own hypocrisy in how he applies it.
  • He believes that people who do not appreciate their lives will gain appreciation for them by surviving one of his games and coming close to actually dying. It never occurs to John that addressing the psychological reasons behind people who are acting wasteful with their lives would be a far better way to help them, and his games are just adding more physical and psychological trauma on top of whatever issues they already had. Indeed, as the series keeps going it becomes clear that the few people who survive John's games didn't "get better" like he thought, they just got worse.
  • Even when his games are plausible to win, the difficulty in actually doing so varies wildly. Some of them involve self-harm, hurting someone else, or your fate being left in someone else's hands to decide and you have to try and convince them to help you; and the games themselves range from searching through a pile of used syringes, to sticking your hand in a jar of acid, to holding your breath to a long period of time, to simply remaining calm under duress and figuring out how to survive. While some of his traps are his attempts at poetic justice, with the trap intended to reflect the victim's crime that caught John's eye, he never seems to consider that his victims may be more willing to hurt someone else than themselves and adjusts accordingly, or that they may not be physically capable of winning due to health problems.
• Invincible Villain: In every film where he's involved, he has always won in some way, regardless if he gets actual karma or not. Even after his death in Saw III, he still got the upper hand with his posthumous schemes. His apprentices and copycats also won several times, but none of them got to the extent he reached.
• I Reject Your Reality: His "games" have an almost universal failure rate. Even the subjects who do survive usually end up facing a downward spiral in one way or another. He's adamant that he's not a murderer, despite Eric telling him at point-blank range in Saw II that he still caused their deaths by putting them in these traps in the first place.
• It's All About Me: John is simply trying to validate his own suffering and make everyone else suffer for doing him a great wrong by denying his cancer treatment or by doing harm to his family. The only reason why he thinks he's better than his victims is that he gives them a slim chance of survival, something they denied him when they did him wrong. He believes his victims are ungrateful to be alive and he believes he's providing meaning to their lives by forcing them to overcome their traumas... by giving them new ones.
• It's Personal: In X, he kidnaps and tests Cecilia and her whole team for scamming him into believing his cancer was cured. So much he didn't even bother to use Billy to greet and give them instructions.
• Jerkass: An understatement; John may be polite beyond his schemes, but he's otherwise quite a murderous, self-righteous asshole and seems to like putting his victims through torment. Of course, compared to his successors — who completely miss the point he was making when he was alive — he isn't as open about this.

K-O

• Kaizo Trap: A recurring theme of his traps is that his subjects are liable to doom themselves if they do the wrong thing, often relying on some sort of Batman Gambit to trick them into making the trap inescapable. For example, in the second film, the Razor Box trap has two holes in the bottom for one to stick their arms through to reach an antidote vial, but the coverings of the holes are razor-sharp and cut into your arms if you try to pull them back out. The trick is that on the other side of the box is a lock and key that open it up, if the victim would only take a moment to study the trap and find it before sticking their arms in.
• Karma Houdini:
  • He has the goal of making his victims accountable for their misdeeds by putting them in life-threatening situations that require them to mutilate themselves or kill someone else in order to survive the traps they get put in. In other words, the games John makes have the purpose of preventing his victims from becoming Karma Houdinis.
  • Ironically, John became a Karma Houdini himself for the first two films, as he has murdered, crippled and traumatized many people through his games, yet he was never brought to trial or convicted for his crimes. This is because he has baffled the police countless times, as he figured out numerous ways to outsmart them and lure them into his games. In Saw II, he deliberately allows the police to apprehend him in order to test his next victim Eric, who does beat him up badly when he sees his teenage son Daniel being endangered in the Nerve Gas House. Saw III is the film where full-on karma finally gets to John, namely by getting killed by his latest victim Jeff, even though this leads the latter to fail his first trial as the correct option was to "forgive" John. Played with in that John had already pulled numerous elaborate plans in motion that were meant to continue after his anticipating death, which affect the plot of the following films and succeed for the most part. Also, John was noticeably on the brink of death already and wouldn't have lived much longer even if Jeff had spared him, and not only he managed to extend his life to see the game to completion already, but he also got to go out on his own terms, in a way.
• Karmic Death: A staple of his traps, though not universal. In the third movie, he himself is killed (with a saw no less) by one of his many victims. He even dies with a piece of him missing, like the puzzle pieces he took from his victims. His was in his head, perhaps symbolizing his sociopathy and lack of humanity.
