The internet is a scary place. We know this, but it doesn’t make it any less shocking or deeply disturbing when it shows its uglier side.

This is a place, after all, where people read The Daily Mail, fan fiction sees Chewbacca have sex with Harry Potter, and where film critics are threatened with violence for not liking the latest Batman film. It is also, apparently, a place where making bad films is comparable to the Holocaust.

Tom Six, the controversial filmmaker behind both shitty Human Centipede movies, has told Hustler magazine that his production offices and Facebook page are routinely abused by individuals issuing death threats and offensive slurs. “Some say that I’m worse than Hitler and should be killed. Others go so far as to say that they want to cut me open with glass or shoot me through the head… They’re threatening me because they just can’t handle the films.”

The Human Centipede films are notorious for their depictions of torture, degradation and humiliation, usually as a result of victims being stitched together to form one single organism – gums to bums, as it were. Small fries, really, when you consider what other acts of horror and debasement have taken place on screen in the name of entertainment, often with more realistic torment and better lighting. I just hope these trolls never stumble across the likes of Martyrs, Hostel or Home Alone 4.

Unless, of course, they simply meant he was a worse filmmaker than Hitler. In which case, fair play.