Fifteen years ago, Dutch film-maker Tom Six succeeded where almost everybody fails – particularly in the world of horror. He actually shocked people. No self-respecting sophisticate admits to being shocked, of course, and no horror connoisseur will admit to being really and truly horrified. But Six really did freak audiences out with his extreme exploitation nightmare The Human Centipede, the first of a trilogy. It was a grenade in the faces of prim conformists, and also those badass horror fans who thought they’d seen it all.
The “human centipede” of the title is created by a sadistic surgeon who imprisons three young people in a basement and sews them together mouth-to-anus as a vivisectional experiment. Six himself had been a director on the original Dutch TV show Big Brother that started the global franchise, and it was easy to see how his movie masterwork was intended as a satire on consumerist voyeurism and cruelty. Or maybe it just sprang from the same dark creative place that gave birth to the TV phenomenon of the age.
