If there's one thing the Saw franchise is famous for, it's those spine-chilling traps – and any fears that Saw X isn't going to deliver on that front should be put to rest.
The trailer alone features fingers being bent out of place, large mechanical collars, a man trying to remove his own brain's cerebral tissue, rats seemingly running down tubes towards someone's eyes and much, much more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, coming up with new twisted ways to torture victims remains a difficult task for the filmmakers
"It's really, really hard," director Kevin Greutert tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on the cover. "Every year when I've been told we're doing another shoot I’m like, 'How do we do it?' Because a lot of it starts with the script, but sometimes the traps and cells are very shorthand. In the script, sometimes they are just as they appear, but usually, there are a lot of long meetings between assorted people – the writers, the production designer, the actors – where you just sit and hash through it.
"I have lots of books on medieval torture machines and other dark stuff, and sometimes we just pore through it and shoot ideas off each other," he continues. "Some of the traps have evolved quite a lot from how they started. And then you have to think about how to actually pull it off. I was very nervous about some of the things that we did; nervous on a safety level and nervous thinking it was just going to look ridiculous.
"Far more so than on the other Saw movies, we had to do a lot of testing," he adds. "Mostly in pre-production, but we wound up having to split the shoot into two parts – three weeks in November and three weeks in January – because it was so complicated. We had to make so many prosthetics and machines, and over Christmas, we spent the entirety of it figuring this stuff out."
Well, mark us down as very intrigued indeed. Saw X hits theaters this September 29, 2023. In the meantime, check out our roundup of the best horror movies to tide you over while you wait.
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That's just a snippet of our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX Magazine, which features The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on the cover and is available on newsstands from Wednesday, September 6. For even more from SFX, sign up to the newsletter, sending all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.
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