• Kick the Dog: Even being Affably Evil, Kramer was still capable of performing nasty stuff during a test subject's game. Some notable ones were:
  • Poisoning Zepp, the only hospital employee who bothered to treat him with decency or kindness, and forcing him to carry out his orders.
  • Leaving Adam to die in the bathroom at the end of the first movie, even though he had "won" his test by surviving past the time limit. It could be justified that he tells Adam where the key to his shackle is (and the key being flushed down the drain was not in his plan), but regardless.
  • Mocking Jeff's son's death in Saw III by using Billy.
  • Taunting Eric by telling him that his son will probably die soon.
• The Killer Becomes the Killed: The climax of Saw X marks the first and only time in the franchise where John himself is forced into a trap. Cecilia hoped that this would either kill him or force him to kill an innocent child she put in the trap alongside him (Carlos) simply to spite him. However, John predicted he would get put into the trap and escapes shortly after.
• Knight Templar: He honestly believes that he's doing the right thing by making his victims appreciate their lives more, despite all clear evidence to the opposite. In Saw VI and 3D, Simone makes it very clear that it's not working, and angrily calls out victims who say that it helped them. That said, 3D shows that it did work for some people.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • If you were to watch the first film after any of the other ones, you wouldn't be surprised by the ending, especially since John even appears in a few posters for the other films.
  • If you didn't know that John dies in Saw III, you may wish to steer clear of the trailers and one of the posters (also the DVD boxart) for Saw IV, which show John's body lying on an autopsy table (from the opening scene) and his disembodied head being weighed on a scale, respectively.
• Laughing at Your Own Jokes: He occasionally makes puns in his instruction tapes and chuckles at them. The fact that he's describing torturous traps makes him deviate from the usual examples of this trope.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: He's a twisted bastard, but whenever he comes into conflict with another villain, he always has the moral high ground. This applies to both his primary apprentices, Amanda and Hoffman, as well as to Cecelia Pederson in X.
• Made of Iron: Weirdly, he is this despite being an elderly cancer patient. He somehow takes a blast from a shotgun and gets up several moments later to make an escape in the first movie (which would have been pretty much impossible even if he was wearing body armor). Later on in Saw II, he takes a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Eric during his Papa Wolf-fueled Unstoppable Rage well enough to remain (barely) conscious and get the last laugh.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: He has a reputation as a dangerous murderer, but is actually a terminally ill man with brain cancer, only able to operate because of his manipulative skills.
• The Man Behind the Man: If you watched Saw for the very first time, you'd think the creep watching Lawrence and Adam while holding a family hostage is the Jigsaw Killer. But no, he's a pawn himself, and the real villain has been right in front of you the entire time...
• Manipulative Bastard: Apart from his skills at scheming, John has a knack for reading people's feelings to exploit or provoke them, best exemplified by how he turned his ex-wife into a reluctant accomplice.
• Mask of Sanity: He sounds quite rational as he speaks, but his words ring hollow in the face of his brutal traps. Perhaps best shown in Saw X, where he imagines an entire horrifying scenario for someone the instant he sees them stealing, then pushes the thought away as soon as they put away what they stole, as if his imagination just works that way about everyone he ever sees. It’s even more emphasized as he tries to rationalize why he puts people in traps to Cecelia, where he describes himself as a life coach. Ironically, she shows herself to be even more insane than he is.
• Master Poisoner: He appears to have a vague "slow-acting poison" to inject for any occasion, which he uses on Zep and Mark Wilson in the first film, and by Saw II he has set up a whole house that's slowly filling with nerve gas.
• Meaningful Name: His first name "John" is likely a reference to John the Baptist, a saint who washed away sins through baptism. In the movies, John believes he's baptizing people by installing new traumas through his traps. In fact, in II and 3D, he actually baptizes Amanda and Gordon, respectively (the latter after rescuing him).
• Misery Builds Character: His outlook and philosophy runs on this, putting people through traps that involve self-mutilation and psychological scarring in order to live and gain a new outlook on life. John himself only started appreciating his own life after surviving a suicide attempt following his cancer diagnosis.
• Moral Sociopathy: Jigsaw's a murderous bastard, that much is true, but he truly believes he's doing the right thing by capturing people and subjecting them to his Death Traps. All of the traps he designs himself are survivable, even if they lead to self-mutilation, psychological scarring, non-intuitive thinking, or all three, and he takes offense to Amanda designing inescapable traps and Hoffman killing his sister's murderer and making it look like a Jigsaw trap.
