- It’s okay. You’re safe. I promise there will be no screencaps.
- On the act of not watching
- But there’s something non-consensual about the way Six did this.
- A lot of avoiding this film, for a lot of people, is a kind of ‘Fuck you for doing this to my brain.’
- Memetic marketing is not new – and sometimes it’s a cover for poor product.
- The Human Centipede watches like Six never worked that out.
- Or if you like high trash –
- But this will prove to be a recurring theme with Six: it may sound odd considering his reputation, but his actual storytelling is bland.
- The most relevant one he mentions is Cronenberg, particularly Rabid (1977) and Shivers (1975).
- The Human Centipede, on the other hand, uses body horror as a substitute for story.
- Also, the makeup is the most noughties thing I ever saw.
- You know how I know it’s the end of the world?
- Generation X was braced to die of meaninglessness – and then it turned out that there was meaning everywhere, and it meant bad things.
- I had this curiosity how it’d compare to the Grand Guignol. I think I was right: they both play their shocks slow.
- Let’s talk about Eyes Without A Face.
- But this brings me to another point: why is the plot like this? And by ‘like this’, I mean conventional.
- If a director has a million horrendous ideas that’s not distressing, that’s impressive.
- Sexism? Maybe. On the other hand it’s not a very lecherous camera; even before the girls get kidnapped there’s not much leering at their bodies.
- Okay I’m done. For a black comedy that was downer ending. Felt like the body-horror equivalent of a fade-out ending to a song.
- Let’s talk edgelords
- On Some South African Novelists
Helping You Feel Better About The Human Centipede Torture porn, storytelling and fluffy animal pictures: a serious critique
It’s okay. You’re safe. I promise there will be no screencaps.
But that said, given that I’m the woman who mostly waxes passionate about folk horror and international cinema and arthouse –
What the actual fuck am I doing reviewing this movie?
Well, pals, I have a mission in mind. I want to cheer you up.
Horror films can scare or sadden us, but at the end of the day they’re like all art: they exist to make our lives richer, more interesting, better. But here we have an exception. This is a film where just saying its name is enough to get a lot of nice people upset. Its very existence seems to have made their lives worse – and I don’t like that for them. I’d like to cheer them up.
Have you ever encountered another film where just mentioning it rattles people?
I haven’t, even films where worse things happen. It’s like one of those Dr Who monsters whose ability to hurt you exists in the act of thinking about it. I don’t know of another film that has that status – and you know, I don’t think any film deserves that much power. Or at least, not unless it’s an absolute bloody masterpiece, which this isn’t.
But its power exists mostly in the corner of your eye. Take away that power and it’s just a below-average movie, less extreme than several and less suspenseful than most. So I’m going to look at it straight – without redescribing anything or showing images because we can talk about it fine without.
Normally I love weaving spells, but today I want to disenchant something. Call me starry-eyed, but if a few people came away feeling like a small trauma in their brains had been taken away, I’d really like that. And along the way I’m going to try to find some reasons for hopefulness in this whole mess.
Do you hate that you know about this film? This review is for you.
Warnings.
If you don’t already know the premise of The Human Centipede, your life will probably be better if you don’t find out. Some films are worth the unpleasantness, but it isn’t among them.
Body horror, sexual abuse/assault/trauma, surgical/medical horror, torture, human experimentation, child abuse, animal abuse, coprophagia, mention of paedophiles and cannibalism, suicide, racial abuse, war crimes, fatphobia, general horrible shit and I do not say that figuratively. Tom Six is a guy who complains a lot about ‘political correctness.’ If there’s any sensitive subject I didn’t include, assume I overlooked it.
I link to interviews, but be aware some include stills from the film. I’ll warn where I can, but there are some older sites and I have a second-hand-laptop, so I can’t promise your computer’s compatibility will be the same as mine.
Also I’m going to talk about arthouse movies. Some of those will be disturbing too.
I ran this piece past someone who swore never to watch the movie, who particularly hates surgical horror, and who found the whole idea dreadfully upsetting, and they called the review ‘lovely.’ It’s possible that I was being humoured, but there are at least some safety-rails. But no hard feelings if this isn’t for you.
There will be nothing graphic.
I suspect Six wouldn’t like me to start with a warning, but if anyone objects, all I can say is they need to grow a thicker skin.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1qu4s9/parents_just_took_in_two_kittens_suffice_to_say/
On the act of not watching
Let’s start where I started: the fact that people don’t-watch this in a way that’s different from not watching other films.
The Human Centipede (2009, directed by Tom Six)is one of those movies you don’t need to see to be horrified; it’s the concept that does all the work. But if you’re enough of a horror fan to be here, I assume you already do. It is, let’s say, a known film: many people know more about it than they’d like to.
Tom Six is the guy who put the ‘emetic’ in ‘memetic’.
And in itself that’s interesting, no? Six has loyal fans who think his ‘royal lowness’, as he signs himself, is brilliant and hilarious, but absolutely everyone I know has the same reaction: they are resolved to spend the whole of their lives never watching this film. Not just ‘give it a miss’, but assertively never watch it.
When I told people I’d be doing this they all flinched, and then informed me kindly but firmly that the last thing they wanted was to know any more about the whole revolting subject. Sometimes I wondered if their opinion of me had dropped just by knowing I planned to talk about it. And these weren’t reactionaries; they were intelligent, curious people.
I get it. Until this review I was with them.
Now, I don’t have an issue with extreme cinema; there are some taboo-breakers I genuinely love. I even own DVDs of Eyes Without A Face (1960), the great surgical shocker, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), which has faeces forced into someone’s mouth in the first scene. I really like those movies, both of which would ruin many a normal person’s day. And every art form needs its extreme fringe; the one thing I agree with Tom Six about is that a healthy culture doesn’t censor things just for being upsetting. Art needs freedom, which has to include the freedom to disturb.
But there’s something non-consensual about the way Six did this.
He sold the film on an idea so nasty that just hearing about it would put you through the mill – and while it’s one thing to terrify a volunteer, it’s another to deliberately upset everybody.
That, I think, is a big part of why we react to this movie the way we do; it’s kind of assaultive. I first heard of it the way I suspect most people do: someone in my life heard concept, and was so troubled that they told me because they needed some kindness. So while I flinched and then recovered, I remained pretty annoyed with Tom Six for upsetting someone I care about.
When most horror film directors say, ‘If you don’t like it you don’t have to watch it,’ they’re quite right – but Six’s movie doesn’t work like that. You don’t get a choice to avoid the main punch: Six put it in the title, and if you don’t like it, well, sucks to be you.
Source: https://www.boredpanda.com/leaf-sheep-sea-slug-costasiella-kuroshimae/
That put me out of patience with him, and like many, I decided that not watching, talking about or doing anything that would spread the movie’s reach was the best form of revenge. And it’s certainly the only form of revenge I’d ever endorse: Six has apparently got death threats, so just for clarity:
Do not send death threats to people.
But I’ve spent fifteen merry years not watching this film and, like many, I did it out of spite.
And that’s almost unique. There are films I skip because I don’t think I’d enjoy the particular way they horrify, but that’s just taking a normal decision about what to do with my time. Park Chan-Wook’s horror turned out not to be my speed, but Park Chan-Wook as a person I wish nothing but the best, and if somebody else likes his stuff then I’m glad they’re having fun. I don’t much feel like checking out Gaspar Noé’s oeuvre, but I don’t wince at the thought of him;
I just think, ‘Those sound exhausting and my life is tiring enough,’ and move on. Likewise there are subjects I avoid because they bring up bad personal memories, but that’s a me issue, not a movie issue.
Almost every film in the world I haven’t seen, I just haven’t seen – but not watching The Human Centipede was active. There are films I avoid because I don’t want to support someone who’s been credibly accused of doing bad things to real people; I love Roman Polanski’s work, but as long as he’s alive I’m not putting another penny his way. But as far as I know Tom Six lives a blameless personal life. It was purely on the basis of his concept that I conducted my boycott.
It wasn’t consumer choice. It was retaliation.
A lot of avoiding this film, for a lot of people, is a kind of ‘Fuck you for doing this to my brain.’
But I have a thrawn streak. I’d been reading an interesting book on the Grand Guignol, and that got me thinking about extreme horror, and when it popped up on my Shudder homepage I started wondering if there might be things to say about it. Against this was the pure and immediate instinct that this was a film Not To Be Watched – and I found I wanted to examine that instinct. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Six plays on kneejerk reactions, and that simply rejecting it as if it were in some special class of its own was . . . well, playing into his hands. It was treating the film as more unique than it actually is.
It’s not in a special class. It’s not even very original. But it was marketed that way – and I feel like rejecting his terms and setting our own.
