What's Next?: Horror Icons by Decade

With the "100 Scariest Films of the..." threads running rampant through this forum, and with the Halloween season in full swing, I've been thinking about iconic figures that represent their decade. Horror films, after all, tend to reflect the tensions inherent in the social, economic, and political spectrum of the times.

I'll posit that Michael Myers, although not showing up until 1978, represents the 1970s. American suburbia had crystallized into a quantifiable concept since at least the 1950s, but a growing crime rate and distrust of thy neighbor laid the groundwork for The Shape. He invades and violates the sacred midwestern oasis, bringing violence, death, and insanity but also revealing the underlying truths that everything already wasn't alright: the teenagers are smoking, drinking and having sex, and Michael lays them out for the world to see.

Anyone disagree? Please do. I'm proceeding from the assumption here that the Slasher genre represents the mainstreaming of what we think of today as horror, but the preceding decades don't have to be Slasher necessarily. 

What specific icon represents the '80s, '90s, and 2000s? Once we've established that, let's make predictions about what will be next. 

I wholeheartedly agree on Freddy Kruger as the personification of '80s horror iconography. 

Before we get to him, however, let's establish exactly what comprises a horror icon. I've narrowed it down to three points: aesthetic, weapon, and modus operandi.

Aesthetic most assuredly means the icon's look, but also includes the look of their surroundings. Michael Myers, for instance, is identifiable by his lack of identity and the "every town" feel of Haddonfield, IL. Myers's mask erases his features, while his mechanic's jumpsuit is a drab bluish-grey lacking in personal touch. This could hint at what I'll continue with when discussing Freddy, the post-60s Baby Boomer generation lacking direction. 

His weapon, the butcher knife, is very distinctly his. It's simultaneously evocative of the traditional family kitchen setting (straight out of the 1950s, as I'm sure the "Mr. Sandman" song is supposed to evoke in the second movie, and the '70s (American Graffiti, Grease and Happy Days) were known for looking back fondly at twenty years before) and perhaps, ironically, the Happy Homemaker Housewife, while being very phallic in nature. Myers's erratic breathing, especially during the climactic closet scene with Laurie, hints at sexual dysfunction on the part of our icon.

As for modus operandi, Myers is unique in that he stalks in plain sight. Due to the nature of the holiday, Myers can prowl the streets without anyone batting an eye (unlike, say, Jason Voorhes). He also has an animalistic body language and behavior (the stalking, muteness, head tilt, and he likes to play with his prey before moving in for the kill), positing that Myers is tapping into his lizard brain and/or charging forward like a Great White Shark (which the color scheme supports, three years after Jaws).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Schwartz 

Sometime in the longago, I made a thread about how home invasions were all the rage in 00's horror because of the shift from Cold War paranoia to more personal, hit-em-where-they-live terrorism fears.  I think there's something to that, but that trend didn't produce icons on the level of Freddy/Jason.  Honestly, the puppet from Saw is probably the most iconic horror image that came up in the last decade, which sucks to think about.  I'd like to think that Chigurgh's pageboy haircut will be more clearly remembered by horror aficionados than that nonsense a few decades down the road.

Great points, and I'll probably discuss Jigsaw in a few days. What I'm hoping to accomplish with this thread is to show how horror icons aren't necessarily representative of quality (although most will be quality) but of popular trends at the time. This may spell doom for the next decade.

Scream (1996) definitely captures the zeitgeist of the 1990s. Jigsaw is a product of the '00s, including elements of home invasion, technology, and the question of torture. More thoughts on them later.

Psycho came out in 1960. Is Norman a reflection of the past, or a glimpse at things to come?

I'll add as a fourth parameter music, but by contrast what's important here is that the music be universal. If it's too much a product of its time (as music is a much more blatant player in a film's narrative than the subtext inherent in aesthetic, weapon, and modus operandi), then it will ultimately date the film. 

Disclaimer: A long term goal of this thread is to look at the progression of sequels through the decades and whether or not the icon evolves over time, and then remakes/reboots as well. Halloween and a Nightmare on Elm Street will be specifically targeted, and perhaps Scream versus Scream 4 as the latter functions as both a sequel and reboot.

