What Can We Learn From The New 'Human Centipede' Trailer?

And here we are again. Like an ass-to-mouth incarnation of the ouroboros, we have come full circle and find ourselves amongst another Human Centipede movie. Tom Six’s horror franchise – basically feeding off the sociopathic urges of teenage boys who’re into beheading videos and August Underground – returns for one final go around, a last beat of the drum until we, all of us, free our gobs from the anus of this troubling series.

But we may as well indulge it, right? If Mr. Six has gone to the effort to make a new Human Centipede film, the least we can do is give it our full attention. Scour the trailer for clues and tidbits and themes. I can’t imagine there being many other themes than “sew man’s mouth to other mans anus”, but you never know. Perhaps the whole thing has been an allegory for the war on terror? Maybe we’re all ourselves human centipedes, wriggling through life trying to make sense of it, trying to ingest as little of the shit of the person in front of us.

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Let’s have a good old look through the trailer, and see what nuggets of pathos we can find therein. Warning: may cause epiphany!

Right off the bat Tom Six wants to let us know what we’re in for. He’s trying to disturb you. You should exhibit discretion. You have been warned. This is only the trailer as well. If you need a warning for the trailer, can you imagine how messed up the actual movie is? God damn, Tom Six, what have you been getting up to?

I see what you’ve done there, Thomas VI. You’re trying to make us think you’re alluding to the rich back log of films in the horror genre by referring to its “annals”, but really what we, the consumer, are getting is “anal horror”. By clueing us to both The Human Centipede‘s role in the historical horror canon, and people shitting into each others bleeding mouths, Tom Six is asking us a question. And who can say what that question is?

Here’s a look at our many protagonist’s first encounter with the human-to-centipede apparatus. They look on in abject disgust, but what they don’t realise is that they’re not just watching a man defecate all over a woman’s teeth, they’re watching life. They’re watching metaphor, and sometimes metaphor can be all too real and uncomfortable.

This man has become troubled. He reminisces on summers past, of colours he cannot touch, scents he can no longer smell. He is imprisoned, trapped, as if the mouth of his life has been somehow surgically moulded to the rectal orifice of the prison-industrial complex.

Waxy German actor Dieter Laser is back in the Hum-Cent fold not as his original character Dr. Joseph Heiter, but as prison warden Bill Boss. You can tell he’s the warden from his large white stetson, yellow-tinted aviators and disregard for the wellbeing of his inmates. Perhaps Laser’s return is Tom Six’s way of telling us that no one really ever changes. Sure, we may look different, live in different places, have different names, but really all we’ll ever be is a crazed bavarian surgeon pushing a needle through the lips of a Japanese man and hooking it, thread and all, into the puckered chute of another sentience. Sunrise, sunset.

Taking a break from starring in critically acclaimed blockbusters, Tom Hardy wanted something a bit more DIY.

I’m beginning to think there’s actually no deeper meaning to this third instalment of The Human Centipede, and it is just a film about a chain of excrement winding it’s way through multiple peoples conjoined digestive tracts.

Hmm.

Feel like I should never have trusted a man called “Tom Six”.

I wonder what it’s like being a “freak” actor? An actor whose sole purpose is to look weird and be creepy. This man will never play Atticus Finch. He will never play Charles Foster Kane. He looks like Max Hardcore mid-ejaculation. He looks as if he could play Voldemort in Harry Potter: The XXX Parody.

Yeah, this film is definitely just about sewing peoples faces onto other peoples arseholes.

And here lies the real message in this trailer: a succinct reminder of exactly who this film is for. It’s for people who have said, “If they can say it why can’t I?” about racial epithets. Those who wonder why they can’t make dead baby jokes in the presence of people they’ve just met. The tasteless among us, the peasants, the shock jockeys, the Sickipedia moderators. The last in The Human Centipede trilogy is, I reckon, trying to transform itself into a chintzy splatter horror, what with the busty correctional officer and comically pudgy little man. But there’s no escaping the series’ past as just debauched ultra-depravity for kids who spend a bit too much time on LiveLeak looking at women’s bodies crushed under the wheels of articulated lorries.

@joe_bish