So:
I can’t take it out of your head, but let me give you some ways to see how it’s not as awful as it wants you to believe. I’m going to crowd your mind with cultural context that’ll help it look smaller by comparison, I’m going to recommend a lot of better movies, and I’m going to talk about the ways the movie itself is quite weak. It’s been upsetting people for long enough, and it’s time to feel better.
Roll up, roll up! Dare you see . . .?
Here’s the highest compliment I have for Tom Six – and on principle I mean to be charitable where I can. So I’ll say that even though I didn’t like how the movie pitch made people feel, I had to give some grudging recognition to the cleverness: it was viral marketing by the leading-a-pig method.
You know the old story about that? Pigs don’t like being ordered around, they say, so if you want to get your pig to market the trick is to tie a string around its leg and pull back so the pig will go forwards. That was Tom Six’s clever idea: tug people’s brains with an idea so repulsive they’ll run right off and tell other people how awful it is, and then a proportion of these little piggies will decide that the slaughterhouse yard might, after all, be an interesting place to check out.
Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/search/baby-pig-in-flower?image_type=photo
Crafty more than intelligent, we might say. At heart it’s the shrewdness of the barker: what’s inside the tent, ladies and gentlemen? Will you take this dare?
But what if you do? Are the freaks really freaky enough to be worth the ticket price?
There’s an old carnival trick attributed to P.T. Barnum: when short of material, he’d put up a sign for a wonder of wonders: a SIX FOOT TALL MAN EATING CHICKEN! And when the punters entered the tent, well, they couldn’t say they’d been lied to: there was indeed a six-foot-tall man in there, and he was indeed eating chicken. It wouldn’t have been a money-spinner except for one thing: what happened next. At first you’d feel a fool for having been taken in – but then it would occur to you it’d be quite funny if only you weren’t the butt of the joke. So what if you went and told other people to go see the six-foot man eating chicken? Ah, then you’d be in on the joke.
Memetic marketing is not new – and sometimes it’s a cover for poor product.
So when it comes to the movie . . . well, this was the real question. What’s behind the curtain of The Human Centipede? Is it a wonder of wonders, or is it just Barnum up to his tricks again?
The truth is, by the end of the film I felt like I’d seen a six-foot man, eating chicken.
Look, you know the basic idea: a mad doctor sews bottoms to mouths and everybody dies. Yuck.
That said, I felt the best thing to do was approach Six in good faith. Maybe it was a well-made film in its way; there have been important films that were deliberately upsetting and gross-out fests that were a lot of goofy fun. The best plan, I decided, was to give it a chance to convince me.
Unfortunately it did not hold my attention. It became one of those films where I live-posted while watching it – and as it’s a way of talking about its contents without going into details, which I’ll use to hang a structure for this enormous essay on. But let’s start with something basic:
A storytelling perspective
Tl;dr: Tom Six is not a good storyteller. And he’s a bad storyteller in a very recognisable style – to wit, a fatal combination of dogged and lazy.
I’m not a scriptwriter or a director, but I am a novelist, and in this film was a mood I recognised immediately. We can call that mood ‘creative fatigue,’ or perhaps ‘writer’s block that you ignore,’ but it’s something everyone has to learn to deal with.
Here’s how it is. Sometimes your story needs to get from A to B, and to get there you feel like you have to drag through a scene you aren’t really interested in writing. It’s grim and boring. It’s the worst part of the process. In that situation you have two choices: you can either push through and hope that when you get to B the destination will have justified the journey . . .
Or you can be a writer and realise that if the scene you’re writing doesn’t interest you it’s because you’ve chosen the wrong scene. You need to stop, reapply your imagination, and come up with a more entertaining way to get to your next plot beat. It’s more work at the outset and it takes more imaginative courage, but it’s also what we write for. Boredom is your brain informing you that your current scene isn’t very good and needs a better idea. Time to climb back up that tree and leap from a higher branch.
Because if you’re bored, you will bore your audience. They may not be able to name it, but they can smell it from the very back row.
The Human Centipede watches like Six never worked that out.
It’s full of moments where creative apathy is present in every frame no matter how much the characters are running around, and rather than thinking of something more fun to do instead, he just ploughed on like he was grinding to the next level of a video game.
Let me give you a nondescriptive summary so you can see what I mean. The Human Centipede is a very straightforward three-act story, and it goes like this:
Act 1. We need to get to the Centipede. Take the basic route; it’s a chore, but it’ll be awesome once we get there and nobody cares what happens before that point.
Act 2. We’ve got the Centipede! Okay, now what? Hadn’t planned that far ahead. We can have things happen in the final act; let’s just film repetitive scenes of them suffering to fill in the time till then.
Act 3: Okay, gotta wrap this up. If we bring in the police that’ll add a definite end point. Wait, though, the police could end this all right away. Let’s send them off again. Does that need a plausible reason? Nah, it’ll be fine, nobody wants them stopping the movie. Okay, police were gone for long enough to have a bit more gore. Bring ’em back and we can get to the point where everybody dies! Six characters, one idea to resolve each of their stories the same way: job done!
I’m not usually this sarcastic, but if there’s one thing that annoys me as a viewer it’s disrespect for an art form.
By the time I’d finished watching this movie I was far less offended with the content than I was with the fact that anyone calling themselves a professional looked at this script and decided it was good enough to shoot.
The only impressive thing is that, disinterested as the writing is at every turn, Six somehow managed to keep his thighbones in the chair and make himself type it all up without switching over to Windows Solitaire and never going back.
That’s your structural review. Now for more detail. Still with me? Grab a fluffy kitten and let’s get to it; notes, then we’ll talk about better films. There will be no graphic recaps.
First thought: wow, Tom Six’s camera has NO patience. If there isn’t a dramatic incident it’ll track sideways just for something to do. He’s almost as bad as Kenneth Branagh.
(Have you seen Branagh’s 2006 The Magic Flute? Even my love for the music couldn’t get me through his dizzying camerawork; it was like something filmed on a carousel.)
This camera drift was the first sign that the man was eating the chicken, not the chicken eating the man. The very first moment, for instance, was a tracking shot along a motorway. It wasn’t bad in itself, but here’s the thing: it ended by settling on a parked car. So why were we tracking? The motorway was being viewed from something static. It made no visual sense.
What I later discovered was that Six could hold his camera still when something dreadful was happening. But when it came to setting up suspense, his camera didn’t so much frame scenes as fidget through them.
Next thought: he made this to turn a joke into a film, and that really seems to be it. He’s not interested in developing any other part of the story.
Famously, Tom Six began this movie with a joke about what he thought should be done to paedophiles: they should have their mouths stitched to the back end of a fat trucker. (https://www.cinemablend.com/new/An-Interview-With-Human-Centipede-Director-Tom-Six-18376.html – that interview features the poster but no movie shots.) That was the inspiration. He talks about this a lot in interviews; he’s proud of it.
But as you would in any popcorn horror flick, we begin with the victims getting lost after their car breaks down – and Six has no particular interest in developing them. They’re not criminals deserving of punishment; they’re bog-standard cannon fodder straight out of a third-generation slasher. Nothing in them is set up to resonate with what we know will happen to them later. Dialogue tells us little about their lives: they call another friend who will never be mentioned again; their plans are ‘go clubbing’ and nothing more distinctive; we have no idea what waits for them back home. They’re just pretty girls in a horror movie.
Why such a dull choice? Why didn’t he stick to his original idea of a deserving victim?
It is allowed – sometimes celebrated, even – to make a movie in which every character is a terrible person. If your story is a violent one that can be a smart choice: terrible people are selfish, selfish people tend to be highly motivated, and highly motivated people get into interesting conflicts.

And when it comes to suspense there’s so much you can do with this. Consider Hard Candy (2005), in which fourteen-year-old Hayley (Elliot Paige) goes back to the home of suspected paedophile Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and, rather than falling prey, does some really drastic things to extract a confession from him. I won’t spoil it, but it’s an edge-of-the-seat experience where your sympathies are never safe.
Or if you like high trash –
which you’d think Six should – then consider the old EC Comics/Cryptkeeper tales. The-biter-bit narratives were their core motif: the gory squaring-off of two mad, bad people all the more dangerous for knowing each other. Take ‘Collection Completed’ as a fairly close comparison: (https://tftc.fandom.com/wiki/Collection_Completed): a retired man is exasperated that his wife loves her animals so much she treats him like one; he retaliates by taking to taxidermy and stuffing her pets; she retaliates by stuffing him. It’s one of the simplest and most effective tools of black comedy: the ironically apt revenge.
