The Saw fran­chise draws new blood with the Spi­ral trailer

The Saw fran­chise of hor­ror movies nev­er real­ly went away, hav­ing gained a new entry as recent­ly as 2017 with the ori­gin spin­off Jig­saw, and yet the new­ly unveiled trail­er for Spi­ral feels like a come­back of sorts. Saw was the defin­ing scary-movie series of the 2000s, at a time when the once-robust tra­di­tion of the hor­ror movie sequel was seri­ous­ly flag­ging, and now it’s returned to pour the blood back into our cineplexes.

Though only sort of, it would appear. The trail­er below bills the upcom­ing Spi­ral as ​‘From the Book of Saw’, which means we’re either deal­ing with a sec­tion of the Gospel that didn’t make it through the Bible’s final round of edits, or this will be more of a reboot than prop­er sequel. Be that as it may, the clip con­cludes with Chris Rock chained to a radi­a­tor with noth­ing to free him­self but a rusty bone saw, so some things nev­er change.

Rock (who also claims a ​‘sto­ry by’ cred­it on the screen­play) stars as beat cop Zeke Banks, a lif­er detec­tive who stum­bles onto the case of a life­time along­side his new rook­ie part­ner (Max Minghel­la). Zeke smells a ser­i­al killer with a pen­chant for cops, iden­ti­fi­able by the spi­ral insignia rec­og­niz­able from mur­der-pup­pet Jigsaw’s face, and he’ll need his vet­er­an-of-the-force father (Samuel L. Jack­son) to help out if they want to survive.

Saw pio­neered the dis­rep­utable sub-genre of so-called tor­ture porn, films that shocked and tit­il­lat­ed audi­ences with sadis­ti­cal­ly cre­ative dis­plays of bod­i­ly harm, in this case involv­ing ghast­ly con­trap­tions rip­ping jaws and limbs this way or that. While the new film seem­ing­ly adopts the struc­ture of a police pro­ce­dur­al, it wouldn’t be a Saw movie with­out some of the old ultraviolence.

More sur­pris­ing than any­thing else is Rock’s involve­ment, both as star and con­tribut­ing writer. He hasn’t had a huge pres­ence onscreen as of late, but this year he’s set for a two-pronged come­back between this and the newest sea­son of TV’s Fargo.

Rock’s good with the no-BS schtick that could be eas­i­ly fit­ted to a cop per­sona, and with Dar­ren Lynn Bous­man return­ing as direc­tor (he han­dled install­ments two, three, and four, not to men­tion Repo! The Genet­ic Opera), we can rest easy that we’re in trust­wor­thy hands. Until they’re amputated.

Spi­ral comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 15 May.