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Of all the victims in David Fincher’s “Seven,” Lust is the one that makes me shudder the most. We don’t see much of the deceased, and that makes it all the more horrifying. Instead, Fincher lets our imagination do all the work, later revealing a polaroid of the custom-made murder weapon and subjecting us to the sickening testimony of the brothel client who was forced to participate at gunpoint. It was also the scene I thought about in later years when I first watched 2004’s “Saw.” For me, the combination of baroque cruelty and the extreme sexual aspect provide a through-line from 1990s serial killer movies like “The Silence of the Lambs”<\/a> to the torture porn subgenre James Wan’s low-budget hit is often credited with kick-starting \u2014 and Fincher isn’t happy with that association at all.<\/p>\n “It was offensive to me on a certain level that when ‘Saw’ and those other movies came out, people said, ‘Well, torture porn really started with ‘Seven,'” he told Playboy<\/a> in 2014, adding a “F*** you” for good measure. Noting the film was “lurid” on purpose, he further emphasized that he and writer Andrew Kevin Walker were “extremely conscious of the fact that we were talking about torture, but we never actually showed it.”<\/p>\n “Saw” itself is pretty mild compared to what came after, but there’s little doubt it paved the way for much grislier and more nihilistic horror movies, leading\u00a0David Edelstein to coin the term “torture porn”<\/a> in 2006. Citing Greg McLean’s “Wolf Creek,” Rob\u00a0Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects,”<\/a> and “Eli Roth’s “Hostel” (all released in 2005), he likened them more\u00a0to gruesome ’70s exploitation flicks than ’80s and ’90s slasher\/serial killer films. But does “Saw” fit in this category? And is Fincher right to suggest it tarnishes the legacy of “Seven”?<\/p>\n Read more: All 20 Coen Brothers Movies, Ranked<\/a><\/p>\nWhat happens in Saw?<\/h2>\n