WWTW Interview: ‘The Human Centipede’ writer/director Tom Six

Writer/director Tom Six gets some curious stares after screening his new horror film, “The Human Centipede.“

“They expect this kind of monster,” the Dutch filmmaker tells WWTW. “I had a very happy childhood, and I wouldn’t hurt a mouse.”

“I have a big imagination,” Six adds, an understatement given the twisted nature of his film.

“Centipede” follows a German surgeon (Dieter Laser) who wants to surgically attach three people to form one new life form.

Reactions to his vision have been mixed, to put it bluntly.

“Some people hate it and think I’m a lunatic,” he says calmly. “That’s pretty cool because the film does something to them.” But the film is sparking a firestorm over at Flixster.com, the kind of buzz that just might make “Centipede” a breakout hit.

Six wanted to ground his outrageous yarn in some cold, hard truths. So he sought out a doctor to see if the surgeon’s mad scheme was medically feasible.

“I explained to him what I wanted to do, and at first he thought I was crazy,” he recalls. “But he’s a big lover of movies so he called me back.”

The doctor gave Six a detailed description of just how such a procedure, in theory, could be performed.

“I have the actual report at home,” he says.

Casting for “Centipede” came next, and few actors was eager to crawl around in some pretty uncomfortable positions.

“Lots of actresses didn’t want to play this,” he says, while others had second thoughts about auditioning after checking out his storyboard sketches.

“They saw it and thought I was crazy and left immediately … the smart ones stayed,“ he says.

“Centipede” begins much like many horror films before it – two pretty young women find themselves in a jam when they suffer a flat tire. The predictable scenario was all part of the plan, he says.

“I saw a lot of horror films from the ‘80s and ‘90s. There’s always this cliché of ladies getting in all sorts of trouble,” says Six, who was influenced by the early films of David Cronenberg. “If you start like this, the impact of what happens to them is much bigger than if I started in a way you wouldn’t expect.”

Six enjoys the extreme feedback the film evokes, even those who read a political subtext into a story that has none.

“We have to swallow each other’s [excrement] all the time,” he says with a chuckle, citing one person’s interpretation of the centipede’s gastrointestinal system.

“The Human Centipede” will be too upsetting for some audiences, but it doesn’t use buckets of blood to leave audiences reeling.

“The general idea is so crazy, so I didn’t show everything,” he says.

And Six defends creating a film that stretches the boundaries of horror – and some will argue good taste.

“I just do it for fun and to create something new. A lot of lunatics do crazy things for real … that’s the really scary thing,” he says.

(Photo: Dieter Laser plays a mad surgeon in the horror film “The Human Centipede”/IFC Films)

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