• Motive Decay: In the first three films, John claims that he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist who teaches his victims the value of life by putting them in traps in which they're forced to perform Self-Surgery or kill others just like them. However, his victims in later films tend to be nothing more than people who ruined his life in some way, with their tests seeming more like outright punishments. He even chooses some victims for petty reasons or simply to sacrifice them in order to teach others a lesson.
• Murder by Inaction: John adamantly insists he's never killed anyone; he merely puts them in Death Traps, and the traps kill his victims because they failed their tests or the real participant failed/refused to save them. Of course, since he knows the traps are fatal to those he puts in, that doesn't make much of a difference. Eric Matthews puts it best in the second film:
  Eric: I don't know what [the cure for cancer] is, but I know it's not killing and torturing people for your own sick fucking pleasure.
  John: I've never murdered anyone in my life. The decisions are up to them.
  Eric: Yeah, well, putting a gun to someone's head and forcing them to pull the trigger is still murder.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: The events of the fourth through seventh films of the series were carried out after he had died, with John's wishes and intentions guiding things along. This phrase is even invoked in the fourth film.
  John: You think it's over, just because I'm dead? It's not over. The games have just begun.
• My God, What Have I Done?: John rushes out of his hiding spot to save Logan when he realizes he accidentally overdosed him, since he thinks everyone deserves a chance to win their games. Once he realizes that Logan mislabeling his brain x-ray was an honest accident, he exempts Logan from the game.
• Necessarily Evil: He knows that torture isn't a good thing, but he believes it's necessary to teach people to value their own lives and better themselves. That is if they survive.
• Never My Fault: Despite his claims that he is trying to help his victims, it rarely, if ever, seems to work, as most of his victims are killed while the few that survive their game are severely traumatized. And of course, he claims the people that died were missing an essential part of themselves, the 'survival instinct,' so to speak. Apparently, if you aren't willing to do absolutely anything (up to and including committing murder) to survive, you simply don't value your life enough. He also never admits to being responsible for the deaths he causes, even in the tests where someone deliberately has to die for another to live. They're making the choice, not him, nevermind that he is responsible for putting them in a life-or-death scenario in the first place. In the third movie, he puts people in traps that are designed to kill them if the participant doesn't save them... and even then he still deflects responsibility by saying the participant killed them by refusing to save them.
• Noble Demon: He does have standards, and he upholds them religiously. He doesn't lie, and he doesn't make unwinnable games.
• Non-Action Big Bad: It's downplayed in the first movie, and played straight in the second movie onwards. He's primarily a schemer, not a fighter and Strahm even calls him "brains, not brawn". He's an old man who is dying of cancer after all.
  • Before the events of Saw II (including Saw X), he would partake in physically subduing his victims (including his future go-to muscle, Hoffman, in a Saw V flashback) and fought back against Tapp when he was being arrested. However, he's not a threat in a direct fight and always requires the element of surprise.
  • In II onwards his cancer progresses to the point where he usually needs a wheelchair and Eric Matthews beats him to a bloody pulp without any real resistance. In the third film, he is bedridden, knocking on death's door and ends up murdered by Jeff without attempting to save or defend himself at all.
• No-Sell: In the second film, he's completely unfazed by Eric's threats of Police Brutality, in part because he's already in a lot of pain due to his cancer.
  John: I don't intend to mock you, officer, but I'm a cancer patient. How could you possibly put me in any more pain than I'm already in?
• Nothing Up My Sleeve: If you can actually get close enough to him, his primary means of self-defense is a concealed blade, as seen in the first movie when Tapp tries to hold him at gunpoint.
• Not The Illness That Killed Them: He's killed by getting his throat slashed open at the end of Saw III, in an especially egregious time where his colon cancer had advanced enough to cause a brain tumor and put him in a bedridden condition.
• Obliviously Evil: John doesn't seem to ever fathom how horrifically wrong his actions are, consistently claiming he only wants to help others get the best out of life.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: What Logan tries to do with his corpse in Jigsaw. He digged up John's grave and took his body, placing Edgar's in its place so as to keep up rumors that the original Jigsaw Killer is still alive and out there.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Probably the only times you'll hear John get angry and raise his voice are the following examples:
  • In the flashback of Saw V where he's blackmailing Hoffman, when the two briefly argue over the death of the man who killed Hoffman's sister.
