The Human Centipede Collection

This trilogy is built around something that actually happened to it in the real world, not just what happens on screen. The first film, about a retired surgeon who kidnaps tourists to stitch together into a single shared digestive system, got a standard adult certificate without major incident. The second film did not. In 2011, the BBFC refused to classify The Human Centipede 2 outright — not a cuts request, an outright refusal — specifically citing "a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence" and ruling that the content ran through the entire work closely enough that cuts weren't even a viable fix. It's one of a genuinely small number of films the board has refused to certify at all since 2000. Tom Six eventually got a UK release months later after agreeing to more than two and a half minutes of cuts across 32 separate edits.

What makes that ban worth knowing about specifically, rather than just a footnote, is what the second film is actually about: a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD of the first Human Centipede movie and sets out to recreate what he saw in it, badly and with far less surgical skill. The real first film exists as a real object inside the fiction of the second one. Several critics pointed out the irony at the time — a film built around a pointed, ugly argument against the idea that watching something violent turns ordinary people violent got banned by a board acting on more or less that exact premise. Whether or not the argument works as cinema, the censorship fight it set off wasn't incidental to the film's meaning; it was close to the film's whole point, playing out for real.

The franchise's cultural reach ended up wider than its content would suggest: the original became notorious enough to get a full parody episode of South Park ("HUMANCENTiPAD"), and Roger Ebert's contemporary review captured something real about its intent, writing that it seemed "deliberately intended to inspire incredulity, nausea and hopefully outrage." Whatever else it is, provoking exactly that reaction, from casual viewers and from an actual national censorship board alike, is the one thing every film in this trilogy can be said to have accomplished on purpose.