Another Halloween season is ’round the corner, and that means Lionsgate is promoting yet another Saw movie and yet another tie-in blood drive. Paul sent me an email this morning, asking my thoughts on this “softer side of torture porn.” I’m certainly not against it–at the end of the day, it’s just William Castle stuff with a humanitarian twist. But it is interesting that last year, although Saw III grossed about $7 million less domestically than its predecessor, the 2006 blood drive more than doubled the volume collected in 2005. As the films have become less popular with the general public and more of a niche concern, Lionsgate’s influence over that core, horror fan audience has seemingly increased.

Or maybe, they’re just moving away from the torture and upping the porn.

Above, you’ll find a screencap from one of several posters dedicated to promoting this fourth installment of the blood drive.  Last year’s posters featured three, ghostly-sexy nurses, done up like Weimar cabaret girls from beyond the grave. This year’s model is slightly heathier-looking, a bit more all-American–more good ol’ fashioned Skinemax than Suicide Girl. As promotional items, you can’t say the blood drive posters fail to do their job–without fail, they engender drooling commentary on the girls and rote synopsizing of the drive’s accomplishments.

But as far as I can tell, there were no posters produced or distributed specifically to promote the first two blood drives; you can find galleries of Saw and Saw II posters here and here. Is it any wonder that Lionsgate’s core audience of teen boys jumped into action the second cleavage and garters entered the picture? What better way to mobilize an army of blood-giving virgins (if not just plain virgins–R rating or no, my guess is that the staunchest fans of these movies are younger than 17) than by appealing to their latent Florence Nightengale fantasies?

That said, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not the transition from scary/sexy to plain vanilla sexy will help or hurt. So far, with about four weeks to go, Lionsgate’s about 59,400 pints away from their blood goal. We’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see how the relatively-scrubbed blood drive promotion impacts the movie’s box office.