    Hoffman: She was my only family. He didn't deserve a chance. He was an ANIMAL!
    John: EVERYBODY DESERVES A CHANCE!
    Hoffman: You didn't see the blood! You didn't see what he FUCKING DID TO HER!
    John: KILLING! IS! DISTASTEFUL!... To me!
  • In Saw X, when he explains why the medical frauds he put in the movie's game are being tested.
    "All of you. All of you... ALL of you. You promised dying people — DYING PEOPLE! That you could save their lives. And in doing so, you took advantage of the only thing... that they still possessed: hope."
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Tobin Bell naturally has a pretty strong New York accent. In most of the movies, he uses a standard West Coast accent and hides it by being a Soft-Spoken Sadist. In X, he shows a much wider range of emotions and occasionally slips into his natural New York accent, particularly when he yells at Cecilia.
• Orcus on His Throne: Justified. In Saw III and by extension IV he's on his deathbed and thus has to rely on his stronger, healthier assistants to carry things out for him. Even before that, he's quite content to just sit back and let his games play themselves out-hell, he spent the entirety of the first film lying on a bathroom floor.

P-Y

• Papa Wolf:
  • His downward spiral into villainy started with the death of his unborn son Gideon, when he made the man responsible for his wife's miscarriage mutilate himself. He also went after one of his victims for indirectly causing the death of his young nephew.
  • In X, when Cecilia abducts Carlos and forces him into the blood boarding trap with Kramer—something that Kramer himself did not predict would happen—Kramer objects to the idea of getting children involved in his traps and takes most of the blood boarding to minimize Carlos's pain as much as he could.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Before his identity became known to the public, John would put on simplistic disguises whenever he went out to communicate to people as "Jigsaw" in a subtle manner. It fools people for a bit, but he easily raises suspicions on the people he's trying to fool because he can't help but act somewhat unnerving. This is seen in two separate flashbacks.
  • The first one in V, he puts on a business suit and glasses as part of his preparation to kidnap Hoffman.
  • The second one in 3D, he wears a hoodie and a backwards baseball cap when he goes to confront Bobby about making money out of him with a fake survival story.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: While some of them clearly deserved it more than others, and others were decent people who just made life choices Jigsaw didn't approve of, many of his victims were terrible individuals whom he subjected to a Karmic Death.
• Percussive Therapy: Briefly does this against an antique clock with a crowbar in a flashback from Saw IV when he's outraged over Jill asking what happened to him.
• Pet the Dog:
  • His first apprentice Logan was one of his test subjects but didn't wake up fast enough, resulting in him getting wounded. John took the time to save him and recruit him since he realized Logan had no chance of surviving otherwise and his crime was ultimately just an honest mistake.
  • In Saw X, he was so elated after his "successful" brain surgery that the first thing he does after is to buy a gift for one of the medical staff. It's just too bad the medical team was actually a group of scammers and the surgery actually didn't happen.
    • He also immediately gets Diego medical attention and attempts to have Gabriela sent to a hospital, albeit only after surviving their games.
• Playing Possum: Spends the majority of the first film mimicking a corpse in the middle of the bathroom.
• Politically Correct Villain: He despises racism and sexism and recruits a woman to be one of his primary accomplices. He appreciates her service enough to entrust his life to her. He also expresses a respectful fascination with other cultures, which implies a degree of worldiness, such as talking about in the "Far East" doctors are paid by the community and serve them for free when they are sick as he was criticizing William's predatory policy. Another instance is when he seems to genuinely enjoy listening to his cab driver's explanation of Mexico's history to him in Saw X
• Posthumous Character: After III and IV.
• Precision F-Strike: He's barely ever one to swear, but when he does, it hits hard.
  • In the flashbacks from Saw IV where he's reeling from the Gideon's death, John says "Get the fuck out of here!" to a guy who asked him if he was sure about cutting off his funding for Jill's drug rehabilitation clinic.
  • A flashback in Saw VI has this speech he delivers to William after the latter personally denies him coverage for the experimental cancer treatment he wanted to take:
    John: We got it all ass-backward here. These politicians, they say the same thing over and over and over again: "Healthcare decisions should be made by doctors and their patients, not by the government." Well, now I know they're not made by doctors and their patients or by the government. They're made by the fucking insurance companies.
