In Real Life, circular saw blades are usually meant for cutting logs and pieces of wood into smaller pieces. Not so in fiction.
In video games, for an example, saw blades can be found on the floor, often covered with blood, to show their true intent. The player needs to avoid them at all costs. Why are saw blades placed on the floor or middle of the room, is usually a mystery.
They also appear frequently in Death Traps or during a Lumber Mill Mayhem sequence.
See also:
- Death Course as one of its supertropes.
- Chainsaw Good when chainsaws are used as weapons instead.
- Deadly Training Area.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In Yugi's duel with Arkana, the duelists are trapped in their chairs. As their life points approach zero, saw blades close in on their ankles. The dub censored this by having the saw blades be "Dark Energy Discs" that would instantly banish you to the Shadow Realm.
- The end credits for the first eight episodes of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt show the two angels poised to meet a grisly demise. One of these shows them strapped to a table while a whirling circular saw slowly descends toward them. It seems no deathtrap can erase their cheery smiles, however.
Film — Animated
- Chicken Run: The Tweedys' new chicken pie machine has saw blades that can grind any chicken into meat. Ginger and Rocky had dodged them after they got inside.
Film — Live-Action
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. On the path to the hiding place of the Holy Grail, the first trap is a pair of whirling saw blades that come out of the wall and floor. If the person trying to pass by isn't on their knees, the saw blade in the wall will cut off their head.
- James Bond
- The World Is Not Enough has two helicopters with tree-clearing circular sawblades (ten on each) suspended below them attack Bond in his Cool Car. A missile takes out one, but the other saws his car in half lengthwise. The sequence is viewable on You Tube here: [1]
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- The World Is Not Enough has two helicopters with tree-clearing circular sawblades (ten on each) suspended below them attack Bond in his Cool Car. A missile takes out one, but the other saws his car in half lengthwise. The sequence is viewable on You Tube here: [1]
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: In the climactic battle, Judge Doom tries to kill Eddie with a giant toon circular saw that he produces from his own arm, being a toon disguised as a human.
Live-Action TV
- Knightmare: One of the many rooms a dungeoneer may end up entering is the Corridor of Blades, where they?re standing on an Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt, with saw blades jutting out of the walls. Their teammates would be tasked with telling them which way to run to dodge the blades, and the dungeoneer themselves would have to move out of the way. This trap had the highest body count of the show, due to how it was instant death if either the team or the dungeoneer messed up once, and the speed of the blades only made it harder for both to react in time.
Video Games
- ThirtyXX: Dustria level features groups of sawblade-like traps at the bottom of some areas.
- The original trailer for American McGee's Alice showed Alice sitting down for tea with the Mad Hatter, while he secretly pulls a lever beneath the table that politely raises a whirring lumber saw out of the floor behind her chair. No such scene was in the game, but a flashback to it in Alice: Madness Returns indicates it did happen (and is the reason Alice no longer trusts the Hatter).
- Badland: Circular saw blades are a common obstacle, which will shred any clone which touches them into pieces instantly.
- Later stages of Battleblock Theater feature deadly saw blades that move back and forth across the surfaces.
- Broforce has saw blades as obstacles in certain levels. They kill you instantly if you touch them, but they also kill most mooks instantly as well, so by knocking them loose, you can use them to shred whole rooms of mooks. Some saw blades hang mid-air until damaged. Other saw blades are dispensed by sawblade traps.
- Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Kirumi's execution. In addition to the thorned vine she climbs up, piercing her hands all the way, saw blades then appear, which will certainly cut her if she continues. And she does.
- Disc Room is centered around the player trying to dodge various saw blades: Some bounce around the room, some move along the edges of the arena.
- DUSK: The Infernal Machine features an area with huge saw blades that kill the player.
- Dwarf Fortress lets you deploy these against your enemies for once, in the form of Large Serrated Discs of various metals (or glass if you want something cheaper). Not as heavy as Giant Axe Blades, but they're still sizable and hit three times per Disc. Nothing but available materials and time stops you from putting ten of them in a single tile, ensuring anything that cannot avoid traps will be reduced to a scattered heap of Ludicrous Gibs as soon as they step into it.
- Extreme Sprint 3010 features spinning saws on the ground, as an obstacle the player must jump over.