Moving on to 1984, and the advent of...Freddy Krueger. 

There's a sense of escalation inherent in A Nightmare on Elm Street. In many ways it can be viewed as a commentary on Halloween itself, as it deals with much of the same subject matter but narrowed. The setting has been kept, suburbia, but now the focus is on a particular street and the demographic of that street: rich '80s yuppies. It's apparent that Elm Street is the nice part of town (in Springwood, ...Ohio, although the first movie sure looks like California), and the exigence that Freddy brings to Elm Street is the tension between classes.

Nancy and her friends are the children of the Baby Boomer generation. There are themes inherent in A Nightmare on Elm Street, such as sexual abuse and the loss of innocence, but whereas Halloween stood as a criticism against the youth generation here the parents are culpable for the fate of their children. These parents are sellouts, and we're starting to see the cracks. From the start Tina's mother is indifferent to Tina's nightmares, and is implied to be a lush and more concerned with her boyfriend and sex life. At least the nuclear family is maintained in Halloween: here both Tina and Nancy's parents are divorced. Meanwhile, the lily white Tina rebels by dating the obviously low class, low income Rod who also happens to be played by an actor of Cuban descent (in contrast to the rest of the all white cast). 

Along comes Freddy, the ghost of the Free Love generation. Construing the timeline here, Freddy is burned alive in the late 1960s, an act of democratic protest on the parents' part in direct opposition to the failure of the bureaucratic judicial system. In retrospect, now that they're all rich and settled into their domestic lives, that act of protest is viewed as a point of shame and taboo: the first rule of Elm Street is you don't talk about Freddy Krueger. 

Aesthetic - What's key about Freddy is he's very distinct. Unlike Michael Myers's lack of identity, Freddy is all identity: the fedora hat, the burned skin, the striped sweater, and the glove. What's key to all this is that even in life (this is only taking the first few movies into account), Freddy was lower class. A janitor, wearing raggedy old clothes. In the dream world, Freddy's boiler room is evocative of rot and entropy. Wherever he goes he brings the stench and infection of lower class, and when you're in the dreamworld you're slumming with him. 

Weapon - What hasn't been said about this classic bit of iconography? It's primal, phallic, and intimate all at once. When Freddy kills you it's up close and personal, and it's a violation. He's raping you (and how else can Tina's death scene be viewed as anything less than a rape?), but he's also infecting you with his rust and decay. His DIY claws, built through sweaty labor. 

Modus operandi - the dreams continue the theme of violation and the sense of escalation. If Myers was violating the home and personal space, Freddy is going where no one else can go. Both Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street are concerned with psychology and approaching mental illness through modern science, but in the former it's not so much criticized. Myers is presented as a rare case for the otherwise successful Loomis. Loomis isn't so much criticized for being  a psychiatrist, for failing at his work, as it's commonly accepted that no one could reach Myers. He's criticized that he let Myers escape. Freddy, however, is approached with the failure of the full force of '80s technology: the dream clinic scene exemplifies the looking-inward of the '80s, and how ineffectual technology can be against the forces of nature. Freddy is, after all, a force of nature combining nursery rhyme myth with the fairy tale fear of all parents that a monster will show up in the night to steal away their children. 

The '80s was aerobics, self-medication, and self-help: the start of the problem of entitlement in the contemporary United States. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by DARKMITE8 

 

Interesting that you view angry mob vigilantism (conjurs up images of witch trials and Klan lynching for me) here as "democratic" and "protest" (it's not like he was a bra). Course, he was a pedo and had it coming in a EC "just desserts" kinda way, but then, so did the parents too, I guess, depending on how you view their actions.

They weren't in the right, but they were unanimously responding to a failure on the part of the American Justice system, and made a choice together for better or for worse.

Remember, Craven makes it a point to have Nancy's mom say, "the lawyers got fat and the judge got famous". It's obvious that the Elm Street parents were once in opposition to figures of authority, but have now become the thing they hated.

