The Human Centipede: violence, madness, kitsch & the plot of the sequels 1 and 2, the meaning of the film, whether the content is based on real events, an explanation of the ending.
Country: Netherlands
Genre: Body Horror, Horror
Year of production: 2009
Directed by: Tom Six
Actors: Dieter Laser, Ashley S. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie
Slogan: 100% medically accurate
Directed by Tom Six, he shot a non-standard film about a maniac, designed for the most seasoned fans of the genre. There is relatively little blood here, but the very idea of the picture leaves a very heavy aftertaste. The point of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is its implausibility. The monstrous torture presented here does not so much serve the sophisticated pleasure of the psychopath as it is a metaphor for human existence.
Based on real events?
The information that “The Human Centipede” is based on real events made a lot of noise at the time. But this is a serious exaggeration.
The director was inspired to create the film by the experience of medical experiments that the Nazis carried out in concentration camps during World War II. However, the maniac from this film really has a real prototype. This is Josef Mengele, a doctor who conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners during World War II. It is believed that the Auschwitz doctor had for some time nurtured the idea of stitching living people together. But this plan was not carried out. In real life, there was no human centipede.
Frame from the film.
What is the movie about
Brief description of the content of the film “The Human Centipede”. The film begins with Jenny and Lindsey, pretty American tourists, coming to Germany for fun and new experiences. They rest in an inexpensive hotel and go to a club in the evening.
They go to the party by car, but go astray and drive into the wilderness. And they also manage to puncture tires and thus find themselves alone in a terrible wilderness. There is no connection here and the friends understand that the best thing they can do is sit and wait for the morning. However, faced with a pervert, they still decide to try to find at least some help and finally lose their bearings. They quarrel, begin to swear, and suddenly they see a house standing among the trees.
A tall man opens the knock. The girls ask him to let them call from him and he, carefully examining them from head to toe, allows them to enter. Tired girls ask him to drink water – he agrees to this. The man goes to the kitchen, pretends to be talking to the rescuers, but in fact puts one sleeping pill into glasses of water and brings it to the girls. He tells them that the tow truck will arrive in half an hour.
Jenny and Lindsey feel uncomfortable and, when the man (he introduces himself as Dr. Hayter) leaves the room, they quietly decide to leave the house. The doctor goes to the basement – there the driver of the truck, tied to the couch, lies on the couch and sleeps soundly – and draws sleeping pills into the syringe.
Meanwhile, Jenny, who has finished drinking her water, feels a sudden weakness. Lindsey asks the doctor to help her friend or call an ambulance, but he injects her with sleeping pills.
Ashley Williams as Lindsey. Frame from the film.
In the morning, the girls wake up in the basement, their arms and legs tightly tied to the couches. The truck driver is nearby. The doctor comes to the screams and, bending over the trucker, coolly informs him that he is not suitable. The terrible meaning of his words is that he is going to kill the unfortunate. A little later, he brings a replacement to the basement – a guy named Katsuro.
Then he tells the captives that he worked as a surgeon for a long time and shared Siamese twins. After retiring, he decided to conduct a terrible experiment – to combine several people into a human centipede with one digestive system. To the horror of the unfortunate, he conducts a complete analysis of the future operation, telling in detail what and how he is going to do.
He puts Katsuro and Jenny to sleep, but Lindsay manages to escape from the operating table and hide in the psychopath’s house. However, he soon finds her and threatens with a terrible punishment – he will put her in the middle of the centipede and the pain during the healing of her wounds will be unbearable. The girl is horrified: she is ready to do anything to avoid the operation – even death. Force majeure suddenly arises and the doctor chasing Lindsey leaves. The girl decides to run away, but remembers her friend and comes back for her. She almost manages to escape, but the psychopath overtakes her and shoots her in the back with a sleeping pill dart.
Having at the disposal of all three, Hayter conducts an operation. Katsuro is given the role of the head of a human centipede. Lindsey, as promised, he places in the middle, and Jenny becomes the end. All three survive the surgery, and the doctor begins training them so that the centipede can live a “normal” life. He trains them like dogs and feeds them dog food…
Ashlynn Yennie as Jenny and Dieter Laser as Dr. Hayter. Frame from the film.
Poor sanitation leads to the inevitable: Jenny falls ill. However, Hayter does not think to treat the girl – after all, she can simply be replaced with a new part of the centipede.
One day the police come to the house. The doctor answers the intercom and Katsuro, having learned that strangers are at home, screams with all his might from the basement to save them, but the psychopath quickly covers the receiver with his hand. The police report that they are looking for missing people – they found a car belonging to the girls near Hayter’s house. He invites them to the house.
In the basement, Katsuro screams heart-rendingly, but the police, not hearing him, are interrogating him. The doctor offers law enforcement officers to drink water and puts a sleeping pill in it. Like a spider that has set up a network, he is trying to lure the police into it to make it part of a centipede, but they are on the alert – Hayter seems too strange to them, from him a mile away carries danger and madness.
