Of late, there seem to have been a fair few films which focus on what happens to the human body in the interim period between death and burial – in particular, the inner workings of the morgue and the postmortem examiners who are employed there. More and more, too, horror audiences are interested in looking beyond the mundane, if grim realities of this period in people’s existences, with supernatural explorations of bodies figuring in several of the best recent films of this ilk; maybe this is because, for most of us, this deals in the doubly-hidden. The process of all things postmortem, and then the possibilities of what goes on beyond even that. This brings us to The Dead Center (2018), an ambitious horror story which weaves a few new elements in amongst some more familiar ideas in its own exploration of what happens beyond the slab.
Medical examiner Edward Graham (Bill Feehely) is called in to assist with the examination of an unnamed male suicide case. (And, considering males make up the vast majority of suicide cases it’s refreshing – if that’s the right word – to have this story about male bodies, not female.) However, before he can get to the corpse, it disappears. We see the abject terror and confusion in our John Doe as he finds himself revived, but for now, Graham has no idea where he is. Meanwhile, John Doe finds his way into a ward, where he’s soon thereafter dispatched to the local psychiatric hospital and placed under the care of Dr. Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth). Forrester is a caring, if flawed individual who is under observation for some of his rather ad-hoc decisions on care. The presence of this intriguing new case only escalates these tensions.
So, his trip to the other side unknown to Dr. Forrester, he and his team start trying to work with this disoriented, often violent man. John Doe lurches from catatonic state to fury very readily, and conventional medicine does little to assuage these tendencies. But there’s more to it than that, and Forrester has begun to sense this; soon, those close to John Doe for any length of time are beginning to die. It now becomes a battle against time for Graham to track down his cadaver – identify him – but most importantly, work out what is going on with this enigma.
The Dead Center offers no real let-up, putting all of its characters through the wringer, but via this, the film provides good characterisation and some excellent performances all round. At heart, both of the professionals who become personally involved with the case want the best outcome for all those concerned, particularly John Doe himself (so far as they feel able to help him). It’s not easy to enact such changeable emotions as the key actors have to here, particularly perhaps in the case of Jeremy Childs as our John Doe, but he’s a formidable on-screen force.
I do feel that the film naturally falls into two halves, however, with a very slow-burn establishment of the plot motifs in the first half and a much louder, higher action resolution; in places, this means falling back on quick edits and strobe-y effects which are very different from the earlier style used. For me, the first half of the film is by far the strongest out of these, with the paranoia it kindles a key strength of the film overall. In fact, some of the flashier sequences towards the end could have been replaced by just a tiny bit more exposition, for my tastes, and I feel this would have balanced things out, but I did nonetheless feel engaged by the story throughout, and impressed by its sustained menace.
Although you can see how The Dead Center fits in with the small but significant sub-genre of toe-tagged horrors, such as Unrest (2006) and to some extent The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) , this is a well made film in its own right which definitely has its own way of suggesting something malevolent beyond the veil. That it doesn’t give us all of the answers is by no means a failing. This is a horror film – in the sense of horrific – through and through, a grim mystery which grows ever and ever nastier.
The Dead Center screened as part of Frightfest Glasgow on March 1st, 2019.