Hey, 'Saw V': I Want My Halloween Back

Posted at 10:40 AM Oct 24, 2008

By Kenny Herzog

"If it's Halloween, then it must be Saw."

With those eight simple words (for scaring your teenage daughter), All Hallow's Eve officially lost its innocence, and had been leased out as the cultural property of a gutless, humorless horror empire that, for future generations, will symbolize the cynical cinematic hallmark of Shocktober.

Now, let's be clear here. My opposition to Saw and the ghoulish holiday's sudden symbiosis isn't puritanical. If anything, it's totally elitist. I'm a devout collector of obscure horror, pulp and grindhouse filmmaking, and possess an equally rabid affinity for teen slasher flicks and gleefully gory exploitation-fests.

But the Saw series has always struck me as pathetically second-rate distillation of the Eli Roth school of self-conscious genre regurgitation, but without the sense of glee that even Dario Argento obviously took in his nauseatingly graphic work.

I guess at the core of my complaint is I didn't realize Halloween was like a McDonald's or an Arby's: some brand name you could rent out and franchise, re-appropriating its sinister connotations as if it were a right of passage.

At least when Friday The 13th epitomized the day's impending arrival, the association happened organically, and wasn't wrapped into its marketing plan as a matter of privilege. Not to mention they would have been campy enough to actually release it on the friggin' day itself if it landed on Halloween, and not a week before so it can cheat the looming competition of Changeling and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. Losers.