Words like depraved, obscene, and tasteless have been lobbed at Tom Six’s 2009 shock horror The Human Centipede, and it would seem that Six’s goal for the sequel is to make his critics have to invent new words to properly describe the images on screen. The newest trailer for The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence has arrived online, and it heavily plays up the reaction audiences had to the first film and seems to promise even more disgustingness in the sequel. Intriguingly however, this trailer is safe for work. Check it out.
I was among the last of my friends and colleagues to see the first Human Centipede. I had built the film up in my head based on reactions from those who’d already seen it so much that I began to wonder if the movie would effectively break my brain. As it turned out, yes it was twisted and sick, but nowhere near as much as I had anticipated.
This is precisely why so many horror movies are able to effectively utilize off-screen violence; what you imagine in your head is often far more terrible than what actually appears on the screen. This also seems to be the concept at play with this Australian trailer for Human Centipede II. People are led one by one to the back off a truck, locked inside, and forced to watch the film. We then get to watch only their reactions as unfavorable comments from critics flash onto the screen. It escalates to the point that the confined viewers are vomiting into buckets and demanding to be released.
This a genius piece of marketing because even if you’d only heard about the nastiness of the first film, the vagueness of this trailer encourages the brain to fill in all the gory details. It also has a weird abduction horror element to it and suggests that sitting through the sequel is itself a form of torture. With the film’s October release looming, it would appear Tom Six is reaching deep into his bag of bloody tricks to pique your interest. His exploitative marketing harkens back to the days of William Castle and Roger Corman. He even appears to take a shot at his detractors by flaunting the question they raised in an effort to chastise the first Human Centipede: has horror gone to far?