If I have a chance today, more thoughts on Silence of the Lambs (1991) as the apex of the Slasher genre, personifying the "get ready to root for the bad guy" phenomena that ultimately resulted in Jigsaw. Even later Scream (1996) looks forward to the future of the genre, and is ultimately the death rattle (until remakes!).  

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.D. Bob Plissken 

I think we honestly have a tie for the 90's.  Ghostface (of Scream) is obviously one of the most iconic for that decade, but I think the following is also equally evocative of the times and one that has been overlooked thus far in this thread.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a snobbish aspect to both characters that I find interesting.

Alright, so let's break down Dr. Hannibal Lecter in both cultural context and character. 

The novel Silence of the Lambs was released in 1988, a sequel to 1981's Red Dragon which introduced Dr. Lecter, and itself takes place in 1983. Previously Red Dragon had been adapted into 1986's Manhunter, in which Brian Cox plays Hannibal Lecktor. Although these books, and the subsequent film adaptions, are generally referred to as "Thrillers" there's a fine line between a Thriller and a Horror film, as thrillers often borrow from the conventions of Horror, especially the Slasher sub-genre. Even if it was not his intention, it's evident that Thomas Harris was writing his very popular novels during the height of the Slasher. 

Let's take a moment to define exactly what horror is, because up until now the focus has been on the Slasher/Stalker sub-genre. This is because, for all intents and purposes, the slashers that originated in the '70s (in a few days I can take a look back at proto-Slasher Norman Bates) and the formula that was perfected in the '80s were the successors to the Universal Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Mummy from 1923 to 1960). I'm not as familiar with the Universal Monsters, however, and welcome anyone with the time or inclination to make an argument for their significance as reflections of their decades. I'd also argue that Godzilla personifies the 1950s Atomic Age, but that's for another day...

Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw attempts to negotiate an ongoing debate over the definition of "Horror", specifically "Art-Horror" vs. "Realist Horror". Noted philosophers Noel Carroll and Cynthia Freeland take sides, with Carroll restricting horror to requiring a supernatural monster, while Freeland does not. Furthermore, "Caroll restricts the horror genre to artworks organized around a monster that is impure and loathsome" and cannot be understood by contemporary science. He acquiesces that the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter could possibly be considered monsters because their psyches are beyond scientific comprehension. Freeland, by contrast, encompasses Psycho, Halloween, and Silence of the Lambs in her "realist horror" that depicts very real human beings committing monstrous acts.

Silence of the Lambs (1991) the movie capitalizes on the growing identification of American audiences with the villain, or in this case "Anti-Hero". Where did this come from? It became apparent as the money flowed and the Slasher flourished (A Nightmare on Elm Street Part IV was the highest grossing horror movie in history until Scream broke the record) that Americans were fascinated by the bad guy, and actually rooting for him to kill those snotty teens. This could be due to bad acting or bad writing, or a thirst for gore, but mostly it was because the killer was just having so much damn fun. Hannibal is no different.

He is indeed a monster, but he's a monster we love and even root for to eat his jailer. Why is this? 1991 had barely broken the '90s in, and was still recovering from the toilet bowl-coke snorting decadence and materialism of the '80s. Released in February, Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" was eight months away from mainstreaming the Grunge movement and ushering in the '90s. The Anti-Hero, after all, is so identifiable because he represents the spirit of rebellion, anti-establishment, and rejection of social norms, behavior which is so embraced by youth, even if in this case going against the norm is eating human flesh.

Hannibal is indeed anthropomorphic taboo, and he'll dissect your mind as much as your body. What's different from Hannibal as opposed to Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger is Hannibal appeared in a high brow, Oscar award winning movie, but there's very little that separates the character from his trashy counterparts. 

Aesthetic - The slicked back hair, non-blinking eyes and jump suit would be enough, but then there's the mask. Not only is the legacy of Myers and Voorhes channeled here, but it's also evocative of a muzzled animal. Hannibal, with his hunched shoulders and bared teeth is like a cat ready to pounce. Those eyes are hypnotic. His lair, as well, has the appropriate appearance of a castle's dungeon, and to go there is to descend down into hell. The one time we do see him outside his prison cell, his tropical wear and bad wig are totally unnatural. It feels right that he's behind glass, but the irony is he pictures the rest of the world as a zoo that he's watching. 

