Is The Human Centipede A True Story

[Silvana Fleischacker]

Itwas condemned for its revolting and grotesque scenes, which showed a German surgeon who kidnaps three tourists, tortures them, before he joins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming a "human centipede" - a conjoined triplet.

The controversy would continue with Six's sequel to the film The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), which was only released in the UK in 2011 after substantial cuts and edits, after the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) refused to give the film an 18 certificate unless the film cut a large number of graphic scenes - including masturbation with sandpaper, rape with barbed wire, and the brutal murder of a newborn baby.

The final film in the torture trilogy The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) was critically panned and derided for its enjoying of sexual violence and self-serious focus on punishment in the criminal justice system.

Tom Six's next film is psychological thriller The Onania Club, which is due out later this year, so we think this would be the perfect time to look at what inspired the Dutch director's disturbing iconic trilogy.

The main inspiration for the film came from a joke that Six had told to his friend where he explained a punishment for child molesters which would see their mouths stitched to the anus of a fat truck driver.

The vile examples of medical torture included tests on twins, with twins being forcibly sewn together to become conjoined, and dying eyes in twins to see how they would react. If one twin died in the experiment, the other would always be killed.

The film also features victims of multiple nationalities to represent countries involved in World War Two, with the evil Dr Josef Heiter (Heiter meaning "cheerful" in German) representing the Nazi German psyche.

Up to 12 murders were linked with being inspired by that film, including teenage couple Benjamin Darras and Sarah Edmondson, who described themselves taking LSD and watching the film on repeat before killing 3 people and paralysing another.

The character of Martin Lomax is a short, obese man who is mentally challenged and becomes obsessed with the first film, before setting out to create a larger human centipede than the 3 people sewn together in the first film.

It was set in a prison where a psychopathic prison warden and his accountant (each played by the actors behind the villains of the first two films) who decide to inflict brutal torture upon the inmates of the prison - including mass castration, cannibalism, genital mutilation and a massive five-hundred person sized centipede.

With the Governor (played by Hollywood star Eric Roberts) approves the torture as being "what America needs" at the end of the film, things enter a more dystopian territory - as we see extreme values in corporal punishment come bleed into culturally-approved torture.

Six likely saw inspiration in infamous prisons that were the site of torture, such as the US base at Guantanomo Bay in Cuba, and of course the Nazi concentration camps that were the chief basis of the first film.

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]

Six has stated that The Human Centipede is, to an extent, a reflection on fascism. Dieter Laser, who played the antagonist Dr Heiter, said during the promotion of the film that he felt the guilt of Nazi actions during the war had haunted ordinary Germans for generations, and that as a German whose father participated in the war, he often felt "like a child whose father is in jail for murder."[23] The inclusion of a German villain came from this, with Six citing both the German invasion of the Netherlands during World War II and the Nazi medical experiments as inspiration.[24] Laser stated in an interview with Clark Collis for Entertainment Weekly that he considered the film a "grotesque [parody] about the Nazi psyche".[7] Heiter's name was an amalgamation of several Nazi war criminals, his surname (literally meaning "cheerful" in German) a combination of the names of Nazi doctors Fetter and Richter, and his first name coming from Josef Mengele, who carried out experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.[25] World War II also played an influence on the nationality of the other main characters who were American and Japanese.[26] Six includes many horror film clichs in the first act, such as a broken-down car, lack of phone signal[27] and very nave victims.[11] Six did this in an attempt to lull audiences into thinking they are watching a conventional horror film, therefore making Dr Heiter's treatment of his victims more shocking.[28]

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