Spiral: From the Book of Saw Director Shares Look at Scene MPA Forced Him to Cut

Each entry into the Saw franchise has been more gruesome than the last, which includes the most recent entry, Spiral: From the Book of Saw. One scene was so intense that director Darren Lynn Bousman nearly cut it from the film completely, with the theatrical release instead offering merely a few frames of the encounter. Bousman recently took to social media to share a photo of the sequence, which only offered a glimpse of the disturbing makeup effects, while also describing how the scene was originally set to play out. He also shared his hopes to get to release a better look at the scene in all of its glory.

“I’ve always had issues with the MPAA. None more so then [sic] my fourth Saw film. So, so much had to go in order to get this thing in theaters… I’ve worked with master effects artist [Francois Dagenais] for a decade plus now… it pains me that many will never see some of the insane work he did on this film,” Bousman captioned the post. “There was an entire sequence shot where the killer took a knife in peeled all of the skin off of a body. It was so goddamn intense. Cutting through the skin and muscles and fat to expose the skeleton. It was a thing of art. In the end only, a few seconds remained in the final cut. Thankfully, no one was more vocal than producer [Oren Koules] with the MPAA and fought tooth and nail to preserve every frame we could. Maybe at some point they will allow me to release the ultra hard-core cut… One can dream!”

Bousman previously detailed that one scene was cut that was not only viscerally intense, but also didn’t tonally hit its mark.

“One of the scenes that had to go, it was a violent scene, I can’t go into what it is and I’ll tell you why: when I made Saw IV, I shot a trap and parts of it were used in Saw V. So there’s a chance they’ll still use it, but we shot a scene with Samuel L. Jackson that was the aftermath of a trap, where something surprising happens, that’s all I can say,” the director shared with ComicBook.com. “But, the reality was, [writer] Josh [Stolberg] was on set that day, it didn’t work, it was kind of funny but unintentionally funny. It just didn’t work. I made the stupid mistake of telling people about it once and it’s become lore, ‘We wanna see it in the director’s cut!’ No, you don’t, you don’t want to see it, trust me. There’s a lot of sh-t that I have you don’t want to see. It’s not in the movie for a reason. But there was a scene and it was really violent and also comically bad at the same time.”  

Stay tuned for details on the future of the Saw franchise.

Are you hoping to see the scene in full? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!