Holed up in Amsterdam, Tom Six talks about what's really making him sick. Yesterday’s punk, grunge, and rebel-outsider upstarts have an uncanny way of evolving into today’s elder statesmen of respectable infamy. (Hello, John Waters, Patti Smith, John Lydon, Henry Rollins, and Robin Byrd.) But it’s doubtful that Tom Six will ever be in the mix of latter-day prestige. His desire to stand apart from it is too great.
In case he’s not on your radar, Tom Six is the Dutch director of the “Human Centipede” trilogy, a series of horror films so grotesque that the idea of sitting through them would be a deal-breaker for 97 percent of moviegoers. Six was after the other three percent: the kind who feed off shock and transgression, and who recognize that a horror movie that makes hardened veterans of the genre feel like they have to watch parts of it peeking between their fingers is either a movie that has gone too far…or one that’s the definition of what true horror is. The “Human Centipede” films — especially “The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence),” a hellacious “Götterdämmerung” of torture porn — were both.
Released in 2009, 2011, and 2015 (and watched mostly on VOD), the “Human Centipede” films carved out an extreme niche on the edge of global movie culture. Yet they also found a perverse mainstream foothold, becoming a cheeky meme (sorry! pun intended) referenced on “South Park,” “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Deadpool 2,” “Beavis and Butt-Head,” and the Childish Gambino video for “Bonfire.” Tom Mix wasn’t aiming for respectability; he was going as far as possible in the opposite direction. But he was courting notoriety and fame, and he did it by working in the carny-barker freak-show tradition of exploitation-world self-marketers like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, Ted V.
Mikels, and (of course) John Waters. These were filmmakers who specialized in selling a vibe of on-the-fringe danger, creating an underground mystique that was part of what made them successful. (By the time Waters was done peddling “Pink Flamingos” on the midnight-movie circuit, he had made a fortune, which became the basis of his trash-art empire.) “The End of Tom Six” is about how Tom Six made and sold his films in the same spirit. But it’s also about how his dark dream came crashing down.
The movie, which premieres this weekend on YouTube, is a DIY schlock- umentary that’s also a real documentary, one that captures how Six’s life became his own private horror film, after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He first learned that he had the condition 14 years ago, and for a long time he was able to manage its symptoms comfortably (and in secret). But MS is incurable and progressive.
For the last six years, Six has lived as a recluse in Amsterdam, lying in bed and going out twice a day for decaf coffee (the regular brew is too hard on his shattered nerves). He’s asking: Is there room anymore for movies like his, that stray over the line? And if not, what does that mean?
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