This is absolutely the style of Tom Six’s original joke, or at least it could be if thought of a suitable inciting incident. I wouldn’t advocate for it being child abuse – unlike live-subject crypto-taxidermy, that’s a common crime that hurts real people and Six does not have the touch to handle it well. But you’d think he could come up with a centipede-, chimera-, surgery- or bum-related crime that was nearly as repulsive as the punishment he then inflicted. Given the right setup and build, it could have been a funny punchline.
But this will prove to be a recurring theme with Six: it may sound odd considering his reputation, but his actual storytelling is bland.
If you described the story beats of the film schematically, it would look like Screenwriting 101. It has acts, events happen in logical sequence, there is set-up and escalation. The scaffolding is there. But it’s scaffolding, not a house – and the reason is that he’s building the wrong structure for what it contains.
In interview (https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2010/05/06/interview-tom-six – shots from the film in that one, warning), Six talked about his influences and they’re fairly generic: The Shining and Japanese horror, for instance, which are good choices but in 2009 would be on anyone’s list.
The most relevant one he mentions is Cronenberg, particularly Rabid (1977) and Shivers (1975).
Those are films with special effects too, but what Six seems to have missed is that they’re actually made from within the freak tent rather than by the carnival barker. They’re a celebration of life in all its messiness, less about mutilation than mutation. The point isn’t to gross people out but to encourage them to cast off normality and rejoice in the strange; famously Cronenberg said that Shivers, which concludes with a parasite-spreading orgy in a swimming pool where everyone succumbs, should be considered a happy ending.
Cronenberg has body horror, sure, but even at its most pulsating there’s a strange kindness to his work. I’ve talked before (https://gnofhorror.com/scanners-whats-on-shudder/) about how well it can speak to those who feel themselves excluded from the normal, and that’s a true good deed. It’s weird and revolting and also sensual and fun – and, importantly, it creates new motivations. It’s not just a question of ‘A wants to do gross thing to B, B objects.’ The New Flesh transfigures, and it changes the characters’ psyches, and that drives the drama. It’s body horror as story.
The Human Centipede, on the other hand, uses body horror as a substitute for story.
Take out the central conceit and it could be anything. If the mad doctor had an obsession with trapping his victims under sealed bell jars for his art collection so they had to roll them around like hamster wheels, or planting their feet in earth with a view to propagating humans like plants so they had to navigate entrapping flowerpots, or locking them into mechanised gorilla suits that went into an automated dance every time you passed a banana . . . it would be the exact same plot. All that matters structurally is that it’s an incapacitating thing they don’t want.
If Six likes nasty stuff he could have chosen a plot that would have given him scope to fill his scenes with it. It can be done, and it has. Why didn’t he? Was he not well-informed on genre? Did he think he’d look more original if he avoided the genre it would best fit? Did he think nobody would watch a horror movie if it didn’t have pretty girls? Was it just too much work to think up satisfying ironies? It beats me. But whatever the reason, from the start there’s something essentially vanilla about The Human Centipede. It shied off its initial premise for the simplest possible victim-villain dichotomy, and that’s not where dark comedy shines.
Also, the makeup is the most noughties thing I ever saw.
On the subject of the noughties, let’s talk about the state of the art Six rode in on. Because it’s here, I think, that we can take the most hopeful lesson.
Torture porn was reaching its height in 2009; it started to fall off after The Human Centipede, in fact, perhaps because of market saturation, perhaps because nobody felt they could be grosser than that, or perhaps simply because once you’ve taken enough slaps you start to go numb.
Horror always moves in phases and any genre boom will have a bust, but torture porn was always doomed to have below-average staying power because it worked by promising novelty, and soon enough it was no longer new. The Saw franchise survived, but by now it’s pretty much the Final Girl, and its fans love it because ‘torture porn’ was never all it was: they enthuse less about the traps than the twisty plots. ‘The most extreme film ever’ is a pitch you can only sell so many times.
One reason why the next trend was the much-debated term ‘elevated horror’, I suspect, was that noughties horror had a drive towards the meaningless. There’s an interesting quote from the movie Strange Days, made in 1995, talking about the upcoming millennium:
You know how I know it’s the end of the world?
Everything’s already been done. Every kind of music’s been tried. Every kind of government’s been tried, every fucking hairstyle, bubble gum flavors, you know, breakfast cereal. What are we going to do? How are we going to make another thousand years? I’m telling you, man, it’s over. We used it all up.
And from where we stand now, as an image of the end of the world? That’s fucking adorable. The worst they could picture was having so much of everything that we ran out of ideas. Then came along terrorist attacks and war crimes and economic disasters and the developed world started skidding into crisis, and the psyches of Generation X (to which Tom Six belongs) didn’t know what to do. I no longer have the article I read a couple of days after 9/11, but I remember its ending: ‘We do not know what the future will hold. We only know that it will be worse.’
Generation X was braced to die of meaninglessness – and then it turned out that there was meaning everywhere, and it meant bad things.
And in the noughties, with that combination of psychological surfeit and sudden uncertainty – well, torture porn was a natural outcrop.
I saw a lot of articles talking about how it was a response to the rise of real torture from supposedly democratic nations, and sure, maybe it was, but I think it was also a response to what came before: the sense of an appetite so jaded it had become Sadeian. An overstimulated palate suddenly faced troubled times and couldn’t think of a better response than to do more, more, gorier and colder and and nastier and, well, less vulnerable.
The oversaturation of the 90s had not braced moviemakers for the uncertainty of the noughties. These were the movies of powerful nations that hadn’t expected to feel exposed, and one response from such a culture is to play tough. Can you take this? How about this? How about THIS? Nobody knew what to feel, and one response is to aggressively refuse to feel anything, or else push the button to make you feel the most simple, primal emotion you can find. Torture porn could do either depending on the audience member. I don’t think the concept of torture was being so much wrestled with back then as it was being played with, or just poked with a stick to see what would happen.
So it’s easy to dismiss torture porn. It’s certainly not my favourite genre.
But in some of those movies was something serious struggling to be born.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the 1990s, the great horror hit was Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), and that last next-big-thing before torture porn was Kevin Williamson-style self-aware scripts that winked at the audience: we all know the tropes, don’t we? When ‘everything’s already been done,’ there’s nowhere to go but commentary. Scream itself was excellent because it was the work of an accomplished director, but he’d always been that. It was the postmodernism that was new. It spoke to the feelings of an audience that was bored with seeing formulaic movies and needed someone to say so. Maybe we’re mere over-served consumers, said horror, but at least we can be savvy consumers.
Gen X audiences knew that slashers had been played to exhaustion. But it was more than that: their youth happened in a culture assuring them nothing new was possible because the Boomers had worked out how to be young back in the 60s and their achievements couldn’t be topped. The world certainly didn’t seem open to change; capitalist realism had a firm grip. What could be done but sigh? Generation X were continually accused of apathy, but a more accurate word would be discouraged.
Slashers rose from 60s classics like Psycho and Peeping Tom, 60s giallo and 70s exploitation, and by the 90s had reached their Daria phase: this is all there’s ever been and by now we’re cynical about it.
But if you’re a horror director, a cynical audience is provocative. The challenge is to shake them up.
Torture porn didn’t get all the way free, certainly at first: Gen X was raised on cultural cringe towards Boomers, and cultural cringe towards the cinema of the past generation is all over the rise of torture porn. The first Saw (2004, James Wan and Leigh Whannell) is a big old take on the 1995 Se7en, and Eli Roth’s first hit was Cabin Fever (2002), a 70s premise if ever there was one. Even Roth’s Hostel (2005) subverts the slasher only far enough to change the Final Girl to a boy and take the victims to the maniac rather than bringing the maniac to the victims: like the audience of Scream, the murderers of Hostel were in the know. (‘What if slasher murder but as a product?’ is a heartbreakingly Gen X concept.)
But there is one thing about the torture porn trend that did push against cultural burnout: it was, at least, going for an authentic emotion. Neither Roth nor Wan and Whannell were trying to wring any more drops out of the irony sponge: they knew it had been saturated to bloating and then squeezed dry. If they were looking to the past for inspiration, they looked to relatively recent films that had hit audiences unexpectedly hard: Wan and Whannell were right that David Fincher’s Se7evn was an ordeal, and Roth’s famous mentor was Quentin Tarantino. Neither Fincher nor Tarantino were technically horror directors, but they made some of the best shockers of the 90s.
And if neither Roth nor Wan and Whannell had the deft touch of their masters – the first Saw in particular is the work of such obviously young film-makers that rewatching it now, it’s almost cute – they were at least choosing influences that could teach them more than how to play the smart-alec. If they had to look outside the horror genre to learn, they’d do it. Fincher nor Tarantino knew how to get an audience properly unnerved.
