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As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Think of it like a reverse bear trap...
- The traps we see in the initial flashbacks with Tapp and Sing start building up the film's horror at a quick pace:
- The Reverse Bear Trap (pictured). Even though Amanda escapes the trap, it's still disturbing. If the reverse bear trap had activated, then her mouth would have been permanently ripped open, as Jigsaw puts it himself in her tape. As if that wasn't grim enough, Jigsaw then shows her this outcome using a dummy head, which gets completely obliterated by the trap.
- The Razor Wire Maze. The cops on the scene noted that the wires cut so deep into the victim, that traces of stomach acid were found.
- The Flammable Jelly trap, as it's easily the most Sisyphean. You'd practically have to enter the combination twice over to get it from start to finish, all while being extra careful not to get the candle anywhere near your body or the wall.
- The fates of both Detective Tapp and Sing.
- Tapp's descent into mental instability, as well as his obsession with Lawrence, is pretty creepy if you think about it. This is a former detective, a man who has the resources and training of law enforcement, and he's delusional and absolutely obsessed with Lawrence, convinced that he's the reason his partner is dead. If Jigsaw's game hadn't happened, Tapp would have likely attempted to kill Lawrence himself.
- Sing's death by the quadruple shotgun. Though it's off-screen at first, the amount of blood splattered everywhere is enough to be disturbing. And then we see his head with a massive chunk blown out of it.
- The scenes with Zep in Lawrence's apartment, holding his family at gunpoint. Most people only talk about the traps and the games, but that scene is absolutely terrifying, especially if you have a family. Lawrence can do NOTHING to protect his family and, for all intents and purposes, thinks that they're going to die. Particularly painful is that Allison and Diana both display more distress when their captor is paying attention to the other than to them. Not only is Allison terrified for her daughter's safety, but little Diana is every bit as afraid for her mother's.
- The flashbacks to Lawrence and Adam's respective abductions are guaranteed to give you a couple jumpscares:
- Seeing a person in a pig mask silently crawl out of the back of Lawrence's car is fucking horrifying, especially at a mostly empty parking garage.
- Adam falls asleep in his apartment, and when he wakes up, the power's gone out. He picks up his camera and uses the flash to make his way through the pitch-black apartment, eventually getting startled when something giggles demonically behind him - a creepy-as-hell puppet someone’s left on his chair. After taking a baseball bat to it, he walks over to the closet, opens it, and activates the flash... The entire scene is extremely tense, with no music and barely any sound. Every time Adam takes a photo, you expect the flash to reveal something horrible... and then it does, when he gets ambushed by the same pig-masked figure (later revealed to be Amanda).
- Lawrence sawing his chained foot off, one of the singular moments that the entire film builds up to from the moment he and Adam first wake up. What makes it worse was that his head was rational and clear enough to wrap his leg with his shirt to cut off circulation and to bite on the cloth to withstand the pain. However, he wasn't rational enough to heed about three characters' statements that the game was over and nothing could be done anymore (or, as so many fans have pointed out, to use his shirt to reach the phone like he had told Adam before). It should be worth mentioning that all we see of the act is just Lawrence starting to cut the foot. The rest of the scene is just the sound of bones being sawed through and both men's agonized/horrified screaming.
- The whole ending. Adam thinks he's killed Jigsaw, only to find that the man he killed also has a cassette player. When he plays the tape and that Climactic Music starts up, the corpse in the middle of the bathroom gets up and takes off the piece of brain on the side of his head, revealing it to be fake. He turns, looks down at Adam... and we realize we're looking at the real Jigsaw. He was in there with them the entire time. Then he limps away from a terrified Adam to the industrial door, repeating the congratulations he gave Amanda: "Most people are so ungrateful to be alive... but not you. Not anymore." It sounds like he's speaking to the audience. Him slamming the door shut with a grim "Game over!" just adds to the creep factor.
- This line in particular: "The key to that chain is in the bathtub." Upon hearing this, Adam realizes with horror that he lost the key when he woke up in the bathtub and unknowingly let it get sucked down the drain, so his only chance to escape was lost the entire time. It gets worse in later films, where we find out that Amanda deliberately placed the key in there to sabotage Adam's opportunity to survive.
- Adam's screams as John slams the door shut are blood-curdling. They were so horrifying that James Wan, the movie's director and the best friend of Leigh Whannell (Adam's actor), had to leave the room because he was upset and close to crying.
