"Saw - I"

The Jigsaw Killer character was introduced in the 2004 film Saw through the character Dr. Lawrence Gordon's recounting of his first killings.

Jigsaw is described as a mysterious person who kidnaps people he sees as wasting their lives and attempts to "save" them by administering various inhumane tests. As opposed to other killers, Jigsaw does not actually intend to kill his subjects.

The purpose of his traps is to see if the subject has the will to survive, and thus inflict enough psychological trauma for the subject to appreciate their life and save themselves from their own demons.

As his victims increase, the media dubs him The Jigsaw Killer, or simply Jigsaw, because of the jigsaw puzzle-shaped piece of flesh that he cuts from unsuccessful subjects, a practice explained in Saw II as reflecting each subject "was missing a vital piece of the human puzzle; the survival instinct".

Throughout the first film, his identity remains uncertain; the unstable ex-cop David Tapp suspects that he may be Dr. Gordon, one of the film's two protagonists, and near the end of the film Dr. Gordon and fellow protagonist Adam Faulkner are led to believe it is the hospital orderly Zep Hindle.

Only at the end of the film is it revealed that the Jigsaw Killer was in fact a terminal cancer patient of Dr. Gordon's, John Kramer, who spent the entire movie posing as a corpse to watch the test he created for Faulkner and Dr. Gordon.