In the book The Disorientated Man, there is a sub plot with a runner who wakes up in a hospital room missing a leg. The only person who comes in the room is a nurse who never speaks. As well as feeding him, she gives him an injection that sends him to sleep. He wakes up with the other leg missing as well. Throughout the book he has a series of operations where he is vivesected piece by piece, arms, tongue, hearing, eyes, and he never knows why. It's very disturbing.
The last operation is worst as they forget to put him to sleep and he feels himself being opened up. They see his reaction and put him under, and he regains consciousness, in silence and darkness, unaware of what state he is now in, just that he is conscious. And what if he lives on as just a brain in a jar forever, conscious, but with no input from the world. Although we do find out in the main story what this is about, reading this disconnected sub plot is a true piece of horror.
Chapter six is where the torture ramps up. Wesley has been tortured for months, every evening. The Count does the torture, the Prince watches, and the albino fixes him up after. First they but his hands, put on oil them and set them alight. Wesley goes away in his mind so does not really suffer. The penultimate night the Count brings The Machine into Wesley's cell and assembles it. Wesley is not bothered. Then, right at the end, the Count says you haven't been fooling me for the last month, I know you have been going somewhere else in your mind. He leaves Wesley with this knowledge. That his method of going away will not work against the machine, the Count knows this. Wesley does not sleep, spends the night in terror. The following evening, the Count arrives and attaches all the suction cups.
The Count covers his entire body in cups, then says he needs to do the inside. It is not as detailed as it could be, but it does tell us that there are tiny cups that covers the inside of his nostrils, deep into his ears so they cover his eardrums, inside his eyelids, and then above and below his tongue. Though it's not described you just know they have covered his genitals, there is a tiny one like a catheter right up his penis, that they have gone into his anus, maybe right into the colon. It could be possible t hey have gone down his throat into his stomach, into his lungs, into his bladder. The clever point of the scene is it leads you into imagining what covering the inside really means. Wesley's worst fears more than realised.
In humiliation and suffering, and frustration, and anger, and anguish so great it was dizzying, Westley cried like a baby.
Actually it's nothing like Saw. The runner is simply put to sleep for an operation and wakes up with a body part missing, there is no pain, he suffers this process without knowing why it's happening. In Saw they are put in a trap, tortured physically, with a choice that should get them free. With the Saw films you can enjoy the seven film story arc, or watch it for the traps, or how each episode and their characters handle the situation.
And interestingly, Cary Elwes who play Westley also plays Doctor Gordon
It's actually the first film that Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price ALL appear in together. Bit of a landmark. Also, if you are an X Files fan, there is a episode called Kill Switch where Mulder is in a virtual reality construct where nurses come in and amputate his limbs one by one. Psychological torture without any physical pain.
