Centipede Documentary
Shanae Maerz
For a movie that only grossed $252,207 worldwide at the box office, The Human Centipede, which turns ten years old today, is a movie that has had an outsized cultural footprint (to be fair, it was mostly an on-demand release, and those numbers, though unavailable, are likely substantial). When it debuted at horror film festivals, outraged Tweets wondering what was wrong with the filmmakers became a trend. Among myself and my friends, it became known as the movie that would make your girlfriend punch you for even describing the plot, in which three people are surgically sewn together, anus-to-mouth. A year later, it was parodied on South Park, and became a thing that everyone just knew about, spawning twisted three-person Halloween costumes and unofficial spin-off merchandise. The sheer uniquely disgusting nature of the central plot point was just weird and gross enough to capture people's imaginations, for better or worse.
My reaction at the time was that in some ways, here was a horror movie I had no good moral defense for. While I champion every film's right to exist, if an evangelical Christian tried to argue that the only point of The Human Centipede was to show filth and depravity, what rebuttal could I have? I couldn't see any larger thematic point being made or ground-breaking cinematic greatness achieved. It was very well made, but was that enough to justify it? Director Tom Six even admitted it began as a joke, when he thought about punishing convicted child molesters by sewing their mouths to the buttocks of a fat truck driver.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) in the first film is never explicitly called a Nazi, but he is implicitly coded as one, from his taste in music to his misanthropy and affinity for medical experiments. He's what you would imagine Dr. Mengele to be. And he's rooted in both the notion of Europe reckoning with its fascist past, and Six's own fear of medical procedures. The anticipation and description of the surgery is almost worse than the actual cutting; Six uses this to spread things out and give us time to expect that maybe the victims will escape. Nope. If they had, the movie probably wouldn't be as memorable. Instead, it gives you the shocking thing you paid to see. And it ends with everyone either dead or dying.
The "It's all a dream" ending is usually a cop-out, but not here, and here's why: threats on the Internet by obsessive fanboys like Martin, in real life, blur the lines between fantasy and reality, deliberately. If caught, they'll claim their threats were just for the LOLz. But sometimes the threats involve actual stalking, or swatting, i.e. calling in a fake crime at the subject's home address, summoning police with guns drawn who may shoot someone by mistake. Feeling powerless, many of today's alt-right recruits idolize powerful figures both real and fictional, and draw up revenge fantasies about a world they feel rejects them. And yes, those are often directed at favorite actresses who wouldn't give them the time of day in real life, and the characters they admire are often fascist.
Back in 2009, the news cycle wasn't quite what it is today, but those looking could see a pattern: fringe blog says something outrageous (think "birtherism"), semi-mainstream commentator discusses it as an item worth considering, then mainstream news pick up on that commentator's take and make it a headline that begins "Some people are saying..." That cycle has only gotten worse, when the president retweets conspiracy theorists and says there are good people on both sides of a pro-slavery debate; meanwhile, right-wing actors like Adam Baldwin deliberately stoke the anger of hardcore video gamers by bolstering misogynist fears that women use sex to get good game reviews, and feminists are coming to ruin and censor violent or sexy titles. The mainstream media spends the day talking about it, the president (who got elected on some of this stuff) sometimes retweets it, until the next crackpot notion takes root in the online fever swamps. The regurgitation and egestion may be metaphorical, but it's a human centipede all its own.
Did Tom Six foresee how all of this would get, or did he just make a gross joke that accidentally became relevant? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. In The Human Centipede trilogy, he has made the perfect allegory for our time, one in which misplaced identification for the wrong people metastasizes, reprocesses, and turns a sick joke into a toxic society.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is a 2009 Dutch independent body horror film written, directed and co-produced by Tom Six. The film concerns a deranged German surgeon who kidnaps three tourists and conjoins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming the eponymous "human centipede". It stars Dieter Laser as Josef Heiter, the creator of the centipede; and Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, and Akihiro Kitamura as Heiter's victims.
According to Six, the concept arose from a joke he had made with friends about punishing a child molester by stitching his mouth to the anus of a "fat truck driver". Other sources of inspiration were Nazi medical experiments performed during World War II, such as those performed by Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. When approaching investors to fund the project, Six did not mention the premise of the film for fear of putting off potential backers; financiers did not discover the full nature of the film until completion.
