But in Dutch writer-director Tom Six’s new “The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence),” the references and allusions pile up like pages of a cultural-studies dissertation. The central character, played by English character actor Laurence R. Harvey, is a squat London parking-lot attendant named Martin who looks more like Peter Lorre’s child-killer in Fritz Lang’s classic “M” than Peter Lorre does — with the added gag that children are the only category of person that Martin doesn’t want to kill. Martin, you see, is obsessed with the first “Human Centipede” film, watching it over and over again in his underground lair, and determines to outdo Dieter Laser’s Mengele-like evil surgeon from that movie by stitching together a dozen abducted strangers into a single pseudo-organism, except without any of the requisite tools or medical knowledge. (If you don’t know much about these movies and don’t quite get what I’m talking about — well, just be happy about that.) He even lures in Ashlynn Jennie, an actress in the first “Centipede,” under the premise that she’s auditioning for Quentin Tarantino, which leads to a dash of actual humor amid the adolescent shock-fest. She made sure everybody showered before the centipede scenes, Jennie tells Martin. “I mean, you’re gonna be near people’s butts, and you don’t want to smell anything.” Oh, ho ho ho.

Martin’s nightmarish home life, which features a harpy mother, a violent neighbor and echoes of sexual abuse, along with peristaltic, subterranean sound effects, is borrowed nearly wholesale from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.” The film’s black-and-white cinematography variously suggests underground Japanese horror films, a decayed 1980s British “video nasty” on VHS (if not Betamax), and the classics I’ve already mentioned. At the New York screening I attended, Six told us that the intrusion of color in the film’s most memorably disgusting sequence is meant as a tribute to “Schindler’s List,” and I think he’s not entirely kidding. At least, he’s not kidding about that any more than the entire “Centipede” thing is a tendon-severing, ass-to-mouth, here’s-feces-in-your-eye Grand Guignol gag.

In Six’s international controversy-starter from 2009, “The Human Centipede (First Sequence),” Laser’s character — a disgraced surgeon who lives alone in the German forest, like a post-Third Reich wicked witch — stitches three hapless tourists together into a single pseudo-organism. It had the affectless, almost clinical manner of a low-budget European horror movie — blending, say, Michael Haneke’s early work with grade-Z American exploitation cinema — and at first I assumed that was what it actually was. Silly me. Now I can see that the whole first movie must be understood within quotation marks, as a self-conscious gesture or imitation. And the second one, like Six’s entire enterprise, is more like an endless chain of references to other things, as well as a juvenile game of Can You Top This? Even worse, it’s a pseudo-intellectual game, one in which the point is not just to épater the old bourgeoisie — at which Six succeeds admirably — but also to congratulate oneself for rising above outrage and indignation.

I’m striving to maintain a neutral tone here because I think that’s the best way to deflate this silly, clever, disgusting and ultimately meaningless project to a reasonable scale. Moral condemnation is exactly what Six wants, on some level (although he has now edited “Centipede II” enough to get it unbanned in Britain — sellout!), and anyway I don’t believe that movies, no matter what outrages they depict, turn people into deviants. But the other thing he wants is to be taken seriously as a high-low auteur with something to say — check out the movies’ pompous-ambiguous titles, with parentheses and big words and everything! — and that’s even more ludicrous. A recent tweet from dry-witted critic and blogger Glenn Kenny pretty well sums it up: The “Centipede” franchise, he wrote, is the “biggest piece of cultural suckerbait since the first Black Sabbath LP.” In other words, it provokes a lot of generalized, extracurricular wailing about moral decay and the seduction of the innocent and Kids These Days, none of which has much to do with the work in question, or anything else. (For the record, Kenny likes that Sabbath record and I can’t stand it. Chacun à son outrage.)

