Forget About Jigsaw: Let's Talk About The True Champion Of The Saw Franchise

Hello. I want to play a game.

For eighteen years you have been watching the "Saw" movies and reveling in their distinct blend of gory death traps and labyrinthine storytelling. You have watched in awe while the series villain, John Kramer a.k.a. "Jigsaw," played by Tobin Bell, subjected his many victims to unthinkable scenarios, in an attempt to teach them that life is worth living, even if it means enduring horrific pain in the process.

You have elevated Jigsaw to the strata of classic horror movie villains, right alongside icons like Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and that Chucky doll. You have given him his due, and you are no doubt thrilled that his adventures seem destined to continue, perhaps alongside his most popular protégé, Amanda Young, played by Shawnee Smith.

But in your zeal to immortalize Jigsaw and Amanda, you have forgotten the franchise's most unsung villain, a deadly and creative force who, in the absence of Jigsaw and Amanda, kept the "Saw" movies alive and popular for four whole films. They are the rarely credited lynchpin of the whole "Saw" series.

Your goal is to remember their name before the next subheader reveals it.

Let the game begin.

Did you win?

Although Tobin Bell has long been the face of the "Saw" movie franchise, appearing on posters and in flashbacks long after his character's death in 2006's "Saw III," he took a backseat in the franchise to allow his disciples to continue his work. And while Amanda may be his most famous student, his most prolific and despicable was Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who used his position as an investigator on the Jigsaw case to hide his true identity as the franchise's primary antagonist from "Saw IV" (2007) through "Saw 3D" (2010).

It makes sense that Mandylor's contributions to the "Saw" franchise would be underplayed, at least for a while. Like Jigsaw himself in the original movie, Hoffman's identity as the killer was kept secret until the shocking finale of "Saw IV." And since the filmmakers behind the "Saw" series kept Tobin Bell in the series via copious flashbacks, and since the marketing department kept his image alive in all those posters, Mandylor was never truly able to take center stage of the franchise he effectively headlined for four highly profitable installments.

And this is a bit of a travesty, because Mark Hoffman was a fantastically vile villain who did things Jigsaw never did.

Every Jigsaw killer approached the game somewhat differently. While John Kramer focused on his potential victims' redemption by giving them the means to escape (albeit not necessarily intact), Amanda sadistically gave her victims no way out, merely teasing the possibility of survival.

Mark Hoffman's approach to his elaborate death traps was different from them both — he would frequently force his victims to make life-or-death situations for others. In "Saw VI," one of the most pointed films in the series, Hoffman traps an insurance executive in a situation he's familiar with: deciding, with cause or arbitrarily, which person deserves to survive and which doesn't. At the beginning of "Saw 3D" he places two friends in a trap in view of the public, where they can try to shove a rotary blade into each other's chests because they were sleeping with the same woman, or work together to murder her instead.

While the original Jigsaw once forced Amanda to dig into the stomach of a living person to find the key to her deadly reverse bear trap — which wasn't consistent with his stated purpose, to give all his potential victims a real chance to escape — that was an aberration. Hoffman made choosing who lives and who dies a regular aspect of his death traps.

And most interestingly of all, he found himself inside them too.

Hoffman didn't sneak around the sidelines, and when he put himself in the game he didn't lay around on the floor or do long-winded interviews. Hoffman actually put himself in death traps, and on at least one occasion he could have died if his victim made the right choice.

This makes sense for the character, since he intentionally kept himself at the center of the Jigsaw investigation, ostensibly to keep his fellow detectives off his track, but repeatedly running the risk of giving his game away. He could have stayed in the shadows rather than constantly dangle his identity in front of the very people who were hunting him. Hoffman, it seems, enjoyed a bit of cat and mouse, and he liked to play both roles.

"Saw V" culminates in a death trap where his victim, FBI agent Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson), has tracked Hoffman down to a room with a box filled with broken glass. Strahm is given instructions to trust Jigsaw, who he knows is really Hoffman, and jump into the glass in order to survive. But Strahm tries to game the system by throwing Hoffman into the box instead, unaware that the instructions he gave were genuine, not a trick.

Hoffman, enduring the broken glass, is lowered safely into the floor while Strahm gets disgustingly crushed to death above him, in what may very well be the most badass moment of the whole "Saw" franchise. (Except, of course, for the part in "Saw VI" where Hoffman managed to survive the infamous reverse bear trap, not by removing it, but by limiting and enduring its catastrophic damage to his jaw. It doesn't get much cooler than that).

Tobin Bell will always be the face of the "Saw" franchise. But for four very clever, gory, and highly succesful films — nearly half of the entire franchise — Mark Hoffman was its guts. And he deserves his due.