If you are one of the few people who Saw 2 AND read Haunted (see previous post), you will have noticed that the two have a lot in common. I mean they aren't enough alike that I would say plagiarism for certain, but enough that I can suspect it. They both have the same sort of theme, only Saw 2 is way dumber and has a "bad" guy. They both are about life and how sucky people are, even the best of the protagonists are never heroic, never really all that good or sympathetic. You could say that Saw 2 is the lobotomized working-class brother of Haunted.

I can't say that I agree with either one, really, though both will go right over the heads of their target-audiences. College kids, teenage boys in general, are not the people you want to lecture about the appreciation of life, or any topics of an intellectual nature. Not your average one anyway, and your average ones are the ones who go to see movies like this. Likewise the only people who read anymore tend to be white and middleclass, not the people you want to share tales of venal attention-whores and suffering with. The squalid life does not resonate with this demographic.