A couple of months ago, the first trailer dropped for The Onania Club, the upcoming film from Human Centipede helmsman Tom Six, and the 40 seconds of footage made it abundantly clear that the divisive director isn’t done making us all feel very uncomfortable quite yet. But while the aforementioned teaser saw a room full of elite women pleasuring themselves to footage of 9/11, these latest stills, which we’re happy to be able to exclusively premiere, show that the film’s titular club finds similar arousal in suffering that’s unfolding right before their eyes.
Seeing how ‘onania’ is an archaic term for masturbation, it only figures that the act would feature so prominently in the movie’s promotion, with one new image featuring several of the film’s wealthy female characters getting off in the presence of a woman who may well be on her deathbed.
Elsewhere in these new batch of pics, we get a close-up of Jessica Morris as the film’s lead, and what looks to be an occupied body bag lying in the hallway of a lavish Hollywood residence.
So far, The Onania Club seems to be living up to Six’s claim that the film’s cast will be very female-dominated. Earlier this year, the director assured us that this project will “definitely pass the Bechdel test with flying colors,” meaning that the picture will contain at least one conversation between female characters that isn’t about a man.
Sure enough, it looks like the key topic of discussion for these women will be human suffering. According to a previous statement from the director, his movie will serve as an exploration of the pleasure people take in the misery of others:
“My latest movie deals with human vileness on many levels. Its main theme is ‘schadenfreude’, an emotion that philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called: ‘the most evil sin of human feeling’ and ‘diabolic’. Where The Human Centipede trilogy is mostly body horror; [this one] deals with this pure psychological horror.”
We’ll see if Tom Six’s take on psychological horror will have a similar cultural impact to his body horror when The Onania Club is released later this year.
