What a way to kill a day | How I watched all the Human Centipede movies and it made me a worse person
Written by Noah Dietz: 10/28/2024
It’s October 2024, the election stress is building up and you’re trying (and failing) to finish your Hooptober 11 list. What better way can you spend your limited time, then, than to watch all three of the Human Centipede movies?
When I set out to do this, I had only seen the original. My memory of it was actually generally positive, and at the end of the day I … mostly maintain that. With a cover and concept that were built to kill in video stores and the way it used to hold a prominent spot on the Netflix horror page, The Human Centipede was an honest to god cultural behemoth. People who didn’t like horror still knew it existed due to the level it was parodied and referenced in pop culture. In a hilarious parallel to the Tom Cardy song “Red Flags,” a friend of mine once even used it to get out of a bad date. But of the many people who know about the film’s existence, most people still avoid it on general principle. I mean, why not? It doesn’t sound fun to watch, why suffer?
Which is how we came to my situation. One night I was playing games with a friend while he streamed on Twitch. Somehow—and I couldn’t tell you how—we got on the topic of The Human Centipede. A guy in chat was looking up the plot of all three to share with everyone, and I made a side comment about how I had zero desire to ever see the sequels. My friend made fun of me, and I told him, “Listen, I’ll watch all three of them in a single sitting, you just have to do it with me.” He hates horror, Hellraiser fucked up his day, I was totally safe, right? Unfortunately for me, he’d rather die than not commit to the bit. Here we are, months later, both of us with a full free day together. Why not throw the whole day away and ruin our collective mood for the week? Starting at 10 a.m. we sat down, grabbed some drinks, and started watching the worst trilogy I’ve seen to date.
The First Sequence
An image I made to commemorate the day.
The original Human Centipede, for all the dramatics and hype around it, is fine. While we open with some frankly amateurish-looking footage, once we get into the house, things lock together in a much more cohesive way. The cold, blue-green lights of the basement laboratory are the only true memories I feel like I had of this entire film until today. The limited colors of the house, the cold, miserable yard? All of it comes together for the cold, clinical way the movie is portraying itself. Getting to the end of it though, I felt nothing huge one way or another. There’s some scenes in it that’ll make you flinch, but it’s not too bad if you’re a regular horror consumer. Yeah, the concept is gross and yeah, there’s the shitting scene. All in all though, we still don’t have anything truly foul in the same way you might have imagined. On top of this, we get to enjoy the performance that Dieter Laser brings to the show as Dr. Heiter. He’s the far and above best actor in the film, and he’s having a blast throughout. Finishing this our spirits were high, and we were happily ready to dive into the second movie. We had worried we would need a drink or two to manage our way through the process, but in our hubris we felt incredibly safe.
The Second Sequence
This all changed as we started The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence). With the ending two to three minutes of the original, it immediately cheapened the opening. Following this up with a slew of comments toward our protagonist Martin (played by Laurence R. Harvey), The Human Centipede 2 set us up for what was surely going to be a bad time. Firstly—and credit where credit’s due—this is objectively shot better than the original. The black and white does a lot of favors, and the sound design is genuinely (and disgustingly) dialed in. Unfortunately the entire premise of this movie seems to be writer and director Tom Six looking at the fans of the original Centipede and saying they’re all short, fat, mentally disabled losers. This isn’t something I’m making up, this is just textual to the film itself. Martin is a superfan of the original, playing it on a loop while he does his dead-end job as a parking lot attendant.
The story continues to get worse and worse as things go on, with incest, abuse, and assault being a core theme throughout. Obviously this is by design: the whole film is intentionally built to offend, but the offense is loaded in at the cost of any sort of compelling story. When I say this I’m not saying I was too grossed out to pay attention, I’m saying there’s truly no story to this film. The entire plot can be summed up as “big dumb loser tries and fails to make a twelve-person human centipede.” And that, unfortunately, is as deep as it goes. There’s nothing here that’s fun to watch; the first at least had moments of pseudo levity, but in this one there was no story to lock into that could have helped push through the finale.
