Do Not Try This at Home

Generally speaking, Austin film festival audiences aren't prone to walkouts. Sure, some people get fidgety or bored, but very few of us who have ponied up for a cash-heavy laminate are going to scuttle out of the theatre because we're shocked, shocked we tell you, that the current reel unspooling up in that dark, dank projection booth has somehow ... messed with our mind.

There are exceptions, however. There are limits. Still, there are taboos. Even in Austin. It's rare indeed, but that's what made the slow but steady exodus from one particular film at Fantastic Fest 2009 so notable: It takes some seriously warped cine-madness to send your typical genre film fan scurrying out of the 24-frames-per-second night into the lobby's light.

But Dutch filmmaker Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence) did exactly that with its genuinely shocking (gasp!), medically accurate (gag!), and unrepentantly sick, twisted, and satirical story of rural Euro-horror meets cringey body modification.

Now, and contrary to all known laws of the exhibition universe, Six's groundbreaking, gut-churning masterpiece has secured stateside distribution from IFC, which is opening it both theatrically and in video-on-demand format.

We spoke to Six prior to his film's Fantastic Fest debut and found him to be disarmingly ... sane.

Austin Chronicle: The Human Centipede is madness personified, and I mean that in the very best possible sense. At the risk of losing what little sanity you've left me, how did you conceive this film?

Tom Six: It started very simple. I always make a joke to friends when some person was being annoying or nasty: I would say that they should stitch that person's mouth to the ass of a fat truck driver. Everybody would laugh and think, "Oh, that's horrible," and that is a horrible thought, to do that to somebody. But when it came time to make my first horror film, my first international film, I wanted it to be something really horrific and something that hasn't been done before, and so I started from that concept and then wrote the script for Human Centipede.

AC: Your film has a very unique feel to it, sort of a cross between the body horror of David Cronenberg by way of Josef Mengele. And that's a compliment.

TS: Yes, thank you. I love the fact that the human centipede created in my film can actually be done in the real world now, too!

AC: You're kidding, right?

TS: No, no, it's true! Everything you see in my film is surgically possible. Before I went into writing the script, I spoke to a surgeon in Holland. He helped me to create that kind of surgery, and the finished film is 100 percent medically accurate. One hundred percent! I like that idea, very much, that you can do this horrible thing and it could be real.

AC: You must be a lot of fun at cocktail parties, Tom.

TS: [Laughing] Oh, well, yeah! But, you know, I've always liked that stuff. In Holland I made, like, controversial films, and I like it when something is new and a little disturbing so that people talk about it.

AC: Did you intend Human Centipede to be a commentary on Western society's compulsive body modification, à la plastic surgery, piercing, and scarification? Or am I just reading that into it?

TS: That's not the purpose of it, no.

AC: So you were just trying to make an entertaining and totally unique horror film?

TS: Right, but it had to be like, real horror. I think a lot of horror films are horrorlike, with knives and chain saws, and that's OK. But like the Hostel films, which are torture and so on, I wanted to make something that was so much torture that it was just way longer lasting, you know? Because when something like this happens to you, I'm sure you totally go insane!

AC: How did you go about casting for The Human Centipede (First Sequence)? Try as I may, I can't get my head around what those casting sessions were probably like ....

TS: Yeah, that was crazy. ... We got a lot of ladies who came over to the casting and I slowly started to explain what I wanted. I had sent them, of course, a treatment and stuff, but I hadn't told them in detail what I was looking for. For the casting, I made a lot of storyboard drawings and showed them that, and a lot of them were shocked and really angry!

AC: I can't let you go without a nod to Dieter Laser, who plays the surgeon. He's like Udo Kier without the yuks.

TS: He's done something like 80 films in Europe and a few films in the U.S. as well. I saw some of his films and thought he was a brilliant actor. I thought this was the guy to play this, and he lived in Berlin, so we went to Berlin. I explained the story to him, and he absolutely loved it. He thought it was a brilliant story, he was ecstatic, and he understood the crazy guy, so we matched perfectly.

AC: What would you like the audience to take away from your film, apart from nightmares?

TS: What I like most is when people come out of the cinema and they can't stop thinking about the idea of being attached to someone's ass. I've seen so many people who couldn't stop talking about it, about the concept. And they were having arguments about, "Oh, I don't want to be in the middle," or "I want to be the first part." That idea, that people are talking about it all the time and can't seem to stop talking about it, I like that very much.

AC: It's got a very palpable sense of classic surrealism, almost Dada, to it. So much so that it verges, in its own unique way, on comedy.

TS: Sure, sure, and I like those arty images. So, like, that sequence where he's in the garden in his white lab coat and there are naked bodies on the ground? Yeah, that's very surreal, and I love that. Those images are great, and they really succeeded.

AC: Dare I ask what you are working on next?

TS: At the moment we are working on Human Centipede (Full Sequence). I wanted to make a double feature, because in the First Sequence there's only three participants, but now there are going to be 12 people attached to each other. But in a totally different way! And it will exceed the first part by a million times!

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The Human Centipede (First Sequence) opens in Austin Friday, May 7. See Film Listings for review.