Ugh! Gag! Barf! Is The Human Centipede the sickest, grossest movie ever made? Tom Six hopes you think so. The Dutch director has proven himself an exploitation showman par excellence for his brilliantly twisted horror parody, writes TARA BRADY
MOST FILM-MAKERS would be dismayed to find that the Sun newspaper had called their new movie “sick and vile” under the banner headline “Is this the sickest film ever made?” But Tom Six is not most film-makers.
“We had a test screening in Holland and many people left the cinema because they didn’t know what they were going to see,” says the young Dutch director. “When I asked them about it they said I belonged in a mental hospital.”
He guffaws. “People wanted me sterilised. They said I was worse than Hitler.”
Six's film is The Human Centipede, an audacious body horror that has dismayed the faint of heart and many respectable critics. Writing in the Chicago Sun Times, the great Roger Ebert refused to rate the movie, concluding that it "is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine".
The twisted plot concerns a demented German surgeon who kidnaps tourists from roadside stops and imprisons them as subjects for his bizarre human experiments. Can the film’s nubile young American heroines possibly escape the clutches of the nefarious doctor, played with Expressionist menace by the award-winning veteran actor Dieter Laser?
“I saw him in a film and I looked him up on IMDb and was astonished by all the things he’s been in,” says Six. “Yet he’d never been in a horror film. How is this possible? So, I talked to him in Berlin and he was very charismatic. He said, ‘I love this’. And he brought his own uniform for the film. He had this white coat he got from an old Nazi depot. He really created this character.”
Nazi medical experiments – or, rather, the brief vogue for the camp Nazploitation films they inspired throughout the 1970s (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS,anyone?) – loom large in The Human Centipede. Mostly, however, the grotesque titular image (a chain of people surgically attached orifice to orifice) came about as it was the sickest thing Mr Six could think of.
“It came from a joke with friends,” he says. “I was watching television and there was this dreadful child molester on. I said they should stitch his mouth to the ass of a fat truck driver. And then I thought, that’s a great idea for a horror film. It’s so universal. If you had the centipede in prison not many people would want to go to prison.”
Six, one of the directors on the original Dutch Big Brotherseries, is hardly averse to controversy. A gregarious fellow with a tongue planted firmly in his cheek, he is currently marketing his film with a tagline William Castle would be proud of: "100% medically accurate".
"I've always loved the early work of David Cronenberg, especially The Broodand Shivers. There is great tension in those films. And I also love Pier Paolo Pasolini. For me, the most scary horror films are the ones that take place within your own body. To combine that with a medical situation is a real nightmare.
“So what I did was I approached a real surgeon. And the first thing he said was, you are crazy. That’s against my oath. But I knew he was a big movie lover. After a while, he said he would help me, but he would have to do it anonymously. So he wrote this full operation report explaining how it could be done.”
Readers of a delicate disposition would be well advised to skip down the page. “With the level of nutrition available, you could live on faeces for quite a long time,” explains Six. “But the faeces could not be exposed to outside air and bacteria. Now if it was going directly from one system into the other . . . ”
He breaks off with another laugh: “This is strange conversation, no?”
Unsurprisingly, the director omitted these crucial details when approaching potential financial backers. The casting call was equally problematic.
“About 80 per cent of the pretty girls we saw at a New York casting call didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” says Six. “Most girls just want to be pretty in films. It was really hard to find girls who were good actresses and not porn actresses who were willing to be in the centipede. So the girls we did find – Ashley C Williams and Ashlynn Yennie – have really big balls.”
Six resists any easy categorisation as a film-maker. The Human Centipedemay revel in its own capacity to gross out audiences, but it's far too kitsch to lump in with the French Extreme Cinema of Gaspar Noé, or Nicolas Winding Refn's savage Danish milieu.
“The difference between them and me is that those French films, in particular, lack humour,” says Six. “There is no sense of dark humour. It is all so serious. That is not to my taste. I do love the fact that those films are daring. But I prefer something with a sense of fun. They take themselves too seriously.”
It's hard not to get behind Tom Six's skills as a ringmaster. After directing several respected dramas, The Human Centipedehas catapulted him into certain stardom. His twisted fantasy has already stormed the international festival circuit, inspiring worldwide broadsheet headlines and uploaded reaction videos (in the style of Two Girls, One Cup) wherever it goes. A flash game, modelled on a classic Atari staple, went online last May; a pornographic parody entitled The Human Sexipedehits top shelves next month.
However one ultimately chooses to view the film, which is not nearly as graphic as some hysterical reviews have suggested, one has to doff the cap at Six’s moxy with marketing.
“The purpose of horror is to horrify. That’s my thing. I just have a huge imagination. But when you talk to people, you realise that everyone has these ideas and keep them to themselves. Especially women – they are crazier than men, I think. When I wrote the story, I of course knew that people would talk. That it exploded like a virus all over the world is every film-maker’s dream. It has been picked up in so many surprising mainstream places.”
Six insists that beneath his talent for discombobulating imagery, he’s just a normal guy who had a normal, happy childhood.
“It’s just make-believe,” he says. “My mother has seen the trailer and thinks it’s great. She hasn’t seen the film yet but I’m sure my family will love it. Perhaps it is a Dutch thing. I certainly know that I am Dutch because when I give interviews I don’t have inhibitions. Because you get used to seeing the things you see in Amsterdam, you lose inhibitions. So I don’t hold back when I am talking or when I am making movies.”
A sequel to The Human Centipedeis already in production.
“This time there are going to be 12 people in the centipede,” promises Six. “Where I hold back in part one – whatever people think – I really go full force in part two. That’s what people want. Isn’t it? I have had people coming up to me really disappointed that they don’t see certain things. Ha.”
We await part two with baited breath. And possibly a barf bag.
The Human Centipedeis on DVD and Blu-ray from October 4th