I’m willing to defend the first “Centipede” film, up to a point, although I’m now inclined to believe that just means I was that taken in by its Brothers Grimm Euro-blankness and cheap production values. It’s restrained and sober, at least as movies about people being mutilated by madmen go, and almost despite itself has a half-serious, Holocaust-themed undertow about the possibility of remaining human in inhuman circumstances. But “Human Centipede II,” the middle chapter in a planned trilogy that will apparently end in America, is more like a perma-teenager’s idea of dark and disturbing excess. Six has joked that he wanted to make the first movie look like “My Little Pony,” and wanted to show those who were shocked and outraged what a real outrage looked like. The results are technically capable, undeniably clever, unremittingly depressing and thoroughly nauseating, so, sure, check all the boxes. But what’s really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there’s something of substance in “Centipede II,” when it’s more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom,” with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don’t let me stop you. But please, let’s not pretend it means more than that.

“The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

If this profile sounds a bit familiar, that’s because Fring’s character isn’t new. His image and demeanor makes him only the latest icon in the Villain Hall of Fame’s special wing devoted to a timeless character: the Invisible Psychopath.

You know this particular monster well from contemporary film, television and literature — he’s the guy who periodically commits heinous and meticulously calculated acts of violence with ruthless precision, but shows little emotion and presents himself to the public as buttoned-up, urbane, super-smart and wholly rational. Rarely ever a muscular action hero type, this killer tends to be fairly average in weight and girth, implying that his sheer insanity and blood lust is able to overcome his physical limitations. In other words, he’s the guy who nobody can believe is a monster because he puts on such a good front and because his psychopathy is invisible to the naked eye.

For all the idiosyncratic genius of Fring, he is only the latest in a long lineage of similarly frightening madmen. Here are the 10 other Invisible Psychopaths he now joins in the Villain Hall of Fame (warning: movie/TV/novel spoilers ahead!).

10. Carter Hayes (“Pacific Heights”)

Credit: dvdactive

If Roger Ebert was correct in calling 1990′s “Pacific Heights” a “horror film for yuppies,” then Carter Hayes is a yuppie’s worst nightmare.

The first thing to laud about this villain is the perfect casting call. Putting Michael Keaton, who typically plays cheeky good guys, in the role of a deranged con man bent on destroying a young couple visually reinforces the “anybody can be a dangerous lunatic” image so integral to the Invisible Psychopath archetype.

Second, while Carter Hayes is a madman, he wields most of his madness with a finely tuned sense of the law, often turning the legal system (in this case, tenant protection statutes and restraining orders) against the very victims he is terrorizing. This makes him even more terrifying than the average wild-eyed maniac, because he has the ability to blend into polite society at will.

9. Hans Gruber (“Die Hard”)

Carrying himself more like an EU finance minister than a coldblooded murderer, Hans Gruber is an Invisible Psychopath with a specific mission: to execute anyone who gets in his way of stealing money. And not just any money — big money from huge multinational corporations.

Mind you, his goal and target are important to his overall fame. This is not a petty street criminal or surly gang leader — his understanding of the finance system, finely tailored suits, well-coiffed beard and general Euro-ness gives his character that intangible global-financial-elite flavor. For the audience, he represents something not all that different from a businessman or Wall Street trader. Indeed, two decades after the release of “Die Hard,” Gruber still stalks our nightmares because we fear he might be our stockbroker.

8. Dexter Morgan (“Dexter”)

Perhaps the greatest television antihero of recent years, Dexter Morgan has three distinct traits that make him such a harrowing figure: 1) His formal grounding in forensic science, 2) his attendant attention to scientific detail when killing his victims, and 3) his advantageous position within the very law enforcement apparatus that is supposed to stop maniacs like him.

In a sense, this latter quality is the active ingredient that makes the recipe of the entire “Dexter” franchise so compulsively addictive: In showing how a serial killer could infiltrate a police force and then use that infiltration as a means of pursuing his victims, the audience is forced to cogitate on the notion that this could be a plausible real-life scenario. (And we can hardly expect a reality-based Dexter to be as fastidious as to exclusively select fellow murderers as his chosen victims.)

7. Arthur Mitchell, aka the Trinity Killer (“Dexter”)

Credit: IMDB

As if “Dexter” was somehow short on Invisible Psychopaths, the show doubles down on the archetype in Season 4 with Arthur Mitchell — otherwise known as the Trinity Killer.

