THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE): Shock Horror Goes To The Arthouse

If you want to read some enter­tain­ing movie reviews, go back and check out the write-ups for The Human Centipede (First Sequence).  This odd­ity tends to con­found film crit­ics accus­tomed to more gen­teel fare.  The response it has got­ten is a fairly even split — one half con­sider it a work of demented inspi­ra­tion while the other half con­sider it a cal­cu­lated upscale ver­sion of tor­ture porn — but it’s the kind of film that has every­one reach­ing for their the­saurus in their attempts to come to terms with its dis­tinc­tively twisted story and style.

Does it live up to the hype and hys­te­ria that it gen­er­ated in crit­i­cal cir­cles?  Yes, it does — and it’s easy to see why it has caused such a con­fused, often angry response from the Daily Review Brigade.  The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is an uncon­ven­tional blend of art­house aus­ter­ity with grisly hor­ror con­tent and themes  and the end result is fas­ci­nat­ing in the dark­est way imaginable.

The film is set in Germany, where Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are vaca­tion­ing.  They decide to drive to a party one night and end up with a flat tire in the mid­dle of nowhere dur­ing a rain.  They find shel­ter at the near­est home, only to dis­cover the owner is a loony sur­geon named Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser).  He promptly knocks them out and impris­ons them in his house’s surgery/experiment room.

Once the Doctor finds another test sub­ject in hap­less Japanese tourist Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), he reveals to his cap­tive audi­ence the exper­i­ment he has planned for them.  His ambi­tion is to attach them to each oth­ersvia their mouths and anuses so they can merge into a three-part crea­ture with one inter­con­nected diges­tive sys­tem… in other words, a “human cen­tipede.”  He suc­cess­fully com­pletes his oper­a­tion but that’s only the begin­ning of the night­mare for his unfor­tu­nate test subjects.

Many  crit­ics have wrongly pegged The Human Centipede (First Sequence) as a mem­ber of the “tor­ture porn” sub­genre but it’s actu­ally a novel rein­ven­tion of horror’s “mad sci­en­tist” sub­genre.  The grue­some oper­a­tion that pro­vides the con­cep­tual cen­ter­piece of the story is truly inspired but writer/director Tom Six doesn’t use it to prop up the whole film.  Instead, the oper­a­tion is only briefly shown, act­ing as a divid­ing point between the sus­pense­ful buildup that defines the first half of the film and the explo­ration of mad­ness and suf­fer­ing that makes up its sec­ond half.

Another fas­ci­nat­ing aspect of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is its sur­pris­ingly low-key approach to grue­some ele­ments of its story.  There is a cer­tain amount of gore but Six is more inter­est­ing in using sor­did ideas to psy­cho­log­i­cally shock his audi­ence: in a telling touch, he gets more mileage of Laser’s blood­less yet detailed descrip­tion of how the oper­a­tion will work — inter­cut with wails and out­bursts of his cap­tive audi­ence — rather than focus­ing on all the gory details of the surgery.

Once the oper­a­tion is com­pleted, Six puts us front and cen­ter to observe the con­fu­sion and anguish of the test sub­jects — includ­ing a morbid/darkly funny bit in which its diges­tive tract is “tested” for the first time.  In the process, he man­ages to pull off an inter­est­ing trick with audi­ence iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.  Initally, the doc­tor is the most interesting/compelling of the char­ac­ters, with his sub­jects falling into con­ven­tional char­ac­ter types.  However, once we are forced to wit­ness their suf­fer­ing in his exper­i­ment, the test sub­jects become more dimen­sion­al­ized through the expres­sion of their physical/mental pain — and thus more sympathetic.

The per­for­mances are very impor­tant in pulling off this shift in per­cep­tion.  Laser has been widely praised for his per­for­mance as the Doctor and justly so — he looks like an unholy fusion of Christopher Walken and Udo Kier.  Better yet, he lives up to the promise of that com­bi­na­tion, veer­ing between arch, dead­pan black humor and freak­ish inten­sity as he fully exter­nal­izes his character’s twisted nature.

However, the test sub­jects also deserve praise: the phys­i­cal act­ing that Williams, Yennie and Kitamura do con­veys a range of intense emo­tions with econ­omy and impact.  Kitamura is the only one who gets to speak post-operation and he does well, includ­ing what is per­haps the film’s most emo­tion­ally affect­ing moment where he reflects on his predica­ment in a way that is philo­soph­i­cal, darkly funny and hor­ri­bly mov­ing all at once.

Finally, and most impor­tantly, Six’s direc­tion is unusu­ally dis­ci­plined (and some­times oddly beau­ti­ful) for a film with such unsa­vory sub­ject mat­ter.  His approach to visu­als is both ele­gant and aus­tere, often using care­ful com­po­si­tion and a min­i­mal­is­tic approach of color to cre­ate painterly back­drops for the story’s may­hem.  He doesn’t flinch from vio­lence when it arises, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing the over-the-top finale, but he also doesn’t rely on it to make his film work.  His direc­tion shows he under­stands the psy­cho­log­i­cal response is as impor­tant in con­vey­ing hor­ror as the vis­ceral one — and he deploys both with a sin­is­ter sense of élan.

Simply put, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is the rare mod­ern hor­ror film that is aes­thet­i­cally well-realized as it is con­cep­tu­ally unnerv­ing.  Six is def­i­nitely a tal­ent to watch and it will be inter­est­ing to see how he twists schlock and art­house con­ceits together the next time around.