Hollywood’s biggest horror franchises have lately been lacking in all-star villainy. This isn’t to demonize long-running hit series such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and The Purge, none of which rely on one big bad guy. But many of scary cinema’s most infamous adversaries—Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees—have grown quite long in the tooth, without any obvious contemporary heirs. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Saw X, one of the biggest horror-movie offerings this Halloween season, centers on a man in his early 80s.

I refer to John Kramer (played by Tobin Bell), otherwise known as the Jigsaw Killer, an ornery civil engineer who’s obsessed with trapping people in escape rooms that are heavy on death and dismemberment. Jigsaw first popped up in Saw (2004), a tiny indie directed by James Wan that became a surprise smash, grossing $103 million worldwide on a $1.2 million budget. The franchise was quickly run into the ground off that success, pumping out a sequel every year until 2010’s risible Saw 3D. Since then, two halfhearted reboot attempts have done all right at the box office, but both failed to grasp Kramer’s star power. Saw X does not make that mistake, leading to one of the franchise’s strongest installments since the original, mostly because it gives Jigsaw center stage.

Jigsaw himself is something of an afterthought in the original Saw; though he is the architect of the twisted puzzle traps, he’s only glimpsed briefly in flashback as a terminal cancer patient. The film’s big twist is that he is also a criminal mastermind, compelled to trap people and have them face death as a way of valuing their own life, something he himself failed to do. Saw II reveals that Amanda (Shawnee Smith), a heroin addict whose jaw Jigsaw encased in a nasty device called a “reverse bear trap,” became Jigsaw’s acolyte after escaping the trap, convinced by his morbid philosophy.

The sequels to Saw should have followed an easy formula: Kramer and Amanda putting people in bizarre situations as some sort of spiritual punishment. The first Saw imprisoned two people in a room with chains around their ankles and rusty hacksaws in their hands, imploring them to cut through their own legs to escape. The comparatively higher-budgeted sequels elevated the complexity of the traps, but the thinking behind them was usually the same: to push some poor, morally deficient soul into making an extreme sacrifice to save their life. The issue is that both Kramer and Amanda died at the end of Saw III; subsequent Saws featured Kramer only in flashback, usually little more than a glorified cameo for Bell.

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Saw X does the opposite, putting Bell front and center for two hours (an epic length for a grimy slasher) and letting him showboat as much as he can. Jigsaw is no longer a grizzled shade lurking behind the scenes and dispensing information to his victims via tape recorder. The film is set between Saw and Saw II, a risk given that Bell is now 81 years old. But the actor returns to the role with relish, playing up both his anguish over the mortal disease he’s battling and his resolute desire to keep Jigsawing folks until the day he dies. Though the recent Halloween films pulled the same trick—recruiting the original Michael Myers performer, Nick Castle, to stalk around in a mask—Bell is doing something much more Shakespearean, delivering monologue after monologue with eerie glee.

In Saw X, Kramer is lured to Mexico in search of an experimental treatment to fight his cancer. It turns out to be a scam, but the film devotes a surprising amount of time to this plotty preamble, spending 30 minutes with Kramer as he gets suckered in and robbed. The decision to turn him into a more resolutely sympathetic protagonist is an interesting one: Though Jigsaw does have a bizarre code he always follows (victims are always given a chance to win the “games” he plays with them), he is responsible for so much arbitrary loss of life.

But in Saw X, his victims largely have it coming, because they’re all part of the scam that preyed on his hope. Amanda joins Kramer as he sets up shop in a giant warehouse, imprisons the confidence tricksters, and goes to work. In every other Saw movie, Kramer is unseen during this part—usually, at least 10 minutes of running time are devoted to new prisoners yelling and screaming as they seek to figure out what’s going on. In Saw X, Kramer is out in the open, a gesture I perceived mostly as a meta-textual homage to Bell himself, a well-liked character actor who stumbled into the biggest role of his career in his early 60s.

If the film is enough of a hit, I imagine Bell could return for more, but it’s just as easy to imagine Saw X as a swan song, a goodbye to a prominent member of schlock horror’s rogues’ gallery. Through the rise of streaming and the hardships of the pandemic, the genre has remained one of Hollywood’s most financially durable, but such legacy sequels can’t exist forever. Bell might be sprightly for his age, but by dint of plot convention alone, his Kramer is stuck in the past, a relic of the Bush era and a time that was fond of hand-wringing discourse about the cultural value of “torture porn.” It’s fun, in a depraved way, to see him trotted out for one more ride, but Jigsaw won’t be around to play games with us forever. Enjoy it while it lasts.