Weapon - His teeth, his hands, whatever he can get his hands on, but mostly his mind. That's what signals the escalation from Myers to Freddy to Hannibal: Myers used a weapon, Freddy grafted the weapon onto himself, but Hannibal IS the weapon. 

Modus Operandi - Again, he lures you in with a false sense of comfort and the promise that he'll teach you something about yourself. There's a combination here of the rising popularity of pop-psychology in the '90s, glorification of the criminal celebrity (everyone from O.J. Simpson to Casey Anthony) and especially the serial killer (Sam Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, although Dahmer hadn't been caught yet), and blaming the victim. Hannibal is quite dismissive of his own victims (whom the sequels label as "rude") and Buffalo Bill's victims, and indeed implies an air of "they had it coming" while maintaining a sense of superiority. The cannibalism is his gimmick, but it's much more than that as it plays into the themes of consumption and introspection that run through the novel and movie. 

Silence of the Lambs is actually to the horror genre what The Dark Knight was to the superhero genre: validation for all those geeks out there that their niche interest could be embraced by a wider audience. Unfortunately, it was such a game changer as to invalidate the very genre it cribbed from (and set a precedent that would be copied by thrillers and the procedural for over a decade before being re-embraced by Saw in 2004). As a result, the old guard Slashers had faded into almost non-existence by the mid-'90s. Then came Scream...

I'd also like to add the irony that Dr. Hannibal Lecter is the love child of Dr. Loomis and Michael Myers, the psychiatrist that became the mental patient.

Great points all around. Gumb is truly the more abhorrent aspect of Silence of the Lambs, whereas Lecter is the charming devil that lures us into a false sense of security. The irony of his brilliance being so unknowable is that we accept (much like the Joker in The Dark Knight) just about any feat he can accomplish because no limits have been assigned to the character. Gumb, by comparison, wears his limitations on his sleeve and he is not only unsympathetic but completely obvious. His getting caught is inevitable. This is fascinating when compared to Dolarhyde of Red Dragon, who is given a relatively sympathetic storyline (if only he would settle down into a domestic relationship rather than continue with the killing...). 

Although the villain as hero or anti-hero had been evolving as a subtextual element of the Slasher genre since the beginning, the '90s would lay the groundwork for it being text by the time Jigsaw is introduced. If Silence of the Lambs distracts us, for the most part, from the questionable aspects of Hannibal in order to make him more sympathetic, ten years later a character is introduced that asks us to accept and even embrace everything about him, including a nonsensical philosophy. That, however, will be discussed later. 

Silence of the Lambs had proved the death knell for the Slasher genre. It had already been on its way out, but the early '90s saw the classic Slashers of the '70s and '80s bow out with a whimper: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), The Texas Chainsaw Masscare: The Next Generation (1994), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), and Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) may have had their passing moments but were overall embarrassments. 

Candyman (1992) and Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) were exceptions to the rule, of course, but the sub-genre needed an injection of new blood. New Nightmare serves as a test run of sorts for Craven, as it deals with mise en abyme and meta-commentary much more blatant than its successor two years later. 

Scream heightens the sense of "blaming the victim" that has been inherent in the Slasher genre since the beginning. To summarize the evolution of the chosen Slashers so far: Michael is barely human, had no motivation outside of being "pure evil", and although the teenagers are rowdy they are not deserving of death; Freddy Krueger is all personality and now has a motivation, but his motivation is vengeance for being burned alive for being a child killer; and Hannibal kills you if you're rude or in his way, so if you operate by the rules of quid pro quo and be fair with him he'll be fair with you. 

Scream, however, and Ghostface by extension, allows two parameters by which the victim can escape death or avoid being a target in the first place: answer Ghostface's horror movie quiz successfully, or follow the rules of surviving a horror movie. 

