Featured Image Credit: Lions Gate Films
Topics: Film and TV, Horror
Shola Lee
The producers of the notorious Saw franchise have finally revealed how the terrifying needles trap from the second movie was created.
Ah, Saw, the horror franchise guaranteed to make you squirm. We've seen everything from a very bloody pendulum trap to a public execution, but one scene stays firmly stuck in our memory — the dreaded syringe pit.
And now, producers of the hit movies have explained just how long it took to create the thing that fuelled our nightmares for the entirety of 2005. If you have the stomach to find out, take a listen:
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The pit of nightmares sealed the fate of returning player Amanda Young (played by Shawnee Smith), who was unfortunately thrown into the pit and spent two excruciating minutes desperately trying to find a hidden key to unlock a door that leads to an antidote.
Amanda, predictably, wasn't successful in the task and quickly subcomes to Saw's wrath... and the ridiculous volume of needles she ends up being buried in.
But we bet you can't guess how many needles exactly were in the syringe pit?
None. Yep, not a single needle - they were all fake, but there were 120,000 syringes and workers spent a gruelling four days manually pulling out the needles and replacing them with plastic ones so no one actually got hurt.
As one producer explained in a previous interview: "One of the things we had to do to aid in the stunt was we had to line the needle pit completely with foam... to make it safe.
"We had to make these syringes and we took the needle tips out one at a time, we had a crew of people sitting there day after day pulling needles out."
Despite starting with 20,000 needles, the team soon realised that they didn't have enough.
"Then we got another 40,000 needles," the producer explained. "So now we have 40,000 needles, we have an entire team that's their entire job, they come to work to pull the needles out the plastic one end as they do all day."
And that's not exactly what you expect your day-to-day job will involve when you're working on one of Hollywood's biggest blockbusters.
If that didn't sound disgusting enough, the producers decided to add buckets of slime to the pit, because that's exactly what a pit full of needles needs.
"We decided to add a few buckets of slime to the annual pit to really make it gross. And what that did was actually make the needles slide a little bit more.
"The needles actually moved around for them nicely and they were able to swim in them a little bit more and you can actually move through syringes rather than walking on top of them so it really helped us out."
Swimming around needles, we imagine that Shawnee Smith wasn't thrilled with this scene, but at least it make her acting a bit more authentic.
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