'The End of Tom Six' Doc Premieres on YouTube
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- "The End of Tom Six" premieres this weekend on YouTube as a DIY confessional documentary fusing the "Human Centipede" director's life, career, and progressive illness into what Variety calls "the story of the end of Tom Six's life."
- Tom Six was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 14 years ago and has lived as a recluse in Amsterdam for the last six years, managing the disease with decaf coffee, Oxycodone for chronic pain, and bed rest on an antique Chinese opium bed.
- Six's 2019 follow-up film "The Onania Club," starring Chloë Sevigny as one of a group of chic Los Angeles women aroused by others' misery, remains unreleased after every distributor he approached passed, citing "the marketplace has changed."
- Six claims the stress of the "Onania Club" distribution battle exacerbated his MS, and in the documentary he admits, "I'm a fucking living X-ray. I've got massive brain fog from all the medications. My thoughts are like scrambled eggs."
- The "Human Centipede" trilogy (released 2009, 2011, 2015) carved an extreme niche in global horror and became a mainstream meme referenced on "South Park," "The Simpsons," "Saturday Night Live," "Deadpool 2," and Childish Gambino's "Bonfire" video.
Why it matters: Six sits at the sharp edge of a real industry question: whether distributors will still release films that court controversy in an increasingly censorious marketplace. His case is concrete — a finished 2019 film with a name cast member (Chloë Sevigny) that no distributor will touch, with Six linking that rejection to his deteriorating health. If even a proven transgressive filmmaker can't land distribution post-#MeToo, the chilling effect on boundary-pushing cinema is no longer hypothetical.
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