Aesthetic - There had been a movement from Michael's mask to Freddy's burnt but identifiable face to Hannibal's ironic human face hiding a lizard brain underneath. Although Ghostface is a departure in that he's wearing a full costume, with mask evocative of Edvard Munch's famous expressionist painting "The Scream", what's important here is that Ghostface is very much not a character. The persona created with the voice changer and the costume is the by-product of Billy Loomis and Stu Macher. Their personalities are something wholly unique, as seen by the last fifteen minutes of the movie, and the costume and persona is actually a pastiche of several horror movie tropes: everything from Halloween (1978) to When a Stranger Calls (1979) and so on. 

Weapon - Ghostface's hunting knife, although impressive and identifiable, is not overly important to the character. What is important is the damage it can do: it's obvious from the start (and by the Stab spoof in Scream 2) that the violence is supposed to look as real as possible. When the blade pierces Casey's chest, it appears to slide in and that emphasis on realistic gore is maintained throughout the rest of the picture. 

Modus operandi - Ghostface invites his victims to play a game, asking the now famous line "What's your favorite scary movie?" This is a movie that asks us to questions our relationship with horror movies, especially that of Halloween (which is playing in the background during most of the third act).

In the end, the irony is that the majority of these characters are indeed likable, and well-acted. Billy and Stu's thesis is dismissed as Sidney, not a virgin, survives. The victim wins out as the killer is disproved. This won't be true in the 2000s...

Sir, I bow to your meticulous eye. I was in a bit of a rush last night and didn't qualify my argument.

Ultimately, the argument of the movie (blaming the victims for why they're being killed) is disproved by the hypocrisy of Stu and Billy. Ghostface as a separate persona, however, stays relatively pure as Sidney appropriates the voice changer at the end and kills them. If you notice, both Stu and Billy violated Randy's rules: Stu is shown drinking, and Billy has sex with Sidney.

Point being, the killer's motivation is that he's crazy, and he doesn't even believe in his own philosophy (which falls apart under scrutiny, anyway). Jigsaw, however, actually uses the same M.O. of the "game" but fully believes in it and expects his victims to as well.

Scream has a distinction, as well, of featuring killers that are youthful. This isn't a first (Cutting Class, starring Brad Pitt, springs to mind), but it's the first to tackle youth-on-youth violence in a socially aware fashion. This was prophetic of Columbine and the media's blame of violent movies for that incident. Most Slasher movies, by comparison, up to this point featured youth being oppressed by older Slashers as symbols of Authority. Ghostface's costume, however, is named Father Death and implies an ironic subversion on the youth ideal of invincibility.

Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back on this, grading papers is killer.

I don't have it in me just yet to hack at Jigsaw, but Plissken's comment has me pondering prismatic effects of Scream on the horror genre as a whole. If Silence of the Lambs shamed Slashers by doing it high-class, and Scream deconstructed the sub-genre, then there was really nowhere to go from there. So, instead of coming up with something new, Hollywood went back to the well. 

The years following Scream showed copycats like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998), followed by the old guard being let back out to play: Halloween: H20 (1998), Jason X (2002), and Freddy vs. Jason (2003) have their defenders, but it's generally accepted that those movies don't represent those franchises at the top of their game. 

If Freddy vs. Jason was the last hurrah of the old guard, it immediately passed the torch to remakes.

Now there have always been remakes, it's a long Hollywood tradition, but what's especially fascinating about these remakes is their focus. In just four years there were several American remakes of Japanese horror films, a sub-genre that depicted the ghosts of malevolent young girls, usually associated with water to some extent: The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), The Ring 2 (2005), Dark Water (2005), and The Grudge 2 (2006). 

Simultaneously, the zombie sub-genre picked back up after being stagnant for years (basically since the heyday of Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Return of the Living Dead (1985)). 28 Days Later (2002) reignited the craze, followed b Resident Evil (2002), a remake with Dawn of the Dead (2004), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and even the return of Romero himself with Land of the Dead (2005), and the trend continues to this day with diminishing returns. 

With Hollywood seeing how well the Japanese remakes and Dawn of the Dead were doing, they turned to the Slasher classics proving that this has all happened before, and will happen again: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) started it all, to debatable results and mixed reviews but fiscal success. This was followed by countless number of remakes, of which we're still feeling the effects today. 

