The Human Centi-WHUT

I'd like to address an issue that is facing modern cinema, and that deeply concerns me. It has to do with a genre of film that I don't have a lot to do with, because I have a serious problem with horror. Any horror movie you watched that made you say, "Hey, that wasn't so scary," I guarantee it terrified me. There are TRAILERS I can't watch because they scare me so deeply. I once saw a trailer for the movie Slither and repressed it so deeply that when I had a nightmare about it, I had no idea where the images came to me from.

But I'm fascinated by horror: I can't watch it, but I read all about it. I beg people to know the ends to the movies I'm too chicken to see. I can spend hours on Wikipedia reading about these movies that I'll never see. You can imagine my fascination when I stumbled across a film called The Human Centipede, accompanied by a poster of a silhouetted person with two extra sets of arms. "Oh," I thought. "It's a monster movie. About a mutant person. With extra hands, and maybe extra legs."

Oh, how little did I know...

The trailer didn't work on my computer and now I know this is a blessing. The Human Centipede is a nightmare film the likes of which I hope never to see again. The plot is grotesquely simple: a mad doctor kidnaps three people and stitches them together into a "human centipede," connected by their digestive systems. Mouth to ass. And this is where I died a little inside.

Is this really what the horror film genre has sunk to? What happened to subtlety? What happened to letting our own minds provide the scare? Hitchcock knew how to scare without blood. Stephen King and his movie adapters understood that a a skillfully placed noise could make you shudder better than a medical freak show. When did filmgoers decide they'd rather experience vomit-inducing imagery than eerie cinematography?