That was the one thing torture porn authentically cared about. I don’t think it’s coincidence, for example, that The Passion Of The Christ (2004) is both torture porn and hardline sermon: the two were completely compatible. This is a method that brute-forces a response beyond the intellectual. However sophisticated you think you are, if you have a normal brain you will experience horror. Irony won’t protect you.
Perhaps it was inevitable that, disheartened about both past and future as its makers were, noughties horror had to go back to basics.
You may be smart, torture porn said to the audience, but are you smarter than pain?
You’ve seen a lot of movies, but let me show you visceral anguish: see, you still feel something. That ‘something’ wasn’t deep or subtle; in a way, all the irony had made subtlety a problem for another day. But it was a start.
Tom Six didn’t create that movement, but his movie would probably not have been funded if it hadn’t already been a trend. The Human Centipede was well timed. A few years earlier and there wasn’t enough cultural groundwork to make it a workable pitch; move further into the future and, well, Six is currently complaining that ‘politically correct’ culture is refusing to release more of his work. (More on that later.)
Meanwhile ‘politically correct’ culture is making a lot of scary films that encourage the audience to feel things both sincere and complex. We’ve been doing great for horror lately – but we had to wade through some blood to get here.
Torture porn both touched a new low in cinema that pushed us to think, and inflicted something sincere that forced us to feel.
It was a wake-up call.
Enter Tom Six with his joke-turned-into-a-movie. Nowhere in The Human Centipede did I see anything that seemed to partake of the more aspirational side of torture porn. It doesn’t wake anything up. It certainly isn’t a film that would have started a trend on its own. But there was room for it in the market of the moment. Six, from interviews, is a very consistent man who doesn’t change with the times, but in 2009 the times made a platform he could jump on.
The actor playing the doctor has a fascinating face. Good casting for this.
Credit where it’s due. Dieter Laser plays the mad German doctor, and he’s the best thing in the film by a long way. There’s no depth to the character: he hates humanity and he has a nasty obsession, and that’s it, but Laser knows what he’s there to do.
His performance is assisted, though, but some favouritism on the part of the camera. He dominates scenes; when he’s around, it’s not overly interested in shooting anyone else. It’s one of the flaws in the film; really it only has one character, and that character only has one personality trait. But that trait does get delivered on.
This is a movie where the title is the spoiler. It really takes down the suspense. Guess it works better if you’re gleeful?
This is the crux, no? It’s supposed to be shocking, but you come in already shocked – or else, I suppose, proud that you aren’t shocked because you’re too cool. I’ll talk more about Six’s personality below, or at least his public persona, but I think the audience most likely to have a good viewing experience is the kind who feels that the act of watching it would piss off somebody that they’d really enjoy pissing off.
Épater la bourgeoisie (shock the comfortable class) has been a rallying cry since the French Decadents of the 19th century – yes, I’m that kind of critic – and I don’t think you’d watch this movie with any pleasure unless you felt you were epat-ing somebody. Possibly everybody.
I’m not that kind of viewer, but they do exist, and they’re Six’s target demographic. It’d take a bubbly joy in the very fact that you were watching at all to carry you through the early parts. Famously Alfred Hitchcock said this in an interview :
Four people are sitting around the table talking about baseball, whatever you like. Five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What have the audience had? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. Well, the whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you’ve given them that information. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital, because they’re saying to you, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, stop talking about baseball, there’s a bomb under there.’ You’ve got the audience working.
It’s usually excellent advice. But Six is no Hitchcock: it feels less like there’s a bomb under the table than like he’s kicking his heels against the chair waiting to get to the good stuff.
I had this curiosity how it’d compare to the Grand Guignol. I think I was right: they both play their shocks slow.
This was one of the reasons I wanted to watch The Human Centipede: I was interested to know where it placed in the history of transgressive shockers. I’ll come back to this later, but just to fill you in a bit: the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol performed its graphic plays in early twentieth-century Paris. The plays were short, shocking, and featured twist endings where the actors deployed a bit of stage magic to pull off gruesome special effects. Again, Six isn’t doing anything particularly new: Dare you see this? is one of the longest traditions in art.
But here’s where Six started to show what ability he has.
There’s a single scene in the film that’s really good – and if you’ve seen clips or trailers, that’ll be the one that upset you. It’s where the doctor explains to his victims what he’s about to do to them. He uses medical terms and diagrams and goes into detail, and he’s patient and methodical and takes his time. In that scene Six pins us to our seats.
It was at this point that I started to hope that I might actually be in a for a well-made if gruelling experience. That would be nice; one way to feel better about an upsetting concept is to learn that it’s in a surprisingly good film.
Quite soon, though, my hopes deflated. Where Six was strongest as a director was in some very pure tell-don’t-show. It’s the same trick as the pitch and the title: have an idea so awful that just thinking about it hurts, and then make people think about it.
It worked as long as thinking about it was all we had to do. But then he had to get on and actually execute it. Again, I promise I won’t go into details. Let’s just say that in terms of quality horror the film peaked here, before any surgery happened.
I suspect his scripting of the girls was influenced by The Blair Witch. (More than by a good ear for real dialogue.)
By making us care about the characters, he could have involved us more in the story. Or by making the characters resourceful and clever and finding ways to make that relevant to the themes, he could have created a more engaging cat-and-mouse plot and spun out the suspense. But the girls just swear and shout. It worked in The Blair Witch Project (1999) because it was naturalistic dialogue improvised by actors playing people too stressed and exhausted to be especially eloquent. Here, though, it was just poor writing. You don’t expect ‘real’ people to compose lively cross-chat, but it’s not too much to ask of a professional scriptwriter.
One of them has temporarily escaped. I kind of want him to hurry up and catch her; Six isn’t great at regular suspense and it only really works in the torture scenes. (Which I think it does because they’re what he’s really about; he holds his nerve more than most.) The escape feels like filler.
This point – where the doctor has told them their fate and one of the girls briefly gets away – was really where the wheels started to come off. Six had a head of suspense built up, and he did it by making the film feel inescapable. If he’d kept us in that room and refused to look away, we might have got somewhere.
But he blinked first. And the way he blinked revealed something extremely interesting: while he refused to use a genre that would have suited the material better, I don’t think he really knew what genre he was using.
The escape was suited to a different movie – a slasher, most likely, where there was a chance at least one character would survive and we weren’t sure who it’d be. That wasn’t on the cards here: the title promised us that her flight was a waste of time. And that’s what it felt like.
Suspense can work two ways: it can leave us in uncertainty, or it can make us feel trapped with the inevitable. You’ll notice that in Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table analogy, which is about the inevitable, he describes a scene where the characters are sitting at a table and they stay there – or, in other words, we’re stuck with the bomb.
There was no uncertainty in Six’s set-up, so he needed to go with dreadful waiting. An escape scene would have only worked for the ‘what will happen now?’ kind of suspense, which he wasn’t doing.
Six was making the wrong movie for his premise.
And there was something almost grudging about it. It’s hard to define exactly what makes you feel like the director’s heart isn’t in it, but in a lot of these scenes it really didn’t.
Source: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1130851154/shrimply-the-best-cute-shrimp-prawn
Oh wait, he’s found a way to tie it back into the torture prawn. Good good.
Extreme cinema is a legitimate genre, even an important one. If you’re going to build your film around something awful, things need to stay relevant to it. Sadly less came of this than I’d hoped.
He’s actually doing quite well spinning out this one idea. He’s even settled his camera down a bit.
Six likes to sell himself as a deliverer of the grotesque, but he’s better at anticipation. Once the bad thing was nearly, nearly happening, the film became engaging.
It was almost funny how the drift or steadiness of his camera correlated with how close to something nasty we were. It was like watching the film itself glaze over or wake up.
Ooh, at minute 43 we find out he’s probably seen Eyes Without A Face. He’s more chicken, though.
Let’s talk about Eyes Without A Face.
While badly reviewed at the time, Eyes Without A Face (or, in the original French, Les Yeux Sans Visage, 1960) is another mad-doctor story, and probably the best ever made. A cosmetic surgeon becomes obsessed with finding the perfect skin graft to repair his daughter’s beauty after he crashes the family car, and kidnaps victim after victim to get it. It’s disturbing, yes, but it’s also eerie and elegant, and it’s haunted cinema for a long time.
It also has the most upsetting scene of surgical horror I’ve ever seen. By far. It leaves Six standing.
Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know how. There’s a scene where a victim, face marked up to guide the knife (a visual Six also uses, which is why I thought I saw an influence) lies unconscious on her gurney. We know what’s going to happen: they’re going to peel the healthy skin off her living face in a single piece and lift if off. But they surely can’t show it all, right? Right? They’re going to end the scene soon, aren’t they? Or they’ll do that thing where we see just reaction shots or . . . or something, right? Something that’s not . . . this? I mean . . . I mean, they’re not going to . . . they can’t . . . they wouldn’t . . .
