Why The Human Centipede Movies Are So Controversial | Screen Rant – Screen Rant

Gory horror movies tend to be controversial, but the Human Centipede trilogy pushes the boundaries by making its gore disgustingly scatological.

The horror genre is prone to have controversial movies, butThe Human Centipedemovies really pushed the boundaries. Tom Six's2009 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 withThe Human Centipede 2, which he willingly made "worse" by increasing the number of victims in the centipede to twelve andmakingtheir suffering more explicit. He also embraced the criticisms toward the disgusting,yet inaccurate level ofrealism 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."

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The Human Centipedemovies have continued to divide audiences and critics sincethe 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 conventionalbody horror. Six even had to skip this central aspect of the story duringhis pitches to investors in order to finance the project. However, the firstinstallment isn't nearly as gory or explicit as most movies in the genre. It was only untilthe firstHuman Centipede attained a strong word-of-mouth impulse that the crude parts of the concept were further fleshed out for the sequels.

TheHuman 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 heinousvillains 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 theSawfranchise, the victims are never blessed with the tiniest sliver of hope, and the intensity of the torture isconcentrated onthe shock of seeing them suffer while they swallow each other'sexcrement instead of the curious complexity ofJigsaw'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 movieshave continued to desensitize audiences since 2009. As time goes on, gory movies stop being so controversialdue tothe 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.

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Nicolas Ayala is a screenwriter, photographer, and model with a passion for blockbusters and big-screen adaptations. He's been writing movies since he got his first crayon and continues to do so in his final year of Film Production at university. An extensive immersion in the behind-the-scenes of a couple dozen projects has let him see films in a new light and talk about his experiences around the web. When not writing or dreaming about writing, he's probably cosplaying, directing goofy films, creating comic books, studying ancient mythology, learning new languages or producing music that your hips can't stop dancing to.

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Why The Human Centipede Movies Are So Controversial | Screen Rant - Screen Rant

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