As with Carter Hayes from “Pacific Heights,” part of what makes him so terrifying is the casting choice. Though he has portrayed some villains in the past, John Lithgow is best known for his avuncular disposition from his years on “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “Harry and the Hendersons.” Having him appear as a bizarre serial killer obsessed with ritualistic executions is jarring unto itself.

More jarring still is the juxtaposition of his public persona as the Everyman and his secret life as a bloodthirsty lunatic. As Lithgow noted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times:

There were these huge revelations like he’s got a family, he’s a churchgoer, he’s a volunteer home builder, he’s a horrible family man … I think by far the scariest scene of the whole 12 episodes is Thanksgiving dinner when he’s being the gentle patriarch: “We always like to say what we’re thankful for,” and you just know this is not going to end well. I even chuckled when I say, “Well, nobody said they were thankful for me.” That tension between his nice outward demeanor and whatever’s boiling inside him is really disturbing.

6. Martin Vanger (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”)

About halfway through “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” you sorta get the sense that Harriet’s killer is going to be someone you haven’t thought of yet — an Invisible Psychopath lurking in plain sight. Eventually, you end up being correct — you learn that the violent freak with the Gary Heidnik-esque dungeon in his basement is Martin Vanger, the prim and proper CEO of Vanger Industries who had earlier been pretending to help get to the bottom of the book’s mystery.

While his murderous pathologies have nothing to do with the pursuit of money, Vanger is scary because of his Hans Gruber-ish qualities. He doesn’t just seem Euro-corporate in style and dress, he lives it as a chief executive of a major Swedish company, implying that even well-known people in the public spotlight may be leading secret lives as sadomasochistic serial killers.

5. Agent Smith (“The Matrix”)

Typically, Hollywood’s non-human villains aren’t as scary as human ones because they don’t seem that real. However, “The Matrix’s” Agent Smith — really just a visual projection of programming code — manages to provide an epic sci-fi version of the Invisible Psychopath. He’s able to do this because his mix of drab dress, barely hidden Britishness and pre-programmed blood lust somehow pulls off the seemingly impossible — and horrifying — combination of the early earnest Beatles and the Terminator.

Hewing to the old cyborg script, Agent Smith almost never shows emotion. Though we know that’s because he’s just a glorified computer program, his compulsive calmness in the face of mayhem only makes him all the more frightening.

4. Brother Mouzone (“The Wire”)

As professional hit men for inner-city drug gangs go, Brother Mouzone is hardly standard. He is described in his official character bio on “The Wire’s” website as “seem[ing] more like a banker or entrepreneur or scholar” thanks to “his trademark suit and bowtie, rimmed glasses, well-spoken demeanor and penchant for highbrow literature, public commentary and journalistic essay.”

Yes, between hunting his prey and defending his allies’ turf, this Invisible Psychopath is busy immersing himself in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New Republic and the Nation, reminding us that even the most soft-spoken and erudite scholars might put a cap in your ass if you cross them.

3. Mitch Leary (“In the Line of Fire”)

Credit: IMDB

Let’s start by stating the obvious: John Malkovich inevitably turns most roles he plays into Invisible Psychopaths, whether that’s appropriate for the parts in questions or not.

One school of thought says that’s the case because of Malkovich’s inherent Malkovich-ness — his low voice, Archie Bunker-ish looks and the way he often exudes smoldering anger, as if he is, in real life, an actual Invisible Psychopath. However, another, more convincing school of thought says it is because of his searing performance as Mitch Leary in “In the Line of Fire.”

Leary is a would-be presidential assassin, who poses a serious danger precisely because his CIA past has given him the skills to be invisible and untraceable. Though he occasionally breaks Invisible Psychopath character with emotional outbursts, both his fastidious plotting and his masterful disguises more than make up for those momentary slip-ups.

2. Hannibal Lecter (“Silence of the Lambs”)

If you saw “Silence of the Lambs,” it’s a good bet you can never hear the name “Clarice” uttered without getting chills. That’s the filmic legacy of Dr. Hannibal Lecter — an Invisible Psychopath who is so intensely creepy that he manages to unnerve us even though he’s incarcerated and, thus, his psychopathy is longer even invisible.