At the end of the second entry we were not only thoroughly disgusted (the only color in the standard version of the film is shit brown and it’s in a truly miserable diarrhea-filled scene) but the entire film was shown to be the fantasy of Martin. Truly the peak of the “it was a dream all along” trope, with all the disgusting shit we just were put through wrapped back up into the bored musings of our gore fetishist. It makes sense, the violence he doles out is far too extreme for you to believe he’s actually managing to capture any of his victims alive. After what we were put through, it feels like a bit of a cheap cop-out, but I suppose I don’t know what I expected from what we had just put ourselves through.
At this point we were really having an awful time. We were regretting the fact that we’d decided to watch all the movies at all, much less back to back. With much more trepidation, we entered into the third … Sequence.
The Third Sequence
Just like 2, The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) opens with the final few minutes of the previous entry. We’re in an American prison, our first trip stateside in the franchise, and the third entry of the Human Centipede shit machine brings back Dieter Laser, this time as prison warden Bill Boss. He runs the George H. W. Bush State Penitentiary. The opening moments pull out, and it’s revealed that Bill’s assistant Dwight, played by a returning Laurence R. Harvey, was showing him both of the other Human Centipede films. The purpose? Dwight is trying to convince Bill to pursue the plot of the films as an option for extreme punishment for the prison inmates. At first Bill has no time for this; he’d rather castrate a man and eat his balls for lunch or waterboard an inmate with boiling water. He also would rather be racist, misogynistic, and psychopathic.
Honestly, that’s the true issue with this film. The horrendous gross-out stylings of the second and the chilling concept of the original are (mostly) gone and have been replaced with a tsunami of rape jokes and racism. Because of that, this one’s a lot easier to stomach (relatively) than the other ones. Not because it’s fun to watch any of that stuff, but because there’s less actual nauseating, stomach-churning content. Centipede 3 moreso leaves you with stuff that just leaves the viewer feeling dirty. Among the other more valid things that make you feel gross, there’s a load of frankly masturbatory shit about Tom Six. At multiple points his movies are called “really good,” acting like they’re incredibly popular. He even makes an appearance in the film as himself, where he’s worshiped by all except Bill. In a different film I’d find this corny, but endearing. I love when M. Knight Shyamalan shows up in any of his films. I love Wes Craven’s cameos. I just have no love for Tom Six showing up like this. In a more aware situation, I’d think it’s hilarious.
In fact, this is the closest one of the Centipede films comes to self awareness in that way. There’s a world where this is an interesting commentary on the alt-right and the US prison system. For instance, Luke Y. Thompson has some great insights in his article for Forbes, but personally I see this as more a case of Tom shining the light on some of his own community. Bill Boss is an insane Joe Rogan/Liver King style character that feels unfortunately close to a lot of modern political characters we have to put up with. He’s over-the-top violent, and talks endlessly of medieval torture against his inmates as a method of “curing” them of their desire for crime. But none of it lands because Tom is so committed to offending everyone he possibly can that it sours any sort of message the film could hope to convey. None of these films seem to have a deeper thing to say outside of their “wouldn’t it be fucked up if” style statements.
With that, my foray into the septic plant of the horror industry finally came to a close. At the end of it all I truly hated how I spent today, which is probably something that would make Tom Six happy. “I get a rash from too much political correctness.” Yeah, Tom, we can tell. I don’t have a greater point to end this with, if we’re being honest. I wish I had a wrapping thesis statement, but really, this all came to life because of a joke that went too far. I wouldn’t advise spending your time doing this; it was an active poor addition to my day and week. If anything from this makes you want to watch the Human Centipede movies, just stop after the first one. It’s not worth the hours of your life you’d put into the others. Or, better yet, love yourself and watch a better movie.