Lindsay and Jenny, tourists from New York visiting Germany, get a flat tire on their way to a night club and seek help at the house of misanthropic, psychopathic surgeon Dr. Josef Heiter. He drugs the women with water spiked with Rohypnol and kidnaps them to a makeshift medical ward.
Heiter kills a kidnapped truck driver after Heiter informs him he is "not a match". Heiter also abducts Japanese tourist Katsuro. Heiter is a retired world-renowned expert at separating Siamese twins, but dreams of making new creatures by sewing humans together. He says he will surgically connect his three victims mouth-to-anus, so that they share a single digestive system. His prior experiment, the 3Dog, conjoined three Rottweilers into a "Siamese triplet"; all three dogs died following the operation. Heiter has moved on to using human subjects.
After Lindsay tries to escape and fails, Heiter decides to make her the middle part of the centipede, the most painful position for the healing process, as punishment. Heiter performs the surgery, placing Katsuro at the lead, Lindsay at the middle and Jenny at the rear; he removes both the upper and lower front teeth and lips of Lindsay and Jenny, and mutilates the buttocks of Katsuro and Lindsay to provide access to the rectums. He severs the ligaments of his victims' knees to prevent leg extension, forcing his victims to crawl.
Once the operation is complete, Heiter takes the centipede to his living room, takes photos, and passes a mirror around for the segments of the centipede to view their new form. Heiter attempts to train his centipede as a pet by caging the centipede in a dog kennel, forcing Katsuro to eat dog food at dinner, and belittling Katsuro with racist insults and beating him with a crop when he becomes rebellious.
When Katsuro defecates after apologizing to the girls, Lindsay is forced to swallow his excrement. Heiter becomes irritated after being kept awake by the screaming of a caged Katsuro (who, as the front part of the centipede, has his mouth free and is still able to speak, but in Japanese) and by the constant moaning of the women, threatening to remove their vocal cords. When the centipede attempts to escape while Heiter is swimming, all three segments are beaten with the crop. Heiter is displeased with the realization that Lindsay is constipated. He proposes to use laxatives on Lindsay, which would cause her to explosively defecate and force Jenny to feed off the feces of her best friend. Before he can do this, he discovers that Jenny is dying from sepsis (suggesting that Lindsay may have already defecated into her mouth off-camera, which led to infection).
Two detectives named Kranz and Voller visit the house to investigate the disappearance of the three tourists. Heiter comes up with an idea to add them as replacements for Jenny in a new creation: a four-segment centipede. He offers the detectives water spiked with Rohypnol. After being given the drugged water, the detectives become suspicious and obtain a search warrant for his home. When the detectives leave Heiter's home, the victims attempt to escape. Katsuro attacks Heiter. Their attempt to escape fails. Katsuro confesses to Heiter that he deserves this fate because he treated his family poorly, then takes his own life by slitting his throat with a glass shard, trapping the girls.
Upon returning to Heiter's home, the detectives conduct separate searches as Heiter, injured, hides near his swimming pool. Kranz finds the ward along with Heiter's victims. Voller begins to feel ill from the earlier drugging and Heiter stabs him with the scalpel pulled from his foot during Katsuro's attack. Upon finding Voller dead, Kranz is shot by Heiter with Voller's sidearm. Kranz responds by fatally shooting Heiter in the head before succumbing to his wounds.
The inspiration for the film's plot came from a joke that writer/director Tom Six once made to his friends about punishing a child molester they saw on TV by stitching his mouth to the anus of an overweight truck driver.[7] Six saw this as the concept for a great horror film, and he began to develop the idea.[17] He has said he was heavily influenced as a filmmaker by the early works of David Cronenberg and Japanese horror films.[18] Six has said he prefers horror films that are more realistic over "unbelievable"[11] monster films, and that he gets "a rash from too much political correctness."[19] A major influence for The Human Centipede was Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial 1975 Italian drama film Sal, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which was notable for its scenes depicting intensely graphic violence, sadism, and sexual depravity, as was the work of Japanese director Takashi Miike.[20] Six has also expressed his love of the works of David Lynch.[21] Further inspiration came from Six's previous role as a director on the Dutch series of Big Brother, where he had been able to observe people who "did crazy things when they were alone and thought they were not (being) watched."[22]
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