That’s right, this calm, cool and collected psychologist-cannibal is introduced to audiences as already locked up and/or in a straitjacket and therefore no longer a menace to society — which should make him far less frightening. Yet, Anthony Hopkins adeptly overcomes that inherent disadvantage, somehow completely freaking us out from behind bars.

Perhaps, though, this is the true genius of the Hannibal Lecter version of the Invisible Psychopath. We not only retrospectively learn of his days as an invisible psychopath on the loose, but we see that everyone around him is terrified to even be in his presence, even though he is under lock and key.

1. Patrick Bateman (“American Psycho”)

The scariest part of “American Psycho’s” Patrick Bateman is the very quality that makes him so invisible: He is a full-on blue blood with Ivy league pedigree and elite credentials. The construction of such a character was clearly a deliberate — and terrific — decision by author Bret Easton Ellis. Rather than taking the easy way out and manufacturing a big reveal that shows Bateman’s pathology to be the product of some horrific childhood, Ellis gives us a serial killer whose craziness is actually a direct result of the very high-society culture that is supposed to squelch such antisocial behavior.

To some viewers — maybe quite a few — “Take Shelter” will look more like an above-average genre film, somewhat in the M. Night Shyamalan mode (before Shyamalan inflated into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon version of himself), with a bit more grit and realism. It’s not an unfair comparison; “Take Shelter” revolves around Curtis (Michael Shannon), an ordinary Ohio husband and father, who begins having a series of apocalyptic, and increasingly terrifying, visions and nightmares. But Nichols, a 31-year-old Arkansas native who previously made the no-budget underground hit “Shotgun Stories” (also starring Shannon), is after something more complicated than the Scooby-Doo parlor trick of most Shyamalan-style films, where the spooky narrative events are eventually explained through a big “reveal.” Curtis believes throughout the film that he’s suffering a psychotic breakdown, and the possibility that there’s some objective, external, parascientific explanation for his midnight terrors (and midday ones too) is kept locked away until the story requires it.

If there’s a strong horror-movie undertow right under the surface of “Take Shelter,” its main text is a recession-era marriage drama about a family struggling to cling to the lower edge of the middle class. Curtis has recently been promoted to a supervisor position at his construction firm, and his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, of “The Help” and “The Tree of Life”), is increasingly anxious about how his wobbly personal behavior will affect their financial future. If Shannon’s anguished, brooding performance as a man who’s petrified by what he finds in his own head is very much the movie’s centerpiece (and while Shannon gets a certain amount of stick for overacting, I think he’s almost always good), Chastain provides its moral tether. Samantha is keenly aware that if Curtis loses his job, they lose their house, their deaf daughter (Tova Stewart) won’t get cochlear implant surgery, and the family will slide into the chaos of poverty.

What makes this gripping and compact tale of marriage, faith, madness and possible apocalypse so unusual is the fact that it works so well on all levels. Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone capture the undramatic Ohio landscape and wide Midwestern sky in almost lyrical compositions, and the rituals of Curtis and Samantha’s days and nights are captured with no hint of anthropological condescension. Yet as Curtis’ visions become more pronounced and more troubling — they almost always begin with eerie and unexpected storms, involve unseen but dangerous intruders, and often end with someone he loves or trusts turning against him violently — the sense that something shocking lies just below the film’s everyday realism becomes almost unbearable. And with no more than a few deft allusions, Nichols makes the point that the pressure on Curtis and Samantha is coming from all directions, and is not purely psychological: Extreme weather and climate change, bad economic news, vanishing healthcare and the prospect of unemployment and bankruptcy are all very real threats for this family and millions of others. (Even the painfully inadequate mental-health services available to someone in Curtis’ position play an agonizing role in the story.)

