Martin attempts to replicate Heiter’s experiment, but on a much larger, more brutal scale (12 people), using DIY tools rather than medical precision.
One of the film’s most striking index entries would be “Dialogue: Absence of.” After the surgery, coherent speech vanishes. The victims can only groan, whimper, and scream. The “human centipede” moves as a single organism, its only communication a chain of muffled agony. This linguistic void is crucial: by removing the ability to speak, Heiter removes the last vestige of individual will. The index would show a stark decline from the film’s opening (casual conversation between tourists) to its middle (pleas and threats) to its end (bestial moans). Language, that most human of tools, is surgically excised.
Furthermore, because the films are banned or heavily censored in numerous countries, possessing certain versions may itself be illegal regardless of how they were obtained. In Germany, for example, possessing the original, unaltered versions of the sequels could potentially violate Section 131 of the Criminal Code. In the United Kingdom, only the censored, BBFC-approved version of Full Sequence can be legally owned.
Unrated director’s cuts and collector's edition Blu-rays offer the best visual quality and include insightful behind-the-scenes documentaries detailing how the special effects and medical prosthetics were created.