They do.
It’s 1960 black and white and you absolutely cannot believe they would do this to you. But they film it deadpan and they make you look. The movie meets your eyes like a stone-cold psychopath.
Six doesn’t. I promised no details and I meant it; I’ll just say that yes, there’s some surgery, and if that’s a squirm for you it’ll make you squirm, but the unflinching grip he held when the doctor explains suddenly slips. Hence my next post:
The camera actually drifted away from the surgery after a short sequence! Six, you wimp, you disappoint me.
I was promised the most disgusting and shocking film in the world, darn it.
Look, I didn’t consent to knowing about the concept, and I got to find out anyway. I did consent to watch the film do its worst, and its worst was nothing like what was promised. No matter which way I turned, I got exactly what I didn’t want.
Feel like once we get to the actual centipede the budget limitations show. What to do now The Thing has happened? Any suspense left? Because we have 40 more minutes.
And that’s another issue: special effects. They aren’t all that horrifying.
Look, I won’t describe them, but suffice to say that post-surgery, it’s nothing that couldn’t be done in a stage performance. They aren’t a shock when we see them and they don’t get any more shocking. Add to that the fact that the actors’ faces are obscured to cover the limitations of the effects, and we don’t even have performances to sell it. Again, it’s a let-down.
Why all the business about one of them being Japanese? Feels like its making some kind of point but I can’t tell what.
All right, so: two of the victims are American girls, and the other is a Japanese young man. This is emphasised – he speaks little to no English, and the doctor keeps hurling the word ‘kamikaze’ at him as a racial slur.
This brings up a point about politics.
What is Six playing at? There are two sequels to this, one supposedly making points about malevolent fandom and the other about the prison-industrial complex. In 2019 Forbes magazine made a good-faith attempt to find some political interest in that. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/lukethompson/2019/08/30/10-years-of-the-human-centipede-and-its-prediction-of-the-alt-right/)
And the fact that the doctor in the first one is German, and called a ‘Nazi’ by his Japanese victim, obviously alludes to Nazi human experimentation – Six has said as much in interview (https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2010/05/06/interview-tom-six – warning, shots from the film). So are there points being made?
Well, not to call anyone at Forbes a Pollyanna, but I personally don’t trust Six to put across a well-delivered point about anything serious. I just don’t see a knack for commentary. The German and Japanese characters hurl national insults at each other, but for the life of me I cannot tell what point Six is trying to make there. Human experimentation is bad and the Nazis did it?
True – but ‘factually correct’ is a low bar for satire.
Imperial Japan committed human experimentation too, but the way this film plays I’m not sure Six even knew that. The interview I referenced doesn’t mention it; he just says he wanted a language barrier between the speaking victim and the doctor – though they seem to understand each other pretty well regardless and it’s not like conversation would make much difference anyway. (And come to that, isn’t that committing to doing nothing good with dialogue? The doctor’s speeches are the best part; Six doesn’t seem to know how to play to his strengths.)
Six also says in that interview, ‘I love Japanese horror films,’ and so did we all in 2009 – they were the best contemporary alternative to torture porn if you were watching Hideo Nakata rather than Takashi Miike – but that’s a reason outside the story that doesn’t add anything within. Japan may be relevant to Tom Six, but it’s not relevant to the movie; an Easter-egg-to-self is not a social insight.
And in fact there’s little in Six’s work to suggest he learned anything from Japanese cinema except that a country called Japan exists.
In interview (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/aug/19/human-centipede-tom-six) he claims he learned from Takashi Miike to value the long take, but none of Miike’s style or suspense seeped through. Maybe the film would have been worse without Miike’s influence, but it hardly shows his flair.
And as an act of homage to film-makers you supposedly admire? Hostel did a shout-out too: Takashi Miike got to cameo as a happy murderer, speaking his lines in the same language as the protagonists. He made powerful films, so Roth cast him in a power position. His films were so extreme fans joked that he must be deranged; in Hostel, he is. It was a fun little tip of the hat to a director Roth obviously admired.
Six’s tribute? A naked Japanese victim getting tortured and degraded while crawling on the floor shouting lines nobody else can understand?
Well, it was a choice, but I doubt Senpai sent him a gift basket.
So does Six have any views on Japanese history? The dynamic watches more like a re-enactment of coloniser versus colonised, but Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were allies – and at this point I have to give up because it feels like I’ve given the subject more thought than Six did. I think when it comes to politics I feel less in the room with Conspiracy (2001) than with Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS (1975).
In short: I think Six will do what he considers shocking for no particular reason except to be shocking. As I said, he’s a very consistent man.
You’d think, after all this fuss, he would have given the pooing more dramatic build-up.
It may comfort you to learn that actually Six does an awful lot less with the ‘digestive tract’ aspect of the story than you’d expect – especially considering that this was supposed to be the whole point of the film.
You could, if you had a strong stomach, do a lot with the inevitability of this particular horror. But when it comes to the point, any knack for anticipation he’d shown leaves him.
Likewise, for a film that’s supposed to be horrendous, it doesn’t Go There nearly as much as it could in terms of visuals. I mean, Salò came out in 1975, thirty-four years previous, and Pasolini was so determined to have edible faeces on-screen that he invented his own recipe. (Since I’m trying to be at least a bit cheering, I’ll add that it involved chocolate, biscuits, olive oil and marmalade, which doesn’t sound that bad. Source here, though be warned it describes the events of the movie, which really is upsetting: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/salo-120-days-sodom-pasolinis-sadistic-work-art-donald-farmer/. I’ll also add that I haven’t seen it, but have a fair idea from clips and documentaries. At some point I should get up the courage, but, well, I have a kid in the house.)
But that’s a comparison worth making, isn’t it? Pasolini had beliefs: he was so outspoken an anti-fascist that it’s probably why he was murdered. He wanted to show fascists as they are, not as they aspire to seem. Salò is about the abuse of power, which means his abusers are not only cruel but disgusting, pointless and pathetic. Sometimes you do bad things on screen to talk about bad things in the real world.
In an interview with Vice, Six remarked:
I have a very dark vision on humanity. I think we were born evil. That sounds, maybe, a little crazy, but we are. Society keeps us on the right path. Because what you see is when wars break out, people turn into animals, so we’re walking on thin ice, I think. We are very cruel beings. Like, if you compare us to animals, animals only kill because they have to eat, but the human race also kills for fun. That’s very disturbing, I think, and I show that in my movies, the dark side of humanity.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/tom-six-the-human-centipede-director-is-very-proud-of-his-work/
That’s . . . not exactly in-depth analysis. Obviously someone being quoted in an interview verbatim may not be their most polished self, but it’s repetitive and lacks reflection. How does society keep us on the right path? What does he mean by society? Why is society good if it’s made up of evil humans? When things go wrong people turn into animals, but also people are worse than animals? Even if he wasn’t complaining about political correctness nowadays, I don’t think the Fash are coming for him any time soon. Pasolini he ain’t.
So I don’t, you know, mind that I didn’t have to watch him get busy with the chocolate and marmalade. For selfish reasons I’d prefer he didn’t.
But I can’t help thinking that if he had something he really wanted to say beyond ‘People can do bad things,’ he might have.
Like I say, there are honourable films involving the forced ingestion of faeces. I mentioned The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as another one, and that involves cannibalism as well – but again, that’s a film with something to say. Peter Greenaway was a Marxist artist living under Thatcherism and watching his country undergo a spasm of heartless overconsumption; when his brutal gangster Spica (Michael Gambon) describes fine dining as ‘stuffing our mouths and feeding the sewers’, he’s talking about more than what’s literally on screen.
In short: people did this well before Six in really, really upsetting films that are considered important cultural classics.
Six likes to complain about ‘political correctness,’ but at the peak of his career he had the artistic and political freedom to have got away with being way worse than anything he actually did. It’s at this point that I lost not just my engagement with the film, but my respect for it.
Anyone can talk big, but the test is what’s on screen. And what’s on screen is, so to speak, all talk and no trousers.
An hour in and the violence is happening off-screen. He’s either lost his nerve or he’s not interested in non-surgical ick –
– oh wait, just had some surgical ick. Yep, I was right.
But sadly, the surgical ick was short-lived and did not have much in the way of plot consequences. The middle of the film really sagged; it felt like now Six had got his actors into their pantomime-horse position, he didn’t know what to do with them.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/168q5u9/is_this_the_most_beautiful_horse_in_the_world/
Now the police have called. Good move, there is plot again, because this was starting to drag.
