One sleepless night a few years ago, I was flicking through late night TV. Somewhere between the exuberant salespeople banking on sleep deprivation to sell wearable blankets, and lifetime movies about yet another single lady with a big presentation stuck in a sleepy small town (with a hunk who could have been a big shot in the city but chose to sell Christmas trees), I stumbled upon the strangest, scariest, and to this day, the most traumatizing movie I’ve ever seen.

A mad scientist had sewn four people together, mouth to… well, to create a human centipede. The idea was simple and horrifying, feed the first person, and the rest survive by absorbing the results as they travel down the chain, in a kind of human waste sharing system, like a game of faecal gossip. Unsurprisingly, the first person in the chain gets the best version of whatever is served, but the last person in the chain is not so lucky. There is hardly any nourishment to be had when your meal has been filtered through three other stomachs.

Blessed with a short-term memory, I don’t remember how the movie ended, but I clearly remember the feeling: confusion, disgust, existential dread. I shoved that memory as deep into my subconscious as I could manage, and there it stayed for over a decade. Until recently, when I heard someone explain trickle-down economics.