How I Would Have Done It: The Dead Center

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

I haven’t done one of these in quite awhile, and though I have a number of films tagged as potential candidates for this kind of revisit, I think The Dead Center really moved me to do another one because it got so close to being really really good, and the areas that I think held it back were so clearly defined to me that I basically wrote up the notes for this post at the same time I wrote up my original look at the film. It has a lot to recommend it - believable, relatable characters, a sense of dread that doesn’t rely on flashy or expensive effects that would threaten to distance us from the story, and confident, understated cinematography and scoring. In a lot of ways it exemplifies a lot of what I see as virtues in low-budget indie horror. But what this means is that the places where I feel it falls down stick out even more.

I even discussed these shortcomings to a certain degree in the original post, but I don’t like spoiling movies when I write about them, at least when I think they’re really good and I hope that people are going to check them out. If I think they suck, I’m much more likely just to get into it, but I had to be pretty oblique about a couple of things in particular, and so here I can get into more specifics. Because here it really does come down to some very specific choices that I think would improve the movie considerably, without really changing things all that drastically. Needless to say, I’m going to spoil some important stuff, and if you’re at all interested in the movie, I’d recommend watching it before clicking through, also because I’m going to be talking about the movie assuming a basic familiarity with the plot.

As I see it, there are four issues here: First is the placement of the scene where John Doe/Michael Clark comes back to life, second is Forrester’s characterization as a wild-card Doctor Who Doesn’t Follow The Rules Because He Cares, third is Graham’s characterization as a medical examiner instead of a detective, and finally, the limp, anticlimactic ending. What I think makes these issues relatively easy to address is a strong narrative foundation that already relies (and could rely more) on convergence and symmetry to a degree, and heightening that could make it a more powerful story.

What Do We Know, And When Do We Know It?

Like a lot of low-budget indie horror, this film’s strength is not in spectacle. That’s a really, really tough thing to pull off unless you’ve got a substantial effects budget, and even then there’s every possibility that it’s going to overshadow things like story or character or mood. What films in this vein do well is mystery - presenting us with the bizarre and inexplicable and rooting the horror in revelation, as we learn the truth behind whatever’s going on, and some critical piece of information falls into place that gives us that “oh, shit” moment. So it’s important to consider what the audience knows, and when they know it, and this is I think the film’s first big misstep.

We open on an overhead shot of an ambulance speeding to a hospital that zooms down into the chaos inside the ambulance as paramedics try to keep a patient alive. It’s a really good sequence, and I don’t think it’s the problem, I just want to put it out there because it’ll be important later. The patient is dead on arrival, bagged, and sent to the morgue. The attendant shuts the door and leaves…and then the bag twitches, the body inside gasping for breath. Again, it’s an effective scene - the way it’s shot and placed is nicely startling, but the problem is that now we know that there is a dead person who has come back to life, very early into the movie. Then we get a sequence where we get a clear look at this person as they rush out of the morgue, naked and frightened, and take refuge elsewhere in the hospital, which just gives even more away. Before we’ve even really met our protagonists, we know there’s someone who was brought in dead and has somehow come back to life. The film is now robbed of a lot of mystery, and it sets up the rest of the film as an exercise in waiting for the protagonists to catch up to something we already know and have known since shortly after the opening credits. It’s not impossible to make that work, but it’s a much, much tougher sell.

I think this could be remedied with some re-editing. It’s already mostly structured as two different stories converging, so lean into that more. Open with the ambulance shot (because it’s really good), establishing someone going to the morgue. Body goes into the morgue, door closes, lights go out, and then cut to Dr. Forrester, establishing his character (more about which later), his role at the hospital, and in the middle of another hectic, stressful day on an overcrowded emergency psychiatric ward, introduce a John Doe who was found wandering