In an Oscar race that’s likely to feature Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, an eccentric outsider like Shannon probably doesn’t stand a chance. But I’d like to think this enormous, marvelously compassionate performance will put him in the running. Always a commanding physical presence, Shannon displays a gravity in this role, a gut-wrenching sense of inner turmoil, that I haven’t quite seen before. Curtis is an intelligent but uneducated guy who’s struggling to understand something no one can understand (the deepest mysteries of our own minds), and profoundly grieving for the loss of his own sense of self as a competent husband and father. He checks out books from the public library, tries to confide in his best friend (Shea Whigham), even goes to see a sympathetic counselor (a nice bit part for Lisa Gay Hamilton). When he borrows money to build out the underground storm shelter in his backyard, it’s partly because he feels an irresistible compulsion to do so, even though he knows it’s irrational. But he also does it because it’s something he knows how to do; his relief at handling practical and logistical problems, rather than the murkier ones raised by faith and psychology, is tangible.

“Take Shelter” culminates with an escalating series of crises and explosions, the biggest of them when Curtis goes off, with all the pent-up fury of a volcano releasing magma, at a local fish fry full of whispering, gossiping neighbors. All I’ll say is that Curtis and Samantha and their daughter will indeed wind up down in that storm shelter, but that even then the question of what Curtis’ visions mean, or what’s “really happening,” is very much up in the air. When I talked to Jessica Chastain about the movie, she declined to offer any explanation for its breathtaking final scene, but she’s right that the key to that ambiguous ending, and to the whole film, lies in the look that passes between the couple. It’s that look that allows Nichols to end his terrifying tale of American apocalypse on a hopeful note: Whatever storm is coming, these two will face it together.

“Take Shelter” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

That may go some way toward explaining why “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” a Guillermo del Toro-supervised remake of a legendary TV film that traumatized generations of 1970s and ’80s viewers, is both better and worse than its source material. (Del Toro did not direct this movie, although he gets his name above the title; he’s pulled in too many directions on 50 gazillion other projects to bother with that. He did produce and co-write the screenplay.) This is an above-average horror flick by any measure, nicely directed by del Toro protégé Troy Nixey in an atmospheric, unshowy style that recalls cheapo ’70s cinema without mimicking it. If I didn’t find this tale of an old, dark house infested by ancient and evil goblins exceptionally terrifying, that might be because I’ve seen the original and knew what would (probably) happen. Still, Nixey delivers numerous nasty shocks and an overriding sense of menace, and if the premise is new to you this movie will do more than enough to give you nightmares.

While the 1973 original had laughably bad special effects — I seriously think those goblins were stop-motion apple dolls — hammy acting from Kim Darby as the haunted housewife and Jim Hutton as the clueless husband, and a script full of clunky devices, it also had a clarity and a simplicity that were irresistible. The little monsters from the dark Freudian sub-basement tell Darby what they’re going to do and then do it; nobody is watching and nobody believes her, except us. It was a fable of almost Kafkaesque intensity, a story in which all the hope in the universe dwindles down to a single flashlight beam and then goes out. Without consciously intending to, it engaged all sorts of proto-feminist fears and anxieties about the changing roles of women and the ways they are so often victimized or go unheard.

In the Nixey-del Toro version, the central couple, Kim and Alex, are played by Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, two much stronger actors. But the monstrous homunculi aren’t focused on either of them but on a vulnerable child named Sally (Bailee Madison), who is Alex’s daughter by an off-screen ex-wife. Sally takes ADHD medication and is evidently screwed up in other ways, which both introduces a lot of half-relevant, pseudo-contemporary emotional drama and creates a somewhat hackneyed red herring: When Kim’s best dresses are mysteriously torn to shreds, she and Alex pull long faces and drag Sally to the shrink for some serious intervention. “Sure, honey, little monsters from inside the heating ducts did it. Uh huh. Now take your powerful psychoactive drugs and go to bed.”

Not only does the husband-wife dichotomy of the original film become a stepmother-stepdaughter triangle, but the screenplay (by del Toro and Matthew Robbins) introduces a whole lot of mythological and folkloric back story that simply isn’t necessary. Oh, I can see the appeal of dragging in Celtic legends about the “little people” and the tooth-fairy tradition and secret treaties signed with supernatural entities by medieval popes, and it almost feels as if del Toro wishes they were making a different movie, a geeky “Da Vinci Code” horror-thriller that explored the secret history of goblin-human relations. I’d definitely watch that, but this one’s supposed to be about the fact that our house is full of horrible little creatures who want to eat us and cannot be defeated. I’m not sure that juridical or political explanations for their behavior are all that helpful.

