10 Movies People Initially Thought Were A Joke
7. The Human Centipede
On a different note, 2009's The Human Centipede is one of those films that actually started off as a joke that Tom Six decided to turn into a sick work of art: a film about about a scientist, one based upon infamous war criminal Josef Mengele, who kidnaps three people and stitches them together so that they are crudely connected by one digestive tract.
The whole concept for this movie came from when Six was joking with his friends about punishments for sex offenders. Six said: “They should stitch their mouths to the asses of truck drivers”, to which his friends all jokingly agreed. Something about this concept interested Six so he took that idea and proceeded to make it into a horror film, lying to investors about the 'mouth to anus' aspect of the film so it could be funded.
After the first entry was released, the movie was considered a meme because people couldn't believe something like this existed. South Park and The Simpsons got wind of this and decided to make their own references, the result of which made the movie a reasonable success. Six capitalized on this by making two sequels but by 2015, it seemed that Six’s joke had run out of steam. The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) was released that year and it would end up being the last of the series, as well as Six's final film to date.