BBFC

Banning the Human Centipede II

A day or two ago, the UK’s national organisation of stopping-you-watching-things, the BBFC, announced that they had rejected The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a work too depraved to be released in the UK, a film that couldn’t be salvaged by any measure of cuts, a story that would corrupt and damage our all-too-fragile sensibilities.

In one word, this is ridiculous.

To explain why, I’m using this post to write out three of the reasons I believe this. Namely, that 1) this move reveals awkward things about what we do and don’t accept, 2) that the evidence upon which we base the ‘dangers’ of watching bad things is pretty slim and 3) that censorship simply doesn’t work.