Horror junkies and moviegoers alike should be all too familiar with the name John Kramer. However, mass audiences know him better as Jigsaw or the Jigsaw Killer. For a total of eight feature-length films (discounting the soft reboot Spiral: From the Book of Saw), Kramer has tormented, humiliated, and murdered over 80 degenerates and authority figures in cold blood. After his introduction in James Wan’s Saw (2004), Tobin Bell’s John Kramer went on to become one of the most iconic and convoluted horror antagonists of all time, but his motives aren’t always crystal clear. While Kramer has declared hatred for murderers, viewers have been baffled for the last 18 years as Jigsaw continues to do nothing but murder — even indirectly — “to teach a lesson.” After all, holding a gun to someone’s head and forcing them to pull the trigger is still murder, whichever way you look at it.
What with Spiral debuting in 2021 (albeit to negative reviews) and Saw X — the franchise’s tenth installment — currently in theaters right now, there seems to be no more opportune time to recall Kramer’s complex history than right now. Even diehard Saw fans are well aware that the flashbacks-within-flashbacks and cryptic interactions have made the plot — while fascinating — extremely hard to follow. There seem to emerge multiple motives that propel John Kramer’s killing spree, whether he calls it that or not, but the message can get easily lost in translation what with all the intertwining stories. So, let’s take a closer look at Kramer’s biography, starting at the very beginning.
John Kramer started out as a promising civil engineer
One of the most notable locations in the entire Saw franchise is the Gideon Meatpacking Plant, heavily featured in Saw III. When John Kramer worked as a civil engineer, he founded an organization dedicated to providing low-budget homes to low-income residents with his lawyer-friend Art Blank. Kramer and Blank purchased abandoned real estate and renovated them into affordable housing. The Gideon Meatpacking Plant was one of several locations owned by Kramer, but he never intended to use the property to propel his business. Rather, he would revitalize the once-was slaughterhouse and revert it back to its intended purpose.
Sometime after, Kramer met and married Jill Tuck, who worked at an addict recovery clinic under the motto: “Cherish your life.” Ironically, Kramer would go on to claim that motto under different circumstances. For some context, John had always deemed the will to live as the most vital element of human nature. When he met William Easton at an event organized by Jill’s clinic, he learned that Easton had invented a business policy to decide which clients would get insurance from the company he represented: Umbrella Health. From John’s perspective, the mathematic equation presented by Easton completely disregarded a client’s will to live, a moral choice that he fiercely disagreed with.
John and Jill were with child until a family tragedy occurred
In 1994, Jill Tuck fell pregnant. John, inspired by the Gideon Meatpacking Plant, decided that his and Jill’s son would adopt the name Gideon. As John and Jill awaited the arrival of Gideon, John gifted Jill with a children’s bed and a ventriloquist puppet, Bobby the Puppet, which acted as the prototype model for Billy the Puppet, whom John uses as a mascot for Jigsaw’s killings later on. Despite happiness blossoming for John and Jill, the former grew concerned for the latter’s safety as she continued to work without maternity leave.
One time, John was forced to intervene when a brawl was incited between Cecil Adams and Gus Colyard, both of whom would become John’s victims. Cecil had complained about the long waiting times, which caused Gus to get violent and stir up an altercation. When John interrupted, he found all the more reason to worry for Jill’s safety, which turned out to be justified.
During one fateful night in the fall of 1994, John had parked outside of the clinic to wait for Jill when he was approached by Addison Corday, a local prostitute and another Jigsaw victim in Saw II. After being offered her services, John declined and instructed her to go home, remarking about her beauty and how this line of work didn’t suit her. Shortly thereafter, John saw Cecil running out of the clinic in a hurry. When John went inside, he found Jill squatted in pain and bleeding profusely. It turns out that Cecil had accidentally slammed a doorknob against Jill’s stomach out of anger, which led to a miscarriage.
Following Gideon’s death, John became a depressed recluse, withdrawing himself from Jill and Art, who frequently checked on him. Eventually, John divorced Jill.
John is diagnosed with terminal cancer and attempts to end his life
It should be mentioned that until this time, John had suffered a deteriorating physical condition that wasn’t named until after he divorced Jill. When John’s health worsened, he went to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, where Dr. Lawrence Gordon diagnosed him with colon cancer and a frontal lobe tumor. However, Dr. Logan Nelson, sometime during one of John’s earlier visits, mixed up John’s x-rays with that of another patient, hence his cancer had evolved beyond conceivable care and became incurable.