What's provocative about the Torture Porn sub-genre that paralleled these other trends, and bled into them to differing degrees, is that it's provocatively American. Notice I didn't say uniquely American, as the Japanese Audition (1999) more than likely laid the groundwork for Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). Still, these movies have a lot to say about the tensions and trends permeating the United States post-9/11. Whereas the Hostel movies actually attempt a thesis on xenophobia and the value of the flesh, no iconic figure sprung up from those films.

Jigsaw, and the doll Billy, are the closest successors to the Slasher icon. Unfortunately the character is a bad conglomerate of Hannibal Lecter and John Doe from Se7en, as distilled through Mtv video culture. 

More later...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wayward_Woman 

I was thinking about this thread, and I was going to mention the spate of American remakes of Japanese ghost stories. It's startling how ubiquitous the pale-black haired girl ghost has been in Asian (though predominantly Japanese cinema). I don't know if it qualifies as an American Horror Icon, though I believe it can definitely be called a Japanese (perhaps, international?) Horror Icon.

And while I can't claim to be the authority on Japanese Horror, I think it's note worthy to state that so many of the antagonists tend to be female: Audition, Noroi: The Curse, even Paranormal Activty 2: Tokyo Nights (Though largely a riff on the American Paranormal Activity) features some classic japanese horror imagery. 

 

 There was something I read about how the ghosts act as an subversion of expected women's roles: Always slightly behind, relatively quite, shuffling towards you - but I can't remember from where. 

 

Maybe this is reading too much into it, but it's curious how most of these icons are, well, guys. Or at least males. Or at the very least, perceived as masculine. 

I stumbled upon rumblings online the other day of Sadako/Samara's hair working as a powerfully-coded symbol of a woman's sexual identity, suggesting raw power as well. 

In both versions we see Sadako/Samara or her mother's hair: we see (presumably) the mother brushing her hair in front of a mirror; we see Sadako/Samara's corpse and its mass of hair in the well, and also the long mass of hair covering her face when she kills Ryuji/Noah. 

Is there an archetype of hair in Japanese and Western culture? Hair is general a signifier of femininity and gender, even today. I'm intrigued as to why hair is such a powerful indicator of sexuality and status. 

I think the simplest answer is that men are viewed as more threatening and aggressive. There's also an inherent rape metaphor in how Slashers attack their victims, and a fascinating role reversal when the Survivor Girl (inevitably) uses the Slashers weapon against him. See Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon for a nice distillation of Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws, which is an incredible read. 

Which brings me to 2004, and the rise of a horror icon that would reign at the box office every Halloween season for seven years. Lacking a new Slasher icon, rather a resurgence of remakes giving the old Slashers a nice new gloss, Jigsaw takes the title for having appropriated elements from the Slashers while adding a 21st sensory flavor. 

What The Ring and Saw do have in common is a displacing of blame from the attacker to the victim. Whereas the human personalities behind Ghostface turned out to be frauds with a false philosophy, there are very clear and consistent rules that must be followed with both Samara and Jigsaw. In the former's case, if you watch the tape you have seven days to live. If you make a copy of the tape and get someone to watch it you're saved, but you've jeopardized someone else's life. With Jigsaw, he never actually physically kills anyone for the entire series. Instead, he passes judgment on people and places them into circumstances in which they can potentially kill themselves, or in some cases kill someone else. This is all hidden behind a holier-than-thou self-help philosophy in which Jigsaw is actually helping his victims become better people. 

This is, as mentioned above, totally aping John Doe from Se7en (1995). What Andrew Kevin Walker and David Fincher knew, however, is that no one has the right to judge others like John Doe and Jigsaw do. That's why John Doe is kept anonymous, and ultimately dies at the end because he freely admits he's no better than his victims. Leigh Whannell, the writer of the first movie, however, does not have the grace or elegance of those two gentleman. What is created in the form of Jigsaw John Kramer, is a man that thinly disguises vengeance with righteousness. Nearly all of the people put into traps over the course of seven movies have a personal connection to Jigsaw, they've wronged him in some way. A former engineer and toymaker that nearly dies in a car accident and then is diagnosed with cancer, he positions himself as entitled to payback. From imdb.com, 'As stated by the producers of the third film, and Director Darren Lynn Bousman, Jigsaw is not considered an actual serial killer, but a "scientist" who is determined to initiate the survival instinct in his "subjects", believing that humanity no longer used its instinct of survival.' 

