The Pacific Northwest's premiere comic + pop culture show Emerald City Comic Con 2025 has come and gone, but if all you have are memories and regrets we got you covered. From a recap of all the big moments of the show, to VODs of all the panels from the Main Stage powered by Xfinity, and even details on the ECCC 2026 dates so you can do it all over again (or for the the first time).

Where does he get those wonderful toys? We’re not talking about Batman for once, but instead John Jigsaw Kramer, the serial killer at the heart of the horror movie series Saw — his elaborate death traps and games make for good cinema (as long as you’re not that squeamish), but… are they a little bit too elaborate for viewers’ credibility?

The question emerged, in all places, at Emerald City Comic Con 2025’s 'YA Thrills and Chills' panel, where YA thriller authors discussed the ins and outs of writing horror and scary material for younger readers. Asked by panel moderator (and novelist) Cassandra Newbold whether or not they preferred supernatural horror or psychological horror, The Loss of the Burying Ground writer J. Anderson Coats immediately leapt in: “Psychological all the way. Ghosts don't scare me, creatures don't scare me, zombies? None of that scares me. You know what scares me? People. People scare me and what they can do to one another, so I am team psychological.”

The Underwood Tapes author Amanda DeWitt agreed. “I think I like a little supernatural just for fun, but it doesn't scare me,” she reasoned. “In a horror movie, I'm like, ‘Well, I'm probably not going to end up in a Saw trap, so I am not really worried about it,’  but psychological? I'm like, ‘Wow, I'd have to deal with that for real. That's a problem.’”

The Saw theory — something that was top of mind because, as she admitted later in the panel, DeWitt isn’t a big horror fan but her friends had been working their way through the entire Saw franchise and she had been around the movies more than she’d expected — continued when the panel was also asked if they’d prefer to watch horror movies or straight-up thrillers.

“My problem with horror movies is that I'm like, ‘Oh, this wouldn't happen.’ Those Saw traps are so expensive. Where does he get the money from? It doesn’t make sense,” she joked. “So thriller, it'd be thriller. Everything's happening so fast and so pulse-pounding, you're like, ‘okay, I can't think about it too much until later!’”

Sounds to me as if someone needs to get to work on a Saw prequel where we find out that he comes from an exceptionally wealthy family at some point. Is Saw secretly Bruce Wayne in disguise? Maybe we were talking about Batman all along, after all...

Here's how to watch the Saw movies in order.