There’s also a little bit of, say, “The Secret Garden” introduced into this remake, although one could just as well cite any of the dozens of books about a child alone in an old house. Sally arrives from L.A. to the crumbling Rhode Island mansion that architect Alex and helpmeet Kim are fixing up as a resale showpiece, and soon discovers not just the previously unknown basement room but the iron furnace grate someone has bolted shut and the local handyman doesn’t want to talk about. Hmm, maybe it’d be fun to find some tools and open it up! Especially because the little voices down there say they want to come out and play! There are plenty of edge-of-your-seat, spooky-loo moments early in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” before Sally grasps the true nature of her new playmates, along with a few shriek-inducing ones later on.

There isn’t much for Guy Pearce to do as the tone-deaf, perennially irritated dad, but Holmes — whose acting is often overwhelmed by her Mrs. Tom Cruise fame — delivers a sensitive performance as Kim gradually builds a tender, hesitant rapport with Sally. Still, there are problems with the characters and story here that the cast can’t fix. It feels as if del Toro and Robbins never clearly chose between leaving the film in the cruel, manipulative horror idiom of the ’70s — in which telephones never work, cars never start, and minor coincidences and catastrophes keep the family inside the house long past the point when any ordinary idiot would have fled — or uprooting it. So some of the knife-twisting later scenes in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” feel almost campy, like winks at the audience or studious self-referentiality. None of this is quite enough to ruin a gripping, gruesome fable, which of course del Toro’s fans and other genre buffs will rush out to see, but it does render the movie a minor muddle rather than a horror masterwork.

The original “Fright Night” was a sly mini-masterpiece — a blend of self-referential goofiness and genuine chills that helped pave the way for the droll horror of the “Scream” franchise and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It makes perfect sense, then, that the new version was written by veteran “Buffy” scribe Marti Noxon. And she’s fully in her zone here, infusing the film with clever gags, quiet dread, scream-in-your-seats shocks and unexpected moments of creepiness. And for the horror faithful, there are enough casual references to both “Buffy” and the original “Fright Night” to stave off cries of sacrilege.

But the remake also modernizes in fun ways — from characters’ use of lock-picking phone apps to its employment of 3-D. I’ve never been a 3D-fan, but here — with vampire talons and fangs that leap out at the audience, exploding fireballs and whizzing arrows — it makes campy sense. The technology doesn’t seem remotely like fancy “Avatar” shtick; it’s more like classic “House of Wax” fun.

As with the 1985 version, the plot centers on dweeby teenager Charlie Brewster, whose world is turned upside down when a new neighbor turns out to have deadly appetites — and an eye for his mom (Toni Collette). And like the original, the movie’s title refers to both the bloodthirsty menace next door and a campy horror show hosted by a lame showman. But this time around, the “Fright Night” within “Fright Night” is a Las Vegas revue. Its maestro, Peter Vincent (former “Dr. Who” star David Tennant, no stranger to beloved cult classics) is now an eyelinered, egomaniacal, Midori-swilling cross between magician Criss Angel and Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow, a man whose entire personality is his greatest illusion.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) coaxes lively performances out of most of his cast, notably Tennant, whose Vincent is a noble soul shrouded in bravado and too-tight leather pants. The only glaring misstep is that as Charlie, Anton Yelchin is so blandly unweird that neither his vampire obsessiveness nor his hot girlfriend seems entirely convincing. Watching the ever reliable Christopher Mintz-Plasse as his dorky yet authentically poignant pal Ed, it’s hard not imagine how much bolder the film might have been with him as the unlikely vampire slayer.

Yet the movie belongs, heart and soul, to Farrell. Conspicuously sniffing around for blood, slouching in doorways and purring, “Hey guy,” he’s at once self-mocking and utterly menacing — and almost as despicable as his paunchy cokehead character in “Horrible Bosses.” There’s an air of swaggery freedom about his Jerry; he’s amused and intense at the same time. It’s the knowing cockiness that he can do whatever he wants, and the audience will be helplessly mesmerized. And he’s right.