Director Tom Six, whose horror film has caused waves of debate, derision and occasional outbreaks of unwavering support wherever it has surfaced, understands the power of cinema to shock and disturb. He recently confessed to the indieLONDON website that Pier Paolo Pasolini's oft-banned 1975 film Salo [aka The 120 Days of Sodom] still horrifies him. “That's really the sickest film I've ever seen,” he laments.
Many have claimed that the 37 year-old Dutch-born filmmaker's opus is rightful heir to that honour. The 'centipede' of Six's film is, in fact, three adults surgically stitched together, mouth-to-anus. A young Asian man (Akihiro Kitamura), ostensibly the 'centipedes head', unavoidably feeds his own waste matter to the mid-section, a young American woman (Ashley C. Williams), who in turn feeds it on through to her friend (Ashlynn Yennie) – the 'tail' of the centipede. The three victims have had their knee tendons sliced, meaning they can only crawl about the vast, isolated home of the film's villain, Dr. Heiter (a frightening Dieter Laser, pictured, channelling underground icon Udo Kier).
The Human Centipede is an 'extreme horror' film by any definition of the term. It graphically portrays the surgical procedure and the subsequent realities that the three poor victims (and actors) must endure. And, like the extreme horror classics that have come before it, it dares the audience to take the journey and emerge unscathed. In fact, some scholars support the artistic merits and sociological importance of such extreme films. Author Joan Hawkins, in her book Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, states that “even high art can offer affective appeals to the viewer's body that are often coded as culturally low, regardless of a filmmaker's intent.”
Lee Gambin, a senior contributor to the leading horror fanzine Fangoria, says that the very premise of The Human Centipede is what makes it such a cringing horror experience. “We don't like to talk about arseholes,” he says bluntly, “and the notion of the whole arse-to-mouth thing... well, we are just not a society willing to accept anything faecal.”
Melbourne-based Gambin, whose passion for the genre stems from the work of B movie gore-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, 1963; Two Thousand Maniacs!, 1964) and make-up pioneer Tom Savini (Maniac, 1980; The Prowler, 1981), pinpointed several other heretofore-untouched themes in The Human Centipede that define its extreme cinema credential. “The naked-threesome-on-all-fours is synonymous with Japanese (fetish) pornography – the classic businessman-and-school-girl image. One of the film's great strengths is its (embracing) of pornographic imagery under the umbrella of a relatively mainstream horror film.”
Embracing and exploiting taboo subjects is central to the legitimacy of the extreme horror genre. Peruse any fansite that purports to define the greatest extreme horror films ever made, you will find films on cannibalism (Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, 1980; Marian Dora's Cannibal, 2006), sexual violence and deviancy (Alejandro Jodorowsky's Fando y Lis, 1968; Norifumi Suzuki's Sex & Fury, 1973; Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik, 1987; Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave, 1978; Nacho Cerda's Aftermath, 1994; Shozin Fukui's 964 Pinocchio, 1992, and Rubber Lover, 1996), pregnancy and childbirth (Alexandre Bustillo's and Julien Maury's À l'intérieur, 2007), religion (Sion Sono's Suicide Club, 2002; Mel Gibson's , 2004; Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, 2008; Lars Von Trier's , 2009) and torture, in which must be included variations on the mythical 'snuff' film (the Saw and Hostel films; John Alan Schwartz's Faces of Death, 1978; the Guinea Pig films – a Japanese trilogy of hideous dismemberment-simulation movies from 1985 and 1986; Mariano Peralta Snuff 102, 2007; and the multi-director effort, August Underground's Mordum, 2003).
One of the earliest examples of the extreme horror film was Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), which featured a troupe of real-life circus 'sideshow exhibits' cursed with physical abnormalities. Described by the BBC as “a masterpiece of shock cinema”, it remained banned in several countries (including Australia) for many decades, only emerging in the mid 1970s as a classic of the black-&-white period. Under legendary MGM producer Irving Thalberg, the film was recut many times before being unceremoniously pulled from release.
Freaks remains unique to this day for many reasons, not least of which was that it was a major studio release. Board members and stock holders rarely risk the public backlash and negative press that greenlighting an extreme film may bring, despite the enormous success of one of the most shocking films of all time – Warner Bros' The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin. The film, adapted from William Peter Blatty's bestseller (thereby providing a commercial cushion for investors), the film exploited deeply-held social fears that stemmed from religious iconography.
Why on earth would we watch (or make) such films? David Church of Indiana University extrapolated in his thesis 'Of Manias, Shit, and Blood: The Reception of Salò as a Sick Film' – “Because these films typically portray extreme cruelty and bodily abjection, intentionally submitting oneself to such visceral imagery and then discussing its impact seems a sadomasochistic performance between fans.” This suggests that, if the victims of these films don't emerge intact, we the viewer celebrate our own survival and find stimulation from having endured such nightmarish scenarios.
As grotesque a reputation as The Human Centipede has managed to cultivate, its standing as the most extreme horror film ever made may be short-lived. At the recent South-by-Southwest Film Festival, audience backlash reached a crescendo during a screening of Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film. Though the director claims it is a metaphor for the suffering of his country and a rebellious counter-attack on the nation's restrictive censorship laws, the usually unflappable SXSW festival crowd were not convinced that scenes depicting necrophilia and the rape of a newborn child were entirely necessary. Prior to the film being pulled from London's Frightfest horror film gathering, Pete Cashmore in The Guardian wrote, “It's fair to say that A Serbian Film will be impossible to trump for sheer, unremitting foulness, cruelty and squalor.”
Australian audiences, even those who seek out the most extreme of cinema-going experiences... you have been warned.