• Promoted to Scapegoat: He dies in Saw III and his disciples take up his doctrine by continuing his work. From Saw II, Amanda Young and Mark Hoffman are the ones who revise the traps made by Kramer by making them unwinnable and or they target people for extremely petty reasons.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Behind his intellect is simply a despairing man trying to provide meaning to his personal, uncalculated tragedies and lashing out because society's justice system didn't go his way. Most of his victims were connected to him on a personal level, as they were either responsible for his life going downhill or just didn't do what he wanted.^{For instance}Amanda instigated Cecil to cause Jill's miscarriage, Mitch indirectly caused the death of John's nephew by knowingly selling him a faulty motorcycle, William refused to give John insurance coverage for an experimental cancer therapy, and Logan accidentally prevented the treatment of John's cancer by mislabeling his x-ray. The latter case is the only one John comes to terms about. John even recycled Bobby, a toy that was intended to be for his unborn son, to create another one (the iconic Billy) as a tool for his torturous work.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In the end, his actions result in the deaths of his own, his disciples who were qualified enough to succeed him, and his ex-wife. The only thing he leaves behind is his murderous legacy, which is the antithesis of everything he claimed it to be.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • As he explains in Saw II, he has a twisted logic that kind of made sense as to why he was carrying out those sadistic games.
  • Ironically, he himself gets a couple too:
    • While on on his death bed in Saw III, he asks Lynn how people will remember his horrific story. Her response is short, but effective:
      John: Who am I?
      Lynn: A monster. A murderer.
    • Later in the climax of III, Amanda delivers an extended one to him not long after she snaps at seeing his growing closeness with Lynn, screaming about how his methods don't actually work in "reviving" people's appreciation of life and how she's even more miserable now that she works with him than she was as a drug addict.
    • Near the climax of Saw X, Cecilia delivers a speech calling him out for being just a psycho hiding behind a fake moral code.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: When out in the testing field, he usually wears a black cloak with a red interior drawn up.
• Relative Button: Sure, they're divorced, but don't you ever harm his ex-wife Jill.
• The Resenter: For all his talk about appreciating life, it's clear that a lot of John's actions are just him expressing his anger that he is dying while others, whom he sees as having less to live for or not appreciating their lives, will continue after he is gone.
• Resurrected Murderer: Discussed but ultimately subverted in Jigsaw with rumors about John having returned from the dead when a new spree of killings begins around a decade since the last one. Come The Reveal at the end, it's shown via a Flashback-Montage Realization that it was an Of Corpse He's Alive ruse made by a former apprentice of his.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: He was was a civil engineer who was obsessed with control until a series of tragedies put him on death's door. After surviving a suicide attempt, he decided to help people reform by putting them through various death traps that would make them "appreciate life". However, as the series goes on, the people he targets aren't random and they are people who did him a great wrong (from denying him treatment for his cancer or denying him insurance that would support his wife when he dies). His reasoning becomes especially petty, since he starts sacrificing innocent people to prove a point to his victim (one such example being the time he sacrificed a chain-smoking janitor to motivate William and make it easier for him to escape the first trap in his trial).
• Saved by Canon: In Saw X, due to said film being an Interquel between Saw and Saw II. This is prevalent because he's tensely put into one of his own traps by Cecilia, but ends the movie without any notable injuries.
• Serial Killer: He's this in the eyes of the law and the vast majority of rational human beings everywhere, though John himself would dispute this characterization. In his mind, he doesn't kill anyone; he only sets up situations where others will either fail to survive or their choices will be responsible for the deaths of others.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: John's favored firearm to incorporate into his traps are shotguns. He has had six traps he designed that incorporate it as the main or a major feature ^note The Quadruple Shotgun Hallway Booby Trap in I, the Shotgun Shell Collar and the Rack (which fires a shotgun when the key to unlock it is removed) in III, the Shotgun Chair in V, the Shotgun Carousel in VI, and the Shotgun Keys in Jigsaw. The only other gun he uses in his traps is a revolver in the Magnum Eyehole trap in II. It's possible he favored them for their short range effectiveness, since he has them fired at close range. It is also the only gun John is shown holding, which he does after the Shotgun Chair test in V and before the Shotgun Keys test in Jigsaw.
• Sin Eater: While he doesn't outright claim to be one, he can be seen as a metaphorical Sin Eater of sorts, given his MO regarding targets, his method of "rehabilitation" for said targets, and the prominent references to "sinning" that he makes.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: His motivation. He wants to make people who take life for granted appreciate their lives using... controversial methods, to say the least, which he also secretly uses on his various apprentices to see if they're qualified to succeed him and carry his planned schemes afterwards.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Inverted. In a cast where just about every character with enough dialogue has a colorful language, John tends to refrain from swearing, only doing so occasionally for shock effect.