He is a malevolent product of our times. He's also an even more blatant rip off of the little-remembered Phone Booth (2002), in which Keifer Sutherland traps Collin Farrell in a phone booth with the threat of being shot all because Farrell is a cheater. In the end Sutherland gets away, but commends Farrell for fighting for his life. 

Aesthetic - Jigsaw is encompassed by three personas, although it's unclear how each informs the other. John himself wears a red hood and cloak, giving him the appearance of a monk or Darth. The doll, Billy, has a ghoulish appearance with white skin, black disheveled hair, a business suit, and red spirals on his cheeks that hint at the labyrinth the characters have been trapped in. He also rides a tricycle, and speaks in a baritone version of John's voice. There's also the pig mask that appears to only be worn by Jigsaw's apprentices, but I'm unclear of the logistics. John himself may wear the mask at some point, but there's so much retconning later in the series it's hard to keep track. The pig mask implies that all humans (at least those not John) are animals or meat for the slab. It's fascinating that although Jigsaw uses technology, it's all very outdated like VHS and cassette tapes. There's an implication of DIY here, although it's never explained how an out of work toymaker could get the money together to build these over-elaborate traps. 

Weapon - Although Jigsaw does slash a cop's neck in the first movie that cop does not die. Jigsaw does not actively kill anyone in all seven movies, but his traps do. The traps are a symbolic representation of what Jigsaw sees as a flaw in the victim's life. We know this because Billy spells it out pretty clear in a shtick that is laid out in the first movie and is stuck to relatively consistently. The traps themselves are generally set in dank, grimy basements, and as they are torture devices there's a hint of the medieval rack or possibly the Inquisition in these settings. Most are in dark places underground, hinting at the underworld or hell. They all are washed out, lit by shocking fluorescent lights, and hint at death and decay.  

Modus operandi - As has been spelled out, Jigsaw (or an apprentice) kidnaps a victim and puts them in the trap, with the hope that the victim overcomes the trap and has an epiphany with the experience. Several survivors (including Amanda, Hoffman, and Dr. Gordon) buy into Jigsaw's philosophy over the movies, and even those that don't become full-on apprentices are shown to be enlightened. Only one counterpoint is offered, a woman forced to cut her own arm off in the sixth movie that rejects any lesson Jigsaw hoped to teach her. At the beginning of each trap, Billy tells the victim he wants to "play a little game" over a tv screen or tape, and that it's up to the victim whether they "live or die". In the earlier movies John also nabs pieces of flesh from the victims, which is why the media labels himself the Jigsaw killer. This is mysteriously abandoned in the later movies because the writers are lazy and don't give a fuck.

Jigsaw has taken Ghostface's phone calls, even referring to the life-or-death situation as a game, and upped the ante. The video screens may even be borrowed from the tape in The Ring, but it's not blatant enough to be sure. Whereas Michael Myers reveled in stalking his victims and Ghostface liked to make them squirm before attacking, Jigsaw uses technology to monitor his victims' every moves. This could be an attempt at meta-commentary, with Jigsaw as the director and the "game" being a scripted movie that Jigsaw has orchestrated, but maybe I've thought about it too much. 

What bothers me the most about this movie series is the filmmakers' claims that Jigsaw is in the right. It's having your cake and eating it too, because the masses want guts and blood but they don't want to feel guilty about their urges. When a character dies in Saw, the rabble justify their enjoyment with "well they didn't fight hard enough" or "they didn't want to live." These movies cheat, because very rarely do any characters actually survive, and even in the later movies (when Amanda and then Hoffman take over) the traps become inescapable. However, by that point the formula has been clearly established so the audience doesn't even notice the trap is inescapable because they've become so accustomed to victims never escaping.