- Half-Life 2: The level "We Don't Go to Ravenholm" is essentially a Survival Horror level with very little conventional ammunition, but fortunately there are plentiful gigantic circular saw blades that can be turned into projectiles with the recently acquired Gravity Gun.
- Hamsterball: In the Expert race, if you're playing at Standard difficulty or harder, sawblades will appear on some parts of the track and zoom forward once. Even if you avoid them, they cause half of the track they travel through to fall off.
- A Hat in Time: Saw blades, while not directly harming the player, slice up the wagons in Train Rush.
- Hollow Knight: Mounted saw traps are a prominent security feature of the White Palace, even more so in the area aptly called the Path of Pain. Both are covered in fixed and mobile sawblades that the Knight has to carefully deflect and bounce off of in order to navigate the area. This appears to be a family trait of the Pale King, whose daughter Hornet is seen wielding her own saws in trailers for Silksong.
- Limbo: Some areas feature noisy saw blades that are deadly on touch. They can be static or they can also move back and forth.
- Mother (HorrorShopGames): It's revealed that the protagonist's mother has saw blades on the floor of her room. She uses to kill her sons so she can cannibalize them due to the famine they've been dealing with. Ultimately, though, she ends up being mortally wounded by those saw blades when she's chasing the protagonist.
- Muse Dash has saw blades (referred to as "gears" by the game, but they clearly have pointed teeth like a saw) as an obstacle that the girls have to deal with, either floating in the air or cutting through the ground. Unlike other enemies and obstacles, they cannot be hit, only dodged.
- Ninja Gaiden: In arcade port, when the player receives a Game Over, the "continue" screen features the protagonist tied down while a saw blade slowly lowers while the time counts down.
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time features rather ornate spinning saws that the player must avoid.
- Quake II and IV feature saws. However, not as obstacles but as devices to cut meat and limbs off the humans.
- SAW HELL is a platformer where the main obstacles, as the title says, are saw blades.
- SEUM: Speedrunners From Hell features saw blades as one of the obstacles.
- Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer has a secret base with 3 restrooms. X slayers' bathroom features, among other things, spinning damaging saw blades.
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- In the original game, the sixth and final world, Scrap Brain Zone, has buzzsaws as hazards. Some of them are stationary and Sonic has to run under them when they are raised, and others chase after him, requiring him to outrun them or jump over them to dodge them.
- Sonic CD: The final level, Metallic Madness, has moving saw blades similar to those in Scrap Brain Zone.
- Sonic Generations: A truck from City Escape level pulls out three saw blades when chasing Sonic.
- Super Mario Bros.: Saw blades in Mario series are called Grinders and have made an appearance in few of its games as obstacles.
- Super Mario World: Grinders make their debut here, usually moving back and forth. They need to be avoided but Mario can bounce on them with a spin jump.
- Super Mario Galaxy 2: Grinders appear in puzzle plank galaxy. In addition to damaging Mario, they also saw through wood, making pieces of planks to fall off the map.
- Super Meat Boy and its predecessor Meat Boy: Saw blades is the main obstacles in the game. Some are still, some move back and forth and some move in circles.
- 2011 video game Swarm, saw blades are eventually encountered. These kill the player characters instantly.
- One level in the Expert difficulty of Super Monkey Ball 2, Spinning Saw, is one giant saw blade that moves up and down through the center of a donut-shaped platform and spins quickly counterclockwise. If the player is not careful, they can be sent careening off of the stage before they have a chance to get to the goal, which is located at the center of the blade.
- In Team Fortress 2, the Sawmill map features a central objective in which two giant sawblades alternate back and forth. Anyone who touches the sawblades will die instantly, even if they're Ubercharged or equipped with the Dead Ringer.
Web Animation
- Skibidi Toilet Series: Episodes 48 and 49 feature a rocket-propelled Toilet equipped with a giant horizontal circular saw blade, which is eventually controlled and destroyed by the TVwoman.
Webcomics
- Rusty and Co.: In the high-fantasy setting, gnomish baseball is a blood sport played on a Death Course. The theme for one day is sawblade traps embedded in the pitch, which one Guile Hero turns against his opponents and one Metal Muncher contestant simply eats. (The next day's theme? Flamethrowers.)
Western Animation
- I Lost My Body: Naoufel works in a carpenter's workshop full of circular saws, but he has a poor attention span and keeps multitasking, so, when he tries swatting a fly that's perching next to one of the saws, without even turning the saw off beforehand... guess what happens