If he does the police the same way I’m gonna call myself bored.
I think the police bit would be more suspenseful if Six left us in any doubt as to who’s gonna win this thing. I’m not uncertain, so I’m just waiting to see what the mad doc will do, and by now it feels like he’s shown his hand.
This was the point where structurally the movie needed to built towards a climax. Six lacked either the ideas or the courage to create one purely with the mad doctor and his victims, so he resorted to the old method of bringing in some new characters. It was a bit of a relief, less because I expected any rescue than because not much was happening otherwise and I was bored.
But this brings me to another point: why is the plot like this? And by ‘like this’, I mean conventional.
If you’re going for gross, go for it. Think of John Waters’ ‘Trash Trilogy’, which includes more coprophagia in Pink Flamingos (1972), and the rampage of ‘hardcore art’ Female Trouble (1974) with its hilarious conclusion, ‘I feel lucky to receive the death penalty. Why, it’s the biggest award I could get in my field!’ If you want to transgress, you can transgress standard narratives as well – and in so doing, you can strike a blow against hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness.
But what’s the narrative of The Human Centipede? Two girls get lost and wander into the house of a kidnapper. He does bad things to them. They try to escape and get caught. They resist and get hurt. The Rule of Three kicks in and there’s a final chance for them: the police show up. Will they escape or will evil triumph? Structurally it doesn’t matter, because either way the plot template will be served. Change up what’s literally being done to them and this is positively old-fashioned.
There are Hammer movies with more innovative storytelling.
Six’s problem isn’t that he’s too much. He’s not enough. Except for the surgical rants the movie sags, and the fact that he couldn’t think of a better way to bring things to a climax than the police brings to mind Raymond Carver’s old saw from ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950): ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’
I wonder, actually, if the centipede concept would have upset people left if it was only one of many grisly flourishes in a pile of wildly creative horrors? Take Mad God (2021), which I’ve raved about in this very column (https://gnofhorror.com/stopmotion-mad-god-and-the-fearsome-power-of-animation/). It features endless unbearable things, including yet more forced coprophagia – and I’ve yet to see a reviewer who isn’t uplifted by the fact that Mad God is in the world. Even if they don’t want to watch it, everyone understands that its powers of invention are a triumph of the human spirit.
If a director has a million horrendous ideas that’s not distressing, that’s impressive.
One horrendous idea that you make your whole brand? Hm.
Now there’s a thought: The Human Centipede might have been less upsetting if it had more upsetting things in it.
It’s a bit tiresome how the male victim is now the only one doing anything.
Of course the girls’ capacity for dialogue is, shall we say, cut off. But an inventive filmmaker could still find ways to keep them in play. Movement can communicate. Silenced people can make choices. Heck, he could even have had one or both of them be ASL speakers; why not? He already had subtitles for German and Japanese; subtitling American Sign Language wouldn’t have been any extra trouble.
Sexism? Maybe. On the other hand it’s not a very lecherous camera; even before the girls get kidnapped there’s not much leering at their bodies.
All things considered, the movie plays as amazingly sexless.
Again, I’m not saying I want to watch a movie that feels tumescent with relish at such goings-on. I rather don’t. But there are so many fetishes that this concept might touch on, and Six doesn’t touch on any of them. He doesn’t even have the excuse of American puritanism; he’s Dutch, a nation famous for its liberal approach.
It’s just an odd absence in a film priding itself on being shocking that the subject doesn’t come up at all, even to be refuted. That’s what we call ‘not exploring your ideas properly.’
So in the end the girls’ disappearance from relevance lands as a lack of dramatic through-line: the only victim who can talk is the one who we haven’t established a relationship with beforehand. It feels less like a political issue than a storytelling one; again, the mad doctor is the only character the camera really cares about listening to.
Man the police are contrivedly dumb. I don’t think Six is interested in any plot that doesn’t involve the torture prawn bits.
You see, the police have had a report of screaming – an American girl screaming, no less – from a neighbour. They know there are some missing people in the neighbourhood, including two American girls. The missing persons’ vehicles have been found near the doctor’s house. The doctor, when interviewed, is hostile, shady, and drops a syringe he was hiding right in front of them.
And yet when he refuses to let them search, they decide the thing to do is leave him unsupervised for twenty minutes while they go off to get a search warrant.
I do not know the exact rules of police searches in Germany, but come on.
Six knew he needed to escalate. This feels like he couldn’t think of a way of doing it without bringing in an outside threat to the villain, but then realised that they could easily stop the villain, and so waved his hand and made them go away for just long enough to get back to the villainy.
It all watches like the work of a scriptwriter who felt the narrative beats had to be there in order to make it a proper movie, but whose heart did not belong to movie-making. Once he’d made the joke he had to make a movie about it, otherwise he’d just be the guy who made a joke about being sewn to a trucker’s patootie instead of being the guy who made the Human! Centipede! Movie!
Six talks a big game. A huge one. He boast of his ‘unique, singular vision, challenging, intelligent cinema’; he lambasts the film industry saying they ‘lack a true passion and obsession for the art of filmmaking.’
I respect creative obsession. Even if I don’t always like what it produces, I respect it.
But let’s be blunt: I don’t see obsession here, or not with anything except that one joke he made that one time. I see scamping and shortcuts at every turn.
I see, pun fully intended, half-assing.
I do not think Tom Six has a true passion for the art of filmmaking.
If he had, there’d be more creative intelligence in the film parts of his film.
Felt like his interest was flagging, but back to slow suffering and it instantly revives.
There is one last flare of torment as the victims try to escape, and again, the camera snaps to. It’s grisly and distressing and Six stays with it long enough to keep us feeling dramatic. But at this point he’d lost me: I knew that as soon as this part was over the suspense would end with it.
Japanese dude changes personality out of nowhere just to keep things horrid.
See, they’d got to a point where they actually had a chance of escaping. But then this guy, who’d been the most defiant prisoner all along, suddenly declares the doctor is right. He’s ‘God’, in fact, punishing our Japanese lad for his many previously-unmentioned sins. That’s not the kind of thinking you’d get in a Shinto or Buddhist believer, and according to the CIA World Factbook only 1.5% of Japanese people are Christian, so I guess our mad doctor beat the odds when he chose his victim. Or maybe it was a sudden conversion forced by the superior philosophy of this white guy.
‘What an insane world!’ the only character of colour declares, embracing the philosophy of his torturer, and then he turns the weapon he’d intended for the doctor on himself.
We take this moment to remind the audience that this character was supposed to be a tribute to the masters of Japanese cinema.
Failed homage aside, it makes no narrative sense. There’s nothing ‘insane’ about this world except one isolated doctor, and he’s not a God figure, just the only character that the camera enjoys paying attention to. It’s like watching the climax to a different movie.
Or, more bluntly, it’s like watching the script take a bow for a performance it never gave.
It’s also like watching the police decide to leave. Six has an ending he wants to get to and he can’t be bothered to make plausible any character decision that moves us in that direction. It’s just plain lazy.
Source: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/132434045277740308/
And at this point I’m going to start moving through my notes quicker, because this is the point I got really weary:
I’m just saying there’s a reason the Grand Guignol plays weren’t this long.
There’s a good short movie in here, but we’re 8 minutes off the end and I’m tired.
Honestly I think Six has some talent for concept, but I don’t think he cares enough for character to make a full-length film. He either needed a cowriter or less run time.
Look, I’m not saying I WANT faeces horror. I never watched Salò. But given the concept I’m surprised how little of it Six nerved himself up to include.
If I have to watch this being done to your victims, I also demand a splashier and more creative demise for them. Go out with a bang, I say.
The Human Centipede’s premise is essentially Sid from Toy Story (1995), a little boy cutting his dolls about, and there’s no reason you can’t make a perfectly entertaining shocker with that. But if you’re going to do that, then please end by strapping them to some fireworks and throwing them on the barbecue. You give me a gross-out black comedy, I want a punchline.
Okay I’m done. For a black comedy that was downer ending. Felt like the body-horror equivalent of a fade-out ending to a song.
Final thoughts: there’s no reason you couldn’t have done something spectacularly awful with this concept, but actually I’m disappointed. Once he had his concept the rest of the movie felt like a chore. All his creativity is in the premise and he doesn’t have the patience to develop it.
It’s got its moments and the structure is correct on paper, but a lot of it is more drag than punch, and that doesn’t suit the pitch.
This wasn’t outsider art but edgelord. A lurking edge of conventionality.
Let’s talk edgelords
What’s up with Tom Six? From initial joke to script to film, this is absolutely his project and he likes the world to know that. So what’s he about?
