The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is a 2009 Dutch body horror film written, directed and co-produced by Tom Six. The film tells the story of a deranged German surgeon who kidnaps three tourists and joins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming a "human centipede". It stars Dieter Laser as Josef Heiter, the creator of the centipede; and Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, and Akihiro Kitamura as his victims.
According to Six, the concept arose from a joke he had made with friends about punishing a child molester by stitching his mouth to the anus of a "fat truck driver". Another source of inspiration was Nazi medical experiments performed during World War II, such as those performed by Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. When approaching investors to fund the project, Six did not mention the premise of the film for fear of putting off potential backers; financiers did not discover the full nature of the film until completion.
The film received a limited theatrical release in the United States on 30 April 2010. Despite a mixed critical reception, the film won several accolades at international film festivals. Two sequels that were also written and directed by Six—Full Sequence and Final Sequence—were released in 2011 and 2015, respectively. The entire trilogy was combined into a single film in 2016, titled Complete Sequence, which Six described as a "movie centipede" due to each Sequence leading into its successor while simultaneously working as a separate standalone film.
Plot[]
Lindsay and Jenny, two American tourists in Germany, are drugged and involuntarily detained by crazed surgeon Josef Heiter when they seek help at his house after they get a flat tire. The women awaken in a makeshift medical ward. They witness Heiter kill a kidnapped truck driver after Heiter informs him he is "not a match". Heiter secures a new male captive, Japanese tourist Katsuro. The doctor explains that he is a world-renowned expert at separating Siamese twins, but dreams of making new creatures by sewing people together. He describes in detail how he will surgically connect his three victims mouth-to-anus, so that they share a single digestive system.
After Lindsay tries to escape and fails, Heiter decides to make her the middle part of the centipede, the most painful position. Heiter performs the surgery, placing Katsuro at the lead, Lindsay at the middle and Jenny at the rear; he removes both the upper and lower front teeth and lips of both women and mutilates the buttocks of Katsuro and Lindsay to provide access to the rectums; a U-shaped section of skin from jawline to cheek is removed from both Lindsay and Jenny, to which he grafts the skin from the buttocks of Lindsay and Katsuro respectively. He severs the ligaments of his victims' knees to prevent leg extension, forcing his victims to crawl. Each victim in the centipede is half-naked, where Katsuro and Lindsay are provided bottoms covered in bandages for healing purposes while Jenny is provided with underwear. All three segments' knees are bandaged for healing and for them to be able to crawl. Lindsay is joined with a strip of bandage to the buttocks of Katsuro and Jenny is joined with a strip of bandage to the buttocks of Lindsay, joining their mouths to the anus of the person in front of them.
Once the operation is complete, Heiter is delighted with his creation and takes the centipede to his living room to wake each segment of the centipede up, takes photos of each of them, and even passes a mirror around for the segments of the centipede to marvel at their new form. Heiter attempts to train his centipede as a pet by caging the centipede in a dog kennel, letting Katsuro eat dog food at dinner, and often belittling Katsuro with racist insults and beating him with a crop when he becomes rebellious. When Katsuro defecates, Lindsay is forced to swallow his excrement while the doctor watches in delight. However, he eventually becomes irritated after being kept awake by the constant screaming of a caged Katsuro (who, as the front part of the centipede, has his mouth free and is still able to speak) and by the constant moaning of the women. When the centipede attempts to escape while Heiter is swimming, all three segments of the centipede are beaten with the crop. Heiter is displeased with the realization that Lindsay is constipated. He proposes that he will use laxatives on Lindsay, so that she will explosively defecate into Jenny's mouth, and thus be forced to eat the feces of her best friend. However, before he can do this, he discovers that Jenny is dying from sepsis during a checkup (suggesting that Lindsay may have already defecated into her mouth off camera, which led to infection).
When two detectives, Kranz and Voller, visit the house to investigate the disappearance of the tourists, Heiter comes up with an idea to add them as replacements for Jenny in a new creation; a four-segment centipede. He offers the two detectives water spiked with sedatives in hopes of knocking the two unconscious. After being given the water, the detectives become suspicious and obtain a search warrant for his home.
When the detectives leave Heiter's home, the victims attempt to escape. Katsuro attacks Heiter in the process. Their attempt to escape ultimately fails. Katsuro confesses to the doctor that he deserves his fate because he had treated his own family poorly, then takes his own life by slitting his throat with a glass shard.
Upon returning to Heiter's home, the detectives forcefully conduct separate searches as Heiter, injured, hides near his swimming pool. Kranz finds the ward along with Heiter's victims. Voller begins to feel ill from the earlier drugging, and Heiter stabs him with the scalpel pulled from his leg during Katsuro's attack. Upon finding Voller dead, Kranz is shot by Heiter with Voller's sidearm. Kranz responds by shooting Heiter in the head before dying. Back in the house, Jenny and Lindsay hold hands as Jenny dies. Lindsay sobs as she is left alone in the house, trapped between her deceased fellow captives. Her fate is left unknown. The film ends with the sounds of her sobbing while the camera pans to the roof of the house.