Thoroughly dissatisfied with his diagnosis (as anyone would be) and the careless mistake of Nelson, John spiraled into an even deeper depression, even attempting to take his own life. He drove his car off a cliff, fully expecting to die. Much to his amazement, he survived, thereby gaining a newfound appreciation for life and rediscovering his will to live. From surviving the crash, John had learned to cherish life only when death was imminent. From that moment onwards, John chose to test other’s will to live in the hopes that it would teach them to value not just their own lives but the lives of those around them.
John conducts his first test and becomes Jigsaw
Due to the altercation that led to Jill’s miscarriage and inadvertently their divorce, John chooses Cecil Adams as his first test subject. After observing Cecil for a while, John discovers that his experience with Jill hasn’t changed him, nor has it curbed his reckless behavior. At that moment, John decides to teach Cecil a hard life lesson; he drugs Cecil into unconsciousness using a rag soaked in chloroform and transports his lifeless body to his workshop. When inside, John strapped Cecil to a chair with blades through his wrists. After a brief exchange in which Cecil begs for his life and John reiterates the purpose of his test, John fastens a device consisting of eight horizontal knives to Cecil’s chair, positioning them right in front of his face.
In doing so, John explains in a foreboding monologue that he has forgiven Cecil for Gideon’s death, but the test was intended to change him. He informs Cecil that in order to free himself from his restraints, he must push his face through the treacherous blades. If he doesn’t do so, he’ll bleed to death. Cecil begins pushing through the knives, but as this is John’s first invention, it inevitably backfires. The chair suddenly breaks away beneath Cecil, allowing him to move freely. He goes to attack John, who effortlessly evades the mindless charge with a casual side-step, forcing Cecil to fall into a barbed wire cage and subsequently bleed to death anyway. John cuts a jigsaw puzzle piece out of Cecil’s skin to symbolize his lack of survival instinct. And then, Jigsaw is born.
John gets conned in Mexico by doctors and vows to take revenge
While John Kramer / Jigsaw did go on to torture a plethora of civilians as a way to make them understand the definitive choice between life or death, one of the driving forces behind John’s work is events that occurred in Mexico at the hands of a medical team. The mind-boggling events are fully depicted in Saw X, where John travels to Mexico after hearing of a particular medical program that treats those with terminal cancer. After the events in Mexico, John enlists the help of his assistant Amanda (and a certain detective, wink, wink) to capture the faux doctor and medical team that ran a low-key scam operation and took $250k from him.
The actions that unfold in Saw X serve as a sequel to James Wan’s Saw (2004) and a prequel to Saw II (2005), the latter in which John and Amanda continue to engage in setting up traps and provoking unsuspecting victims with the grueling choice of life or death. Dissatisfaction with his destructive illness and being tricked in Mexico ultimately pushes John over the deep end and causes him to dive further into his twisted work.
Jigsaw’s future and eventual death
In the future, after developing a thirst for blood and “justice,” John Kramer would go on to kidnap and torment several more degenerates that he deemed ungrateful, selfish, and conniving, all while making each test survivable on the condition that the subject tap into their will to live — if they have one. Among the test subjects, Kramer encounters Amanda Young, a recovering drug addict; Dr. Lawrence Gordon, Kramer’s oncologist; Adam Stanheight, a sleazy freelance photographer; Metropolitan Police Detective Mark Hoffman and many more. Young, Gordon, and Hoffman would go on to become John’s apprentices.
There would be far too much to cover in all of the Saw movies, but John all the rest is fairly straightforward. John continues preparing ‘games’ and testing subjects — some of whom willingly join his pursuit of justice — until his condition worsens to a vegetative state in Saw III. Amanda Young, Jigsaw’s only known survivor at the time, kidnaps surgeon Lynn Denlon — wife of Jeff — and orders her to operate on John’s brain to remove his tumor otherwise a shotgun collar will blow her head to pieces. In the end, Jeff completes his trial and confronts John, whom he murders by slicing his throat. Unbeknownst to him, Lynn and John’s lives were linked, meaning that should anything happen to John, Lynn’s collar would explode. While that seems to be the end of John Kramer, and it is, future Saw movies depict John in flashbacks that suggest Jigsaw has operated for far longer than we initially thought.
Through Young, Gordon, and Hoffman, John’s legacy continued and even long after his death, he still managed to terrorize victims for years.
