Why The Human Centipede Movies Are So Controversial

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The horror genre is prone to have controversial movies, but The Human Centipede movies really pushed the boundaries. Tom Six's 2009 horror movie, The Human Centipede bases its premise around the disgusting experiment of Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser), a surgeon who kidnaps a group of tourists and stitches their mouths to each other's anus. Although it sparked quite a lot of controversy, the movie spawned two sequels and has inspired other grotesque body horror movies since its release.

Director Tom Six upped the ante with The Human Centipede 2, which he willingly made "worse" by increasing the number of victims in the centipede to twelve and making their suffering more explicit. He also embraced the criticisms toward the disgusting, yet inaccurate level of realism of the experiment, and gave the first sequel, subtitled "Full Sequence," the tagline "100% medically inaccurate." For The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence), the final installment in the trilogy, the number of victims rose to 500, and the aim of the movie was to be "100% politically incorrect."

The Human Centipede movies have continued to divide audiences and critics since the first movie's release. A story about an unhinged doctor who surgically conjoins people together is a bizarre idea by itself, but the scatological nature of the mouth-anus attachment is what takes the movies beyond conventional body horror. Six even had to skip this central aspect of the story during his pitches to investors in order to finance the project. However, the first installment isn't nearly as gory or explicit as most movies in the genre. It was only until the first Human Centipede attained a strong word-of-mouth impulse that the crude parts of the concept were further fleshed out for the sequels.

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The Human Centipede trilogy is not made for the general audience. All three movies not only focus on the process of the experiment, but also on the pleasure the antagonists feel when they see their victims suffer. The victims are depicted as objects for the heinous villains to enjoy, whereas other horror movies focus on the victims' perspective on suffering. The Human Centipede movies take the side of the monster, whose depravity makes him scarier than any paranormal entity or masked serial killer. Unlike the Saw franchise, the victims are never blessed with the tiniest sliver of hope, and the intensity of the torture is concentrated on the shock of seeing them suffer while they swallow each other's excrement instead of the curious complexity of Jigsaw's puzzles, which give the victims the chance to escape — or at least the illusion of it being possible.

It can be argued that gorier horror movies have continued to desensitize audiences since 2009. As time goes on, gory movies stop being so controversial due to the prevalence of the genre in pop culture. Still, The Human Centipede's premise is inherently tied to one of the human brain's least favorite ideas, and that's a very difficult thing to normalize outside the most niche horror groups.