• Slashed Throat: He ultimately meets his end this way in the third movie, courtesy of Jeff Denlon and a buzzsaw.
• Slasher Smile: He mostly avoids this expression, being pretty stone-faced normally, but he does make a pretty ghastly one in Saw II when he taunts Eric about the horrific fate that awaits his son Daniel. It's worth noting that Daniel was already completely safe at this point and he did this just to try to piss off Eric.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: John did target people who did him wrong or he believed were wasting their lives, but his reasons became pettier over time.
  • In general, his first victims were previously patients in Jill's drug recovery clinic, which fitted with the point of his tests being a form of rehabilitation. By contrast, his later victims either pretended to be him or have some connection to him, denied him health insurance, or were callous when they told him he had inoperable cancer.
  • The earliest sign of this was when he forced Amanda to fish out the key to the Reverse Bear Trap from Donnie Greco's stomach, not telling her that he was still alive and she killed him in a frantic attempt to get the key.
  • Further onward, he chose a janitor for smoking so he could punish William Easton for denying him insurance, and he chose various victims throughout the series for simply lying; the only justified case was Bobby Dagen, since his lies were about surviving John just to gain money and fame. Even still, he brutally sacrifices Bobby's wife by burning her alive just to further punish him (even though she did nothing to deserve it).
• The Sociopath: Other than a sliver of affection for Jill, his apprentices (excluding Hoffman) and a few other people, John doesn't seem to be capable of empathy. This is lampshaded by one of his victims, Anna, who while no saint by any means, calls him out for his lack of compassion. While corrupting Hoffman early on in their relationship, he even explicitly states that purging feelings of empathy or remorse are necessary to do what he does.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: He almost always speaks in a low, calm voice. The only times he raises his voice in the series is in an argument with Hoffman while blackmailing him and when he's reprimanding Cecilia about how her medical scam exploits people who are dying and hopeless.
• Start of Darkness: The events that led to John taking up his "work" are detailed over several films. To be more particular, it was after being Driven to Suicide and living after being diagnosed with cancer and his unborn son's miscarriage that he became Jigsaw.
• Stealth Mentor: He sees himself as this, more so for some individuals than others. It almost never works, and, with few exceptions, he doesn't feel any remorse or disappointment when they fail and die.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: His colon cancer is part of his motivation for putting ruined people through the wringer as Jigsaw. Being forced to confront his own mortality, he became obsessed with helping society and forces people to appreciate their lives by torturing them. Given his occasional moments where he defies this reasoning, though, it's implied that his frontal lobe tumor from the cancer clouded his judgment and made him unable to grasp morality anymore up until his death.
• Thanatos Gambit:
  • At the end of Saw III, a bedridden John gives Jeff the chance of forgiving him or killing him. Jeff takes the latter option. In doing so, not only does John's death set off a trap that kills Jeff's wife (as she had been placed in a device that correlates with John's heart rate monitor), but John plays a tape (or drops it with Jeff playing it instead in the movie's Director's Cut version) in which he reveals that Jeff's daughter has been trapped in a location that only he knows about.
  • After Saw III, all of the games he planned and were run by Hoffman are this, but it isn't until Saw 3D when his actual plans are pulled off.
• Theme Serial Killer: He's mostly a simple Poetic Serial Killer whose motives for each of his victims, while all sharing the status as a form of punishment on John's behalf, tend to vary drastically. However, plenty of the scenarios he plans for multiple victims, particularly the longer ones such as the Nerve Gas House in Saw II, the Fatal Five's Trial in Saw V and the Murderers' Trial in Jigsaw, tend to have people whom John targets for a specific type of reason or otherwise share something in common with one another. Many of his traps are also based on or resemble historical execution devices that fit together within his theme of justice.
• There Is No Cure: A variant in his backstory. When he was first diagnosed with colon cancer, John was explicitly told that there's no treatment for it. However, he went through numerous examinations and therapies afterwards. Likely downplayed, as when John found out about an experimental therapy that could successfully treat late-stage cancer, he repeatedly asked his insurance company Umbrella Health to pay for it, only for its senior vice president for membership and claims William to tell him in person that it wouldn't be financially feasible for the company, due to John's age and low chance of recovery.
