The Human Centipede has earned itself a reputation for being one of the most grim horror movies out there - but you may not know that it partly came into existence due to a disturbing joke.
The 2009 Dutch horror movie centres on retired German surgeon Josef Heiter who kidnaps three tourists and surgically joins them from the anus to mouth. What a lovely sentence to read on this fine Wednesday, eh?
Although the independent film wasn’t exactly a Box Office smash, it did go on to gain a bit of a cult following in the years after its release.
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In an interview with the Guardian the Human Centipede’s writer, director and co-producer Tom Six said he didn’t care about bad reviews of his movie as it meant that people were still talking about.
“I know I made a brilliant film and I’m not alone in knowing that,” he said.
“Bad reviews also help the film’s status so I don’t mind. As long as people talk about it, I’m happy.” Fair enough.
He added: “I am 100 percent proud of these films and I am 100 percent sure that in 100 years people will still be talking about my Human Centipede films.
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“There are so many films out there that are immediately forgotten, but my films do something to people and they have become part of pop culture.”
The movie was partly inspired by the real-life twisted experiments carried out on Concentration Camp prisoners by Nazis during World War Two.
Surgeons and doctors, including the infamous Josef Mengele, carried out sadistic experiments including removing the hearts and stomachs of victims without anaesthesia.
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Mengele showed a particular interest in identical twins, and carried out several operations which involved stitching them back to back to create ‘conjoined twins’.
But in interviews, Six has revealed that the inspiration for the movie also came from a disturbing joke he made with his friends in which he suggested that the best punishment for child molesters would be to have their mouth stitched to the anus of a ‘truck driver’.
In an interview with the Guardian, Six said: “This started out as a joke. I saw a TV news report about how a paedophile had got a really light prison sentence and I said it would be a better punishment to stitch his mouth to the a** of a truck driver. The idea stuck in my head.”
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The movie went on to spawn two sequels: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) and The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence).
Topics: TV and Film
Claire Reid