30 Day Horror Challenge-Day 13: A formidable antagonist

For the next 30 days (or whenever I stop being lazy and finish it), I will be giving my fingers short bursts of exercise by completing the 30 Day Horror Challenge, found here. Hopefully it will give you a bit of insight into what horror is for me. Don't forget to check back every day for a new installment.

Day 13: A formidable antagonist

I wanted to be clever with this one, and to come up with someone you mightened have thought of, but my choice, especially under consideration, has to be Jigsaw, of the Saw films. I'm afraid this makes for a boring read, because he has all the obvious traits; intelligent, ruthless, violent, passionate. The cancer patient who subjected people to heinous life threatening traps is so formidable, not even dying less than halfway through the franchise can stop him. Regardless of the diminishing quality of the films (and increasingly repugnant gore), Jigsaw is the puppet-master behind several apprentices who carry on his legacy, all of which inevitably lose sight of his cause. The latter Saw films have a lot hinged on the apprentices straying from Jigsaw's strict rules that gave people a fair chance at survival, and though it appears it all descends into anarchy and that Jigsaw was actually a pretty lame 'mastermind', the series continuously comes around to everything working out exactly as he intended. Even though he was dead. From like three fucking movies in. Beat that.

30 Day Horror Challenge-Day 04: A movie that kills off countless main characters

For the next 30 days, I will be giving my fingers short bursts of exercise by completing the 30 Day Horror Challenge, found here. Hopefully it will give you a bit of insight into what horror is for me. Don't forget to check back every day for a new instalment.

This poster makes no sense...

A movie that kills off countless main characters

Saw: The Final Chapter, or Saw 3D, depending on if you saw it in cinema (which I did, and I have to hand it to the film, it was great 3D). I've always enjoyed the Saw films overall as a series that has a nice overreaching arch, almost like a TV show, but as individual films, they start to fall apart after the Darren Lynn Bousman entries. At least with his films, there was the potential that characters would escape the traps, and there was always the tension that they might not. By this final entry, they did away with the tension and just used the traps as ways to display their spanking gore effects. Literally ever character who is put in peril in this film meets their maker, and boy howdy is it boring. I don't watch films for effects, I'm far more in to a good story, but this truncated-feeling instalment is borderline the former area. Incidentally  there was supposed to be a Saw 8, but the studio decided late in the game to just have the one film, eliminating story and tension in favour of blood and guts and 3D. But hey, it's a film that kills off countless main characters (and a film series that does the same), for better or for worse. In this case, the worse.

Saw 8 might do better.