Well, he’s all about disgust. I mean, he’s all about disgust. His previous work included a film called What The F*ck, in which a celebrity singer is kidnapped by superfans who want his semen to produce a souvenir baby, and in an interview in Scream Horror Mag (https://www.screamhorrormag.com/17721-2/ – includes some shots from that movie) he cannot stop enthusing about how hilarious it is that the couple are fat and ugly. Putting a celebrity at the mercy of people he considers gross makes Six so proud it has an almost child-like innocence to it, like a little boy who can’t stop telling people he can burp the whole alphabet.
And he’s like that in all his interviews. It’s almost like reading Chuck Tingle if Chuck Tingle wasn’t both wildly inventive and a great big sweetheart: some people have an outlandish thing they like to do and they really aren’t being ironic about it. When Tom Six made The Human Centipede, he wasn’t changing pace. He was just being himself.
After he made it, what then? Well, Six made two sequels on the same premise, and Part 2 is on Shudder and I will not review it for less than a thousand pounds. Crowdfund it if you like; I doubt anyone will, but I mean it when I say that’s my price – not because I’m disgusted but because I am, to use the words Six has most loudly reviled, not interested. I feel like I’ve got the point.
And what next?
Apparently Six has made another film called The Onania Club; it’s about a group of women with a fetish for watching people suffer, which doesn’t sound like much of a variation on his theme. But it couldn’t find a distributor. (https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/406568/tom-six-disparages-pc-culture-now-asks-for-fans-support-to-release-the-onania-club/)
Six put out an appeal on Twitter in 2021 – but it’s interesting exactly what he appealed for. This was Six’s plea:
If you want to be part of the battle, grab your phone and record a micro-statement why you want to see The Onania Club and why it is so outrageous that provocative and unsafe cinema is casually rejected in these over-sensitive politically correct times.
Maybe there are contractual issues I don’t know about that meant it had to be released in a theatre. But if there weren’t, then why was Six asking for recorded messages of support rather than, say, Crowdfunder pledges or video-on-demand ticket sales?
A YouTube video that served as an inspiration while writing this review was Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s 2015 essay Postal, Hatred and Weighing The Worth of Asshole Simulators (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kivtv6wabBk): it’s a masterclass in taking deliberately provocative art on its own terms while keeping your head about context. One of the things Caldwell-Gervais points out is this: you can be perfectly successful with deliberately offensive work if you’ll just ‘own the fact’ that what you’re producing is niche.
Six blames the whole of culture, and yes, he’s not wrong at least that torture porn is no longer riding high. But even if political change is the reason cinemas now won’t show a film, rather than the simpler explanation that the genre just fell out of fashion, this is the age of the streamer and there’s no shame in an online release. That’s how most people watch most of the films they see – I mean, it’s how I watched this movie – and it’s impossible to believe that literally nowhere on the Internet would let him put it out.
Six has loyal fans, and if what he wanted most was for his art to be seen, he might find a way to get it to them.
Like I say, it could be there are reasons behind the scenes I don’t know about – but Six in interview gives no reason to believe that what’s holding him back is simply a decision not to do what many extreme film-makers do, which is accept that your natural audience fit is ‘small but passionate’ and make it part of your identity to be fringe.
Which leaves me coming back to the question I had above: did he want to make a movie about a mad doctor creating a human centipede, or did he want to be the guy who made a human centipede movie? Because if the Proclaimers wanted to be the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at my door, and they had to go another way round and they refused the hike, then I’d start to think that maybe they weren’t much of a hiker.
Apparently the new film is made and his fans want to see it. He could probably find ways to get it to them. Maybe I’m being unfair – self-publishing is hard work – but I wonder if he’s in his happy place just getting to talk about how it’s too! shocking! for! release!
The word ‘edgelord’, according to the OED, wasn’t in use until 2013, four years after the first Centipede movie, but if you looked up both ‘edgelord’ and ‘comedy’ you’d probably find a picture of Six labelled, ‘Basically this guy.’ This is a man who described delighting in his fame by saying it made ‘little Tom stand erect and salute;’ conceptual flashing is how he operates. As I’ve said, for so potentially fetishistic an idea The Human Centipede is amazingly sexless – but that kind of goes with the flasher persona: the thing is less for pleasure than for waving around to startle people.
In the same interview he said something quite telling: that he thought the film was perfect because, ‘My writing and filming were totally free of any self-censorship.’
That’s his criteria for quality: ‘unfiltered’ is the same as ‘inspired’.
[https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3558957/interview-tom-six-reflects-10-years-human-centipede-teases-future-centipede-projects/ – features shots from the movie]
Six talks a lot about pushing the boundaries of art, and these are the boundaries that interest him. The New York Times once observed of singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer that, ‘Mr Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,’ and Lehrer, recognising a good joke when he saw one, had it printed on the liner notes and quoted it in concert as a review he ‘particularly cherished’. That’s the territory we’re in here. Six likes to go to extremes, the extremes he likes to go to are gross-out, and he’s one of those people for whom the ‘transgression’ and ‘transcendence’ are basically the same thing.
And you know, transgressive cinema is important. The world would be duller and poorer without it.
But a film is more than one disgusting idea. The disgusting idea has to exist within a film – and the ‘film’ parts of that had no creative passion.
A comic poem occurs:
On Some South African Novelists
by Roy Campbell
You praise the firm restraint with which they write –
I’m with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,But where’s the bloody horse?
That’s the question The Human Centipede really left me with. Six’s artistic manifesto is ‘No snaffles or curbs.’ And maybe he succeeds in that. But I don’t see much horse there either.
Let’s talk cultural history!
I keep saying there are good ways to do what Six is doing. I’ve already mentioned political films like Salò and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover using degradation to stand up for human dignity, and I’ve talked about underground movies like those of John Waters, but there are a couple more ways you could go.
The Human Centipede is essentially a gimmick film. I wanted to be fair to it, but the most to be said in fairness is that it could, given a script collaborator and some sharp editing, have made a very good short. Get to the kidnap faster, give the mad-doctor speech about what he’s going to do centre stage, wake up on the traumatised victims, fade out; fine. That’s as much idea as was there, really, and the rest was filler. Trim all that and it would have been stronger.
Or perhaps even better, it might have made a short story: what Six’s camera really likes is staring at Dieter Laser’s face as he makes speeches. To a surprising degree, the film is all talk – and a short film or story that played to that strength could have hit pretty hard. It could have been done in prose.
But I want to be clear that gimmicks are not, in themselves, the problem. Some gimmicks are pure delight.
A comparison that’s been made before (here, for instance, https://www.eonline.com/news/178950/who_wants_horror_flicks_be_medically) is between Tom Six and William Castle. So let’s talk a bit about Castle. He’ll put a much-needed smile on your face.
Did you ever think a film might be more exciting if you could wear coloured glasses that showed you the ghosts through the red lens or hid them through the blue? What about if they told you the movie’s monster produced an eerie ‘tingling’ sensation, and then sat you in seats with hidden buzzers they set off when the monster ‘escaped’ the movie? If a movie promised a ‘fright break’ where those too afraid to keep watching were offered a chance to leave the theatre, but only if you went through ‘Coward’s Corner,’ would you take that dare?
These are the gimmicks that, tingler and all, spark joy.
William Castle saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula at the age of thirteen, and at that moment, ‘I knew then what I wanted to do with my life – I wanted to scare the pants off audiences.’ And he was, in his day, the king of gimmicks: he came up with a lot of witty ideas to get audiences into seats.
And the movies weren’t necessarily so bad that the gimmicks were the only reason people watched; Castle was important. House on Haunted Hill (1959) is still considered a pulp classic, and 13 Ghosts (1960) had enough staying power that they bothered to remake it in 2001 – and then, near the end of his life, he produced Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and however much there is to say about Roman Polanski as a human being, that’s one of the best horror movies ever made. Castle inspired others too, from John Waters to Alfred Hitchcock, and altogether cinema is the better because Castle was around. He liked his scares cleaner than Six – he was more for the shock than the disgust – but the tradition of using gimmicks to get audiences in is positively venerable.
Here’s a Castle classic: his first movie, Macabre (1958). Not only did he give out a thousand-dollar life insurance policy with every ticket – just in case the audience should die of fright – but he stationed hearses outside the theatres, with nurses in attendance.
The dude had style.
But the idea of medics as marketing? Castle wasn’t the first there either.
When the Grand Guignol played its shockers to Paris, plays with names like The Ultimate Torture and The Kiss of Blood, director Max Maurey showed his impresarial touch by hiring doctors to attend performances. Which boosted ticket sales, as you can imagine.
