finished watching The Human Centipede (First Sequence) 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
I remember seeing this movie for the first time in high school. Friend of mine invited me to his place to watch a movie, torrented the film, and we went into it completely blind with nothing to judge the film by other than it's creepy name and poster. I remember how outright disturbed we were, and how we stopped the movie and ended up doing something else simply because we considered the film to be "borderline torture porn".

However, giving the film a rewatch a full decade later, I can say with confidence that the opinion I held of this movie ever since was completely and utterly wrong. The film is disturbing, yes, the premise is grotesque, of course, and yet, the film highlights something that most horror films lack: a sense of realism, and the sense that deep down the viewer knows that *could* be them.

The film's outright disturbing nature, grotesque concept, and the use of a singular setting paired with being trapped with a psychopath is exactly what horror movies should strive to be in a market saturated with jumpscares and supernatural entities that the average viewer can take confidence in not existing.

Even if not medically accurate, the very thought that this could be attempted in the real world and having the viewer take that in with a concept that could theoretically happen to anybody bridges that disconnect between horror films and their audiences that people, in my opinion, have become too comfortable within.

I wholeheartedly believe that this movie gets a bad rap specifically because a lot of people who watch it have become accustomed with that disconnect in the horror genre. Whether intended by the director or not, the film does leave the viewer connecting what they see to real-life themes that are, in and of themselves, real-life horrors, such as domestic and animal abuse, historical Nazi medical experiments, and rural murder mysteries.

Even other fears that are more psychological than physical come into play such as the fear of humiliation, the fear of being treated as less than human, and the fear of abandonment. It's honestly somewhat impressive that a film can touch on so much with something that seems like a simple premise on first glance

All in all, putting aside some poor character decisions that are all too familiar in the horror genre, Human Centipede is a misunderstood marvel, and I do hope it becomes judged more kindly as time goes on.