  • Saw X shows that the aforementioned "experimental therapy" was a scam, unfortunately for him.
• To the Pain: He really enjoys going into detail to his victims about what his traps will do to them.
• Tom the Dark Lord: This Evil Genius Serial Killer who later becomes a borderline Dark Messiah is an unassuming old man named John.
• Torture Technician: His mind is capable of creating some of the most horrifying torture machines on film.
• Toxic Friend Influence: It goes without saying that Amanda would have never turned out as bad as she did if not for him.
• Tragic Villain: And how!
  • From what the original seven films give: he lost his son in a miscarriage, he went through a messy divorce, he contracted cancer and was denied health insurance, and he grew disgusted seeing those unappreciative of the precious gift of life that he was being denied. He basically went through a job-like situation.
  • Jigsaw adds even more to that: he lost his nephew in an accident after Mitch deliberately sold him a motorcycle with faulty brakes, and his cancer was left untreated until it was too late because some intern plastered his nametag onto a wrong X-ray.
• Trap Master: He mostly engineers mechanical death traps combined with mind games, but he also arms his various lairs with booby traps to dispatch any interference from the police.
• Übermensch: Dissatisfied with the rest of society, John created his own radical moral code focusing on the savouring of life, seeing modern civilization as making everyone waste themselves in hedonism, and setting himself the goal of rejuvenating humanity's survival instinct. And his method is not nice, either: he tests his victims' personal willpower by putting them through ironic hells that require severe self-sacrifice to escape lest they die. While most people see him as a murderer regardless of his claims on the contrary, he's still been able to influence the tortured survivors around him to his ideals, even beyond the grave.^note Although, some ended up disadhering to said ideals or twisting them. For instance, his disciple Amanda ended up becoming a Straw Nihilist. It helps that John's character takes some influence from Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, who was himself inspired by Nietzsche.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: He's not really ugly as much as being a plain looking old man, but his ex-wife Jill looks way better for her age than John does his own.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Zep showed him kindness and compassion. John's response was to use him as a ploy in a scheme. And he chastises other people for being ungrateful....
• Villain Has a Point: A recurring theme throughout the series. As brutal and thoroughly inhumane as John's methods are, they really have made most of the people who were put through his games and survived to the end (or at least survive long enough to have some Character Development) genuinely appreciate their lives and untapped potential and desire to clean up their acts. That being said, Saw II and III show that John's philosophy doesn't work for everyone (namely Amanda, who's been tested twice and never fully loses her self-loathing and self-destructive streak, to the point she's convinced herself that John's tests don't really change anyone), and that John's only solution to this inefficiency is to keep re-testing the people who don't change until they eventually die.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the first film, when he's outwitted and restrained by Tapp and Sing, he descends into an uncharacteristically angry motive rant before slitting Tapp's throat and practically killing Sing. Keep in mind: these are two perfectly normal and hardworking police officers only interested in saving lives.
  John: Yes, I'm sick, officer. Sick from the disease eating away at me inside. Sick of people who don't appreciate their blessings. Sick of those who scoff at the suffering of others. I'm sick of it all!
• Villainous Legacy: He's killed in Saw III, but the series is continued on by his apprentices and the plans he's left for them to follow.
• Villainous Valour: He's not at all phased when confronted by armed police. He's able to fight off two detectives and continues to taunt another one who is beating the shit out of him. That said, he knows he's dying of cancer, so it's not like he has a reason to fear death.
• Villain Protagonist: Saw X is the first movie with John in an active role where he's the protagonist rather than the antagonist, as the plot is much more focused on him and he comes to an antagonistic match with Cecilia, who reveals herself to be far worse than him.
• Villain Respect: In the climax of Saw X, John praises Carlos after the latter willingly "bloodboards" himself several times to protect a man he'd only met once. Once they unchain themselves from the Bloodboarding Trap, John calls Carlos a "little warrior", and gifts him a bag full of money taken from Cecilia.
• Villains Never Lie: The key difference between himself and his apprentices; John may not fully tell the truth or give Cryptic Conversation, but he doesn't outright lie.
• Villains Out Shopping:
  • In Saw II, John is in the middle of eating cereal when Eric, Kerry, and the SWAT team backing them barge into his lair at the Wilson Steel Plant.