Audiences were reported to have vomited during shows, but according to performers from the original Grand Guignol (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVnL7O5ZX6Q) they were more likely to get it on. The theatre included ‘discreet boxes fronted by wire mesh’ in which some audience members could, let’s say, fully enjoy the show; one old performer reminisces with true Parisian amusement that, ‘The cleaning ladies would find traces of sexual pleasure from the audience. Ejaculating yes, vomiting no! You can’t do it all at once!’ ‘It’s no surprise to me,’ another remarks sympathetically, ‘that some got a certain physical pleasure out of watching horror and would perhaps like to share it.’
The Grand Guignol liked everyone to enjoy their evening. It’s the opposite of Pasolini or Greenaway, who were using extreme cinema to say serious things: this was playing at the titillating edges of experience, all in good fun.
There’s a great book called Grand-Guignol: the French Theatre of Horror by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, two academics who studied the theatre, in part, by reviving it in performance. (I promise this will be relevant.) Here’s one interesting thing they found:
To make Grand Guignol work, you have to go slow.
Actors, they remark, have a tendency to rush the mutilations and the buckets of blood. It’s unsettling to perform pain, and it’s also a sleight of hand you worry about bungling, so there’s a natural impulse to hurry through it. Quoting colleagues Fluger and Williams, they say this:
[There] is a tendency to rush through the violence and end the play, instead of playing the violence out fully. When this happens, the climax is perceived in performance as a brief anti-climax, despite the company’s intentions. Only time to rest in the violence – to fully explore it, not only as it relates to the character, to the text, and even to the audience, but equally as it relates to the actor personally in the physical, emotional and psychological way – will allow the moment its real boldness, its real immediacy and its real terror.
They mention what’s describes itself as a filmic record of the ‘last Grand Guignol performance’ in the documentary Ecco (1965), which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtCbnWkIfMA. A bearded man cuts off the arm of a helpless woman – and he does it so slowly. He cuts with a knife; she screams. He subdues her. He goes to get a saw. He starts again. He keeps glancing towards the audience, a tease, a dare, a challenge: you’re going through this too.
It’s an interesting approach, especially when we nowadays think so much in terms of jumpscares. William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959) is still remembered with fondness as an early use of the jumpscare: our pretty heroine is trying to find her way around, and BOO! – a witchy old woman emerges out of nowhere, and everyone leaps in their seat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z2H9ZfITBg. Castle went for this rule: hit ’em hard and hit ’em fast.
But you can see the slow burn in other pieces of cinema.
I mentioned Eyes Without A Face earlier; there’s another good example which Hand and Wilson point to as an example of the Grand Guignol influence lingering in cinema: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 thriller Les Diaboliques – a major inspiration to Castle.
Les Diaboliques, or ‘the deeblie-beeblies’ as I once called it when I was really tired, is a psychological chiller set in a boarding school. The headmaster Michel (Paul Merisse) is an abusive brute, and the story revolves around the conspiracy between his wife Christina (Vera Clouzot) and his mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret) to kill him and conceal his body, which proves unnervingly uncooperative about being hidden. There’s no real gore in the film, but it does have an infamous climax which I’ll spoil in the next few paragraphs.
Christina and Nicole have been attempting to hide Michel’s body in water, and water is an insistent motif. Finally Christina – who we’ve been told has a heart condition – goes into the bathroom, and what’s there? A full tub of water. With Michel’s body in it. Which slowly, slowly, sloooooowly stands up and stares at her with drowned eyes.
Christina gapes, and she cringes, and slowly, slowly, she slides to the floor. We watch the seconds drag out as fear stops her heart.
There’s a rational explanation, albeit a very sadistic one, but it’s the scene itself that makes the movie famous even seventy-odd years later among horror fans who don’t even speak French. Because what it’s doing is very effective – and very counter to how most horror does things nowadays. It’s an anti-jumpscare. And it’s great. Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004) ranked it at number 49.
Cinema can shock by showing you ugly things to make you care about the real world. It can shock by being comically defiant. It can shock by making you jump out of your seat. It can shock by dragging out the horror slowly and refusing to blink.
Where do we put Tom Six in this?
Honestly? I don’t think he measures up to any of them. I can think of good examples of all, and they’re all way more upsetting than The Human Centipede, while also being more passionate film-making.
If he was going for a technique, Grand Guignol slowness would probably have been his best friend. In the one scene where the doctor unfolds his plans, he gets there. The whole concept of the film was to make you think and think and think about something you really didn’t want to think about; fixing the camera on dreadful things and making you suffer along with the characters could have done that. That was the Grand Guignol technique, and it’s cool enough that it’s still being studied. On film it would have been appalling, but we’d have had to respect it.
But he doesn’t really do that. There is no single scene of violence or body horror that stays with it for the whole duration.
So in the end, the best comparison I can think of is Wes Craven – but what Wes Craven proved not to be.
Famously Craven started in horror because it was one of those genres, along with X-rated (which he did too), that a newbie film-maker could get into. The Last House On The Left (1972) was his first, and it’s still a gruelling watch. It’s also not his best work; he got much better.
The plot is taken from Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, but Bergman’s film was a thoughtful meditation on faith and forgiveness in which the violent moments were only part of the story, and not very graphic. Craven built a feature around just those bits and turned everything up to eleven. In Last House, two nice young girls are seized by a pack of degenerates who degrade and torment them to death, and when their parents find out they murder the bejeepers out of the degenerates. That’s it.
I’m not the first to note that Craven was raised in a Christianity so earnest that horror movies were something of a terra incognita to him: he did not know where the usual lines were drawn. And that Last House doesn’t watch like a proper horror film – it watches like what a good Baptist boy kept away from the secular world thinks a horror film is like. Relentlessly horrid, full of unmotivated cruelty, always doing the most wicked thing you could possibly imagine.
Proper horror movies aren’t like that; the word ‘movie’ is more important than the word ‘horror.’
Craven wasn’t exactly naive when he made Last House; he’d got his start with porn films – but again, those are not what you go to if you want to learn plot. Last House rambles from money shot to money shot, really, with a transgression born of that weird mix of pious naivete and pornographer’s pragmatism.
But Craven was intelligent and he learned fast, and what he learned was that if you want the kills to matter they need to be part of a story. It’s the difference between a skin-flick and an erotic romance: the key moments can be as spicy as you like, but they need to serve the story. The story isn’t there as an excuse for them.
Which is where we leave Tom Six, I think. In the good old Guignol/Castle tradition, The Last House On The Left boasted the famous slogan: ‘To avoid fainting keep repeating, it’s only a movie . . . only a movie . . . only a movie.’
Well, we can say the same thing about The Human Centipede. But culturally, that actually isn’t what it is. It’s a memetic elevator pitch that did the rounds because humans are primates and when we see something that bothers us we point it out to the rest of the troop. Only in this case, monkey-see-monkey-warn was a bad plan, because hearing about it wasn’t the warning but the experience itself.
It’s like the dick pic of marketing: by the time you know it’s there, it’s too late.
But if we look at the actual movie . . . it’s not much. Many films have been more upsetting in many different directions, for greater purpose and to greater effect. If we view it as only a movie it’s just a not-very-good one, and the ways in which it’s mediocre are about what it lacks: too little invention, too little originality, too little suspense, too little, in Six’s own words, ‘passion and obsession.’ Really weird and really horrifying films have more energy to them.
As a pitch, it made its mark. As ‘only a movie,’ I think we have to admit Drs Dunning and Kruger as co-directors.
There’s a reason its cultural legacy is what it is: a marketing one. That’s where all the creative energy went. The elevator pitch wasn’t the thing that got the film made; making the film is what justified the elevator pitch.
I don’t think making movies is really Tom Six’s thing. I think his real skill is as an interviewee: in the one scene where the villain interviews himself it’s a good horror film, and all the rest of the work is on the PR junket rather than the screen.
So rest easy in the knowledge that whatever you’re imagining the film is like, it’s probably not that bad. You’ve already seen the real work. And like I said a million pages back, what came of it in the end is probably for the best.
Horror cinema had to strip itself back to the basics of physical horror to shake off the inertia of the 1990s. Then, with its newly-possible sincerity, it needed to find new things to say.
And while no film did it single-handed, I’d speculate that The Human Centipede, simply by its lack of merit, helped to demonstrate that just being gruesome wasn’t enough. You could be this gruesome and still this unengaging. It was time to think of something more interesting.
Art opens up new expanses. To do that, it has to test new ground. And sometimes what those explorations show is that this particular path has got as far as it’s going to go, and maybe it’s time to climb some mountains and check out the view at the top.
. . . And that concludes this episode of Pointless Challenges For Stupid People. I watched The Human Centipede. Can I come back into polite society now? They have better movies.
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