All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned!
Symbolic Mutilation is a recurring element in Jigsaw's tests in Saw. While not always the case, the traps tend to inflict an injury on their victims based on the reason they're tested.
Saw:
- Paul was a man who attempted "suicide" twice by cutting himself, however Jigsaw accused him of not actually intending to kill himself but just wanting attention and pity from others. Thus, Paul was stripped naked and placed in the dead center of a massive maze of barbed wire, and had to find his way out within a time limit. Jigsaw even spells it out for him by telling him that he only needs to attempt the maze, and therefore cut himself, if he doesn't want to die. If Jigsaw's accusation is false and he truly is suicidal, all he has to do is sit there and do absolutely nothing. He'll starve to death eventually. Paul ends up disembowelling himself trying to escape the maze.
- Mark, who called in sick to work even though he wasn't, had to find the combination to a safe out of hundreds written on the walls while using only a candle for light in the pitch-black room. While naked and covered in flammable jelly. Predictably, he ended up fumbling the candle and burning to death. In other words, he got fired.
Saw II:
- Michael, the victim of the Death Mask, was a police informant to a corrupt cop who spied on people. In his test, he has to cut out one of his eyes to get the key that will free him from the trap.
- Xavier, a drug dealer, was meant to search around a giant pit of used needles to get the key to an antidote safe. He forces Amanda, who happens to be a former heroin addict, to do the task instead.
- In a What Could Have Been example, Addison was originally going to have a different trap than the Razor Box (which was meant for Gus), in which she had to press her face onto a hot iron, sacrificing her looks (as a prostitute, that's one of her key features) to save her life.
Saw III:
- Troy, the victim of the Classroom Trap, repeatedly returned to prison despite having a good privileged life. In the trap, numerous chains pierce his body and keep him enclosed like in a prison cell, which he has to pull out in order to free himself. Plus, the door to get out of the classroom was rigged by Amanda, which, while rendering the trap inescapable, can be seen as a metaphor to confinement.
Saw IV:
- Ivan, a serial rapist, is strapped to a bed (which is the most typical place to have sex in) and forced to gouge his eyes, which have "led him blindly astray", in order to escape. If he doesn't, the trap will rip his body apart, which caused endless suffering to his victims.
Saw V:
- The final trap of the "Fatal Five" reveals to the two remaining survivors of the five-person game that if they had worked together, they each could have given two pints of blood each instead of five.
Saw VI:
- The Pound of Flesh puts two corrupt money lenders at odds with each other, both giving all they had to give to survive.
- The Shotgun Carousel gives William the choice (although not obligatorily) to choose two people out of six from his team of analysts in his corrupt medical insurance company. This symbolizes that William's policy only covered one third of the company's insurance cases. William must also give himself stigmata to save the two people he deems being hurt for.
Saw 3D:
- Evan, his girlfriend, and two of his friends find themselves in a trap for being racists, in which Evan's competence is fundamental for the others' lives. His task? Peeling the skin off his back to reach the lever that will stop the trap.
- Bobby got rich writing a book about how he survived one of Jigsaw's traps. Except he was never placed in one, he made the whole thing up. His final test is to recreate the very trap from his book: piercing his pecs with meat hooks and hoisting himself up to connect some wires. However, pectoral muscles aren't strong enough to support a person's full body weight, and the hooks just rip right out of his chest before he can even get off the ground. Jigsaw evidently wanted to teach him that he absolutely sucks at designing traps, since not only is his trap literally impossible to complete using the "intended" method, but it actually has a built-in Cheese Strategy Bobby never noticed that would have made it a cakewalk — the hooks were large enough that he could have either stood in them, put them under his armpits, or hook the belt loops on his pants, no mutilation necessary.
Jigsaw:
- Carly had accidentally given a woman she robbed an asthma attack, and since she took a medication or an inhaler from said woman, she ended up dying. The trap she gets put through has her poisoned with three syringes that force her to confess the money she stole from the woman, and as Jigsaw puts it, she is now the one who'll die without the right medication. She ends up getting injected with all three by Ryan, one of which contains acid that melts her neck from the inside out.
- Mitch had previously gotten Jigsaw’s nephew killed in a crash caused by selling him a bike that he knew was in poor condition. Jigsaw used the motor of said bike to power a spiral-shaped blade trap that ends up flaying Mitch alive.
Spiral:
- In the Subway Trap, Boz is forced to rip his tongue out for lying about innocent people being criminals.
- Fitch has to rip his fingers off in the Finger Trap. He previously killed a man just because he flipped him off, and the Spiral Killer says that his fingers pulled the trigger.
Saw X:
- The Eye Vacuum Trap would have had required the unnamed Custodian to twist all the fingers in his right hand one by one, based on how he tended to use his hands to pick up on patients' belongings.
- Among the group of phony oncologists who scammed John out of his money:
- Gabriela pretended to have been cured of cancer, so her trap is set up like a simulated cancer treatment, featuring loads of irradiation that end up burning her face.
- Valentina and Mateo pretended to be surgeons, so John forces them to perform surgical acts on themselves (amputating a leg in Valentina's case and excising brain tissue in Mateo's case). They're tested on skills they don't actually have, but falsely claim to, with Mateo's test having the bonus point of matching John's cancerous brain tumor (on top of being a Call-Forward to Lynn's test in Saw III).Mateo: I don't know what the fuck all of these things are! Medical supplies, I think, and... And there's a fucking bonecutter?!
- Lastly in the post-credits scene where Hoffman pops up, Henry Kassler is abducted and chained to the ceiling of the first film's iconic bathroom with it shown that he lied about the scars on his stomach being his war wound. To make his lies true, John and Hoffman have planted a saw trap onto his stomach with the outcome left for the audience to decide.