One of them asks the doctor to let him into the basement, but he demands a search warrant in response. An argument ensues, during which the emotional doctor drops a sleeping pill syringe on the floor. However, he quickly finds himself: this is insulin, without which he cannot do anything – he is a diabetic. The cops don’t believe him and quickly leave to get a search warrant. They promise to be back in 20 minutes.
The Doctor returns to the basement to hide his centipede, but it is not there. He goes to look for her and finds her on the street. A chase ensues, during which Katsuro slits his own throat.
After a while, the returning police officers enter the house. A fight with a psychopath ensues, during which all three die …
The Human Centipede Ending explanation
Movie ending explanation. At the end of the picture, the exhausted Jenny dies and Lindsey is left alone between the two dead … The meaning of the ending of the film “The Human Centipede” is that nothing good awaits the unfortunate Lindsey – she will die either as a result of intoxication or from hunger. However, there is another interpretation of the final – sooner or later the police will miss their comrades, which means there is a chance that Lindsey will still be found. But will she be able to live normally later is a big question…
Sequels
The Human Centipede has two sequels. They are united with the original only by the meaning and concept.
Human centipede 2
Martin is an avid fan of The Human Centipede. One day he decides to act – to collect his own monstrous centipede …
Human Centipede 3
The warden of one of the American prisons cannot earn the respect of the prisoners in any way. He eventually decides to punish them by turning them into a 500-man giant centipede.
Frame from the film.
The meaning of the film Human Centipede
Tom Six is considered not a very healthy person. And in fact, only someone who, to put it mildly, knows how to think outside the box, can make such a disgusting film.
However, the director does not justify maniacism, as it may seem, but on the contrary, he condemns terrible experiments on people.
The clue to the whole action lies in the fact that the monstrous Dr. Hayter is a vivid allusion to the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.
Sixx ironically over this monster, and over the horror genre and over the industry as a whole – and he hides all this behind the screen of uber-realism, showing absolutely impossible things as realistically as possible. That is why the story is not to be taken seriously.
In general, to understand the essence of the film, one should consider all the Centipedes in the context of separate, but interconnected universes. The heroes of the first picture are the actors of the second film. In the world of the third film, the first two exist, and the director himself acts as one of the characters.
Each subsequent part is kitsch, a mockery of oneself and just the wildest absurdity. The director plays with the perception of the audience, he does not want them to believe in the reality of everything that happens. The message itself is important to him, not the execution. To do this, he does everything so that the viewer does not associate himself with the characters.
The first “Human Centipede” breaks all the patterns and rebuilds the concept of the film on the go. Starting as a teenage slasher, by the middle the picture turns into an anatomical horror. In principle, the tape is not remembered by anything and does not carry any morality or hidden meaning. It should be perceived as a kind of threshold beyond which the most interesting begins.
Frame from the film.
The second part of the franchise can be described as grotesque on the verge of insanity. This is the most disgusting, provocative and difficult part of the cycle. It is difficult to master it even if you approach the viewing from the point of view of dramaturgy and the postmodernist concept of the author. The second “Human Centipede” completely changed the genre and the vector of the story. This is no longer a youth horror film for one evening, but a black-and-white arthouse with a degree of violence and madness twisted to the maximum. This film is banned from showing in most countries and it is fully justified: it can easily injure the psyche.
Here the ball is ruled not by a charismatic madman, but by a natural maniac, obsessed with the ideas of Dr. Hayter. Revising “The Human Centipede” over and over again, he experiences not only aesthetic pleasure, but also sexual satisfaction. The meaning of the whole action is to ridicule the obsessed fans of any works. But this, of course, does not negate the most depressing, gloomy and insane atmosphere of the picture.
The third part can be briefly described as follows: “thrash, waste and sodomy”. Here, Tom Six finally puts everything in its place and, compared to the previous Centipedes, this part is perceived as a comedy. There are many scenes of violence in this picture, but the approach to showing them is completely different. The tape does not cause panic and feelings of fear and seems to parody the gloomy first and frankly scary second part. Here, the entire US government, in the literal sense of the word, acts as an antagonist. And Tom Six exposes these characters in an absurd, comical way. “The Human Centipede 3” is the quintessence of all the stupidity of the plot, the caricature of the characters and the absurdity of the situation.
In general, the whole trilogy is a typical postmodern movie. On the one hand, immoralism is shown here as biological totalitarianism. On the other hand (if you take the franchise lightly, as it requires), the viewer is clearly shown what they are fed by those who have such an opportunity. The interpretation is simple: one came up with it, the second got hooked on it, and the person in power introduced it to the masses.
Postirony in all its glory.
Frame from the film.
Similar films
Here are a few films similar in meaning to The Human Centipede:
- “Tusk” (USA, Canada, 2014). A young man and a girl are looking for a missing friend. During the investigation, they manage to discover a nightmarish truth.
- “The skin I live in” (Spain, USA, 2011). The eminent surgeon discovered the secret of artificial skin. He succeeded thanks to a terrible experiment.
- “Martyrs” (France, Canada, 2008). As a child, Lucy was kidnapped and held captive. The matured girl finds her old tormentors and begins to take revenge on them.
- “A Serbian Film” (Serbia, 2010). A pornographic actress agrees to shoot a film, unaware that the director is a maniac.
