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" America&amp;#039;s financial industry wasn&amp;#039;t doomed by credit-default swaps and sub-prime lending so much as what they represented: a disregard for the fundamental purpose of American business. Which is, more or less, to find out what people want \u2014 and give it to them. Want to do really big American business? Find out what people didn&amp;#039;t even know they wanted, and give that to &amp;#039;em.  Like the Saw franchise, for example \u2014 all six films, with the latest opening on Friday. We love to be scared in dark theaters nowadays; that much has become obvious. But beyond the stories of escalating mortal (and moral) traps and life-or-death decision-making, who could&amp;#039;ve known just how many moviegoers around the world would get behind the gory dismemberment, evisceration, and other creative dispatching of Jigsaw&amp;#039;s unlucky victims? On the one bloodied hand, Saw is a triumph of Hollywood marketing. On the other, we&amp;#039;ve learned that this series has become the movie equivalent of McDonald&amp;#039;s: It&amp;#039;s cheap, enduring, and you pretty much know how it&amp;#039;ll taste every time out. That&amp;#039;s not a bad thing. While heaven (and Jonathan Safran Foer) knows it&amp;#039;s not a meal you&amp;#039;d want to consume every day, it&amp;#039;s the basis of a mutually beneficial relationship we shouldn&amp;#039;t take for granted. Plenty of people complain about the proliferation of &amp;quot;torture porn&amp;quot; like Saw, Hostel, and other low-budget splatter brands, but let&amp;#039;s face it: In America, there is nothing irresponsible about giving $342 million worth of viewers (since 2004) what they want. Especially if it can be provided inexpensively (budget for six Saws: $50 million, plus marketing) and reliably, with a gruesome new adventure dropped every October into a theater near you. That&amp;#039;s some honest spending right there \u2014 exactly the kind of responsible business behavior that our bankers, politicians, and certainly Hollywood execs ought to have learned by now. With its severed fingers, extracted teeth, intersecting chains, and other permutations of suffering aligned in the form of Roman numerals, the Saw sales pitch is almost as intriguing a commodity as the product. It confers both a cheekiness and an elegance largely absent from the films&amp;#039; grisly abattoirs, and it also brushes the higher echelons of art that the movies generally abandoned any pretensions to a long time ago. (Though their serialized nature allows for more complex storytelling than, say, the Friday the 13th franchise.) Saw&amp;#039;s posters, billboards, and Web sites are all almost too aspirational \u2014 too good \u2014 for the bluntly reductive joys of the films they&amp;#039;re trying to sell. Still, the contrast reflects refreshing ambition from Hollywood, which is more than you can say for the flat-lining, on-the-nose campaigns that sank generally superior horror entries like Drag Me to Hell and Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body earlier this year. But those films didn&amp;#039;t die by marketing alone, just as Saw VI won&amp;#039;t thrive simply by virtue of its bus-stall aestheticizing. There&amp;#039;s bound to be plenty of visceral payoff for the young nihilists composing the bulk of the audience. Yet there&amp;#039;s also a recession-era message in its primal appeal, which has evolved from that of a tense, gritty, $1.2-million indie shocker five years ago to a sweeping, mind-blowingly sadistic affirmation of the American survival instinct.  Indeed, the multiplex has become a haunted house of worship where we come together annually, celebrating our Darwinistic determination to live by any means necessary \u2014 to just get through our torment, whether it&amp;#039;s unemployment, Iraq, Afghanistan, the health-plan crisis, or being a Titans fan. The murderous traps of Saw&amp;#039;s Jigsaw Killer, after all, are individually customized to each of his subjects&amp;#039; psychological shortcomings; his whole purpose is to empower these otherwise rotten captives. Jigsaw even has disciples and apprentices to carry out his messianic mission. Crazy, yes, but Freddy Krueger he&amp;#039;s not; Saw&amp;#039;s protagonist may be the only contemporary horror villain whose motivation is to provide opportunity. All of this doesn&amp;#039;t make the series any less preposterous as it chugs along, but it does entitle each new Saw entry to a topicality that&amp;#039;s unusual among the scores of other products rolling off Hollywood&amp;#039;s horror assembly line. We&amp;#039;re mostly showing up for some seasonal genre carnage, but we&amp;#039;re also intrigued, subliminally or not, by the implications surrounding each wicked kill. So while Saw is the highest-grossing horror franchise ever, it&amp;#039;s probably no coincidence that the box-office has gradually dropped off as both the ads and the movies themselves trade its thematic heft for more inventive gore (Saw V&amp;#039;s $56 million take last year was way off the pace of Saw II&amp;#039;s staggering $87 million in 2005). I wouldn&amp;#039;t attribute this strictly to franchise fatigue, either; the most recent Final Destination film amounted to nothing more than a 3-D parade of outlandish deaths, and it blew the previous FD entries away. Its filmmakers knew what its audience wanted, and it gave it to them. So here&amp;#039;s hoping for a little more reciprocal appreciation from the Saw masterminds as they prepare new iterations in 2010 and 2011, with next year&amp;#039;s Saw VII also capitalizing on that public (and even more profitable) clamoring for 3-D. In an accelerated horror marketplace best characterized by the next six months&amp;#039; worth of vampire thrillers (Daybreakers), remakes (The Crazies, A Nightmare on Elm Street), and new indie-underdog sensations (The House of the Devil), it&amp;#039;s worth remembering how good we can have it every October. Like the Yankees, only cheaper. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. RELATED LINKS:  EARLIER: What&amp;#039;s Next \u2014 Death Panels: The Movie?  STEPHEN MARCHE: The State of the Culture Is... Scared?   THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: S.T. VanAirsdale&amp;#039;s Column Every Wednesday   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a6627/saw-horror-movie-franchise-102109/>