Saw: 6 Jigsaw Traps That Were Impossible To Escape From

Highlights

• Some traps in the Saw franchise are designed to be impossible to escape, like the Silence Circle and the Angel Trap.
• The Laser Collar trap appears easy to escape, but the twist reveals that it was impossible for Halloran to survive.
• The Brazen Bull trap was impossible because the victim’s husband lied about surviving a Jigsaw trap, leading to her horrific death.

The Saw franchise is infamous for the traps that victims must escape after Jigsaw, or his disciples, locks them into one. The franchise is now ten films strong, and with a huge number of traps having been showcased over that time, fans of the gory films can’t resist developing their methods for getting out of these traps if they place themselves in the same situation.

Of course, it is already much easier with careful planning time to think through one of Jigsaw’s traps, than being stuck in such a situation with pressure on. However, even with that extra time, there are some traps that viewers are unable to find an answer for, prompting them to call these traps impossible to escape from. Fortunately, this is not the case with the traps in the latest well-received entry.

6 Silence Circle

Saw 3D

• Impossible Because: Noise Is Inevitable

There are some traps in the Saw franchise that are designed to be impossible, and others in which, though some might think them doable, the likelihood of success is ridiculously low. By the seventh installment, many of the traps were just ludicrous and could hardly be escaped, including the silence circle.

A woman awakens with metal spikes pointed at her that will fire into her body and kill her if she screams, and the only way to escape is for another person to pull a key hanging in her stomach out through her throat. Her mouth is open the entire time, meaning there is no way to try and force down any noises she might make as this key is dragged out of her. The likelihood of not making a noise during this extreme process is so low that this might as well be called impossible. Jigsaw would have and did call this sort of trap wrong, his words were often memorable but his disciples forgot them quickly.

5 The Angel Trap

Saw 3

• Impossible Because: The Key Was Useless

Amanda took over designing some of the traps that victims faced in the third Saw movie, meaning that it is a little dubious to call them Jigsaw traps. However, these traps still occurred at his behest until the time he decided to stop her. The Angel Trap was one of the most brutal examples of this, the first sequence in the film, and one that saw a woman trapped in a machine that would tear apart her rib cage in one minute.

The Jigsaw video appeared to tell her that the key in the jar of acid in front of her would save her. All she had to do was reach in and grab it. However, even after she did so, she unlocked the padlock with the key, only to find this didn’t disarm the trap, and there was no way within the time limit to get it out of her. This proved that there was no real way to escape the trap, as Amanda later admitted when found out to be just killing for the sake of it by her mentor, during the strange conclusion that took place concurrently with the end of Saw 4 in the timeline.

4 The Laser Collar

Jigsaw

• Impossible Because: He Won And Was Killed Anyway

The Laser Collar appears initially to be one of the easiest traps to escape in the Saw franchise. The final two players in the game awaken with collars around their necks that will kill them unless they admit to the reason they deserve to die. They are both told that they will live if they simply admit their guilt. However, there is something more going on than meets the eye here.

The final two are Logan and Halloran, but Logan unveils himself after faking his murder to be the one behind the games, not Jigsaw. Despite Halloran having admitted his guilt and the reason he deserves to die, Logan kills him in the end, making this trap impossible for Halloran to have ever escaped, because Logan had no intention of ever letting him get away. This ending was similar in some ways to the most recent film finale in the franchise but still managed to stand apart.

3 The Brazen Bull

Saw 3D

• Impossible Because: Her Husband Lied

The Brazen Bull might be the most horrific death that any victim has faced in the Saw franchise, made all the worse because the woman who suffered it didn’t even deserve to die. She was the bait for her husband, who had lied about surviving a Jigsaw trap and was now forced, under penalty of his wife dying horribly, to succeed in the trap he had lied about surviving.

Unfortunately, the trap he had lied about, putting hooks through his chest and pulling him via a winch up to a device that could save his wife, was pretty much impossible. He got surprisingly close, but the skin on his chest was always going to rip attempting this, causing him to fall and his wife to die horrifically, being worse than just burned alive by the trap.

2 The Classroom Trap

Saw 3

• Impossible Because: The Door Was Welded Shut

Another case of Amanda giving the victim no real escape from a trap in Saw 3 came in the classroom, where a man was held in place by chains attached to various parts of his body. He had to pull them all out of himself, already brutal, to escape. But beyond that, the timer for a bomb ready to go off only gave him ninety seconds to get them all out.

This trap was on the verge of feasible, but after ripping chains through his hands, shoulders, and side in quick succession, he still had one in his jaw which he either could never have escaped, or doing so would have killed him before the bomb could. This trap was savage, there wasn’t enough time, it might have been impossible to do without killing yourself, and after all of that, when the police finally broke in, they found that the door was welded shut. Even if he’d somehow survived ripping his jaw apart, there was no way for this victim to get away from the bomb blast.

1 The Pendulum Trap

Saw 5

• Impossible Because: There Was No Escape

One of the well-remembered traps from the later Saw films that helped inspire other horror movies is the pendulum trap in Saw 5. This was an interesting design, putting murderer Seth Baxter in a position where he had to sacrifice his hands, having them brutally crushed in vices, to stop a swinging pendulum that was going to cut him in half in one minute.

This could have been a great trap, but even after Seth sacrificed his hands, and they were crushed, likely beyond repair, the pendulum kept swinging. This wasn’t a trap that had any chance of survival, because there wasn’t anything that he could have done to stop the pendulum, showing the differences from the way Jigsaw operated in the early Saw movies.