  • Saw X gives him a lot of these moments, given he plays the role of Villain Protagonist. He's seen writing a will at a coffee shop, sleeping on a couch, traveling around Mexico, sitting at a park while sketching The Rack, and going to a store to buy a liquor bottle to give as a gift.
• Visionary Villain: He genuinely believes that he's helping people realize their true potential by bringing them to the brink of death. He's essentially a self-help guru whose idea of "self-help" involves a severed limb or two. It goes to show that he thinks the person who caused his ex-wife to have a miscarriage should be given a second chance.
• Walking Spoiler: In the first film at least, his identity is hidden until the very end. Nowadays, though, it's no secret, even in marketing.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Deconstructed. John genuinely believes that his methods of "rehabilitation" will benefit his victims in the long run, thanks in no small part to his own Near-Death Experience that renewed his outlook on life. Additionally, his general politeness, the clear messaging behind his traps, and the fact that he always provides a way to survive all seem to imply that he, unlike his apprentices, actually wants his victims to survive. However, due to his Lack of Empathy (likely a side effect of the tumor in his frontal lobe), he fails to consider that most other people will not only be too terrified to think properly during their tests, the ones that survive will be so traumatized that they will be unable to appreciate the rest of their lives.
• Wham Shot: He provides one at the end of the first movie when he gets up after Faking the Dead, and the climax of Jigsaw when he takes off his hood to reveal he's the mastermind of the barn game.
• When Elders Attack: John's a dying, frail old man who is nonetheless resourceful and strong enough to overpower people in far better health, with a propensity for devising some truly complex life or death scenarios.
• Wicked Cultured:
  • He exhibits an avid interest in history.
    • Upon meeting Bobby at his book signing in Saw 3D, John tells him an anecdote of Egyptian lore about how liars were taken to the quarries as punishment if they break their oath (obliquely using it in relation to Bobby's book about his fake story as a Jigsaw victim, and as a warning for him to stop advertising the book before he gets into real trouble).
      John: You know, history is a passion for me. In ancient Egypt, if you were speaking under oath, you were required to say, "If I'm lying, take me to the quarries." That mean anything to you?
      Bobby: No, sir. No, sir. It doesn't.
      John: Well, I'll tell you what it means. It means, if you knowingly lied on the public record, that you were subject to a period of enslavement.
    • In Saw X, he offers a little history on the Gigli saw (specifically, about how its creator Leonardo Gigli invented it for surgical purposes) while explaining Valentina's trap to her.
  • He also quotes Hamlet in a deleted scene from X.
    Cecilia: Is this madness?!
    John: Perhaps. But in it, there is method.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: He was driven to murder after losing his unborn son and being diagnosed with cancer.
• Would Hurt a Child: John frequently involves children in his traps if he has a grievance with their parent.
  • In the first movie, he order Zep to kill Lawrence's wife and daughter if the latter fails his test. Zep was just moments away from pulling the trigger on the two before Tapp barged in.
  • Downplayed in the second movie, where he has the teenage Daniel abducted and put in potential danger at the Nerve Gas House to pressure Eric, although he had Amanda look out for him and eventually move him to a comparably less dangerous place inside a safe.
  • In the third movie, he locks Jeff's daughter Corbett in a room with limited air supply, with little clarification on whether or not he intended her to actually die if Jeff failed his game. Hoffman, fortunately, frees her, even if he did it just so that he could be seen as a hero after the events.
  • Averted in the tenth movie, when he and Carlos (whom he had once met to fix a bike for him beforehand) are forced into a blood-waterboarding trap by Cecilia. John cites how wrong it is to force a completely innocent child into a trap, and when it activates, he tries to take the brunt of the liquid and risk drowning just so Carlos won't be harmed. Carlos, however, willingly risks his own life to save John instead, earning John's respect in the process.
  • The implication seems to be that Jigsaw has no problem threatening a child with death to punish a victim, but directly putting one into a trap is too far for him. After all, a child would fail his litmus test about someone who was wasting or not appreciating their life, since they barely have started living it.
• Younger Than They Look:
  • John's autopsy at the beginning of Saw IV notes that he was 52 years old when he died. Tobin Bell was ten years older than that when he was first casted as the character for the first movie, and he clearly looks like a man in his 60s in all of the original seven films. It's likely that the casting of a considerably older actor was done to more convincingly depict the frailty of John as a cancer patient.
  • It's pretty exaggerated in Jigsaw and Saw X, where Bell was 74 and 80 years old during their respective filmings, yet John remains the same age.

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"Game over."

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