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Inspiration for Saw/Jigsaw

posted 8 months ago by harro (497)
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Some people in the UK who grew up watching a bizarre children's educational/entertainment show name 'Jigsaw' that aired in England between 1979 and 1985. As an Australian, I never saw it but memory lane story on my Facebook feed revealed this English children's show. I believe it was called Jigsaw because there was a little character in the graphics that appeared to be a jigsaw piece who used to talk in an electronically modulated voice. The show was incredibly bizarre but what elevated it to absolutely creepy level was a character called the Noseybonk. The Noseybonk was a person who wore a black dinner suit whose face was covered by a hideous stark white mask with a great big, long nose, googly eyes and big teeth. He would silently go around parks or in the outdoors to the tune of amusing background music behaving unpredictably and somewhat odiously manner. Now that I'm aware of this creepy spectacle that some English children grew up with, I have to ask them the question: Do they think that show was an inspiration for both the name of the Saw movies and was the Noseybonk partly the inspiration for the Jigsaw puppet itself? I'm aware that a character in one episode of the X Files was allegedly inspired by the Noseybonk, but is it possible the young architects (who I believe were Australian) of the Saw movies were somehow aware of the old Jigsaw TV show and inspired..

[–] [deleted] 8 months ago

James Wan has something of an obsession with creepy dolls, his instagram username is 'creepypuppet'.

Billy the puppet from Saw, Billy the ventriloquist doll from Dead Silence, Annabelle from The Conjuring and he also wrote M3GAN.

He has went on record stating that he saw Poltergeist (1982) at a young age and the clown doll in it scared the life out of him. That seems to be the source of the doll/puppet obsession. Many people have remarked how Insidious is practically a remake of Poltergeist.

So what's the deal with Wan and creepy dolls?

"I would just jot it down to watching Poltergeist at a very young age," he says. "That was definitely a very influential film for me, and I saw it at a very young impressionable age, and it made a huge impression on me, and that creepy clown doll definitely scarred me for life. But I also like to say that I'm a big collector of these kinds of things. I love my collectibles, my action figures, and so naturally, the idea of making movies based on one of these things coming to life is exciting for me. It's thrilling, and, of course, in the horror genre, it means I can have a lot of fun with a story like that."

https://ew.com/movies/m3gan-james-wan-creepy-dolls/

I think it's unlikley Wan was inspired by a British children's television show.

[–] [deleted] 8 months ago

Wan on his inspiration for the character of John Kramer/Jigsaw.

Being the hypochondriac I was, I carted myself off to have tests. I had an MRI, and it was such a weird experience to be just sitting there in the waiting area of a neurology ward, being nervous about getting an MRI. And that really was the impetus for the [Jigsaw] character. I started to think, “What if you were given the news that you had a tumor and you were going to die soon? How would you react to that?” So I started to imagine this character who had been given a time limit, who’d been told that he had a year, two years to live, really, and that his condition would slowly kill him. Then I sort of attached that to the idea of somebody who put people in a literal version of that. Instead of a doctor telling you, “You have a year to live, make the best of it,” this guy would put people in a situation and say, “You have 10 minutes to live. How are you going to spend those 10 minutes? Are you going to get out of it?” I thought that would be a good way to capture the idea of why somebody would stick two people in this room and give them a time limit to get out.

https://www.avclub.com/saw-creators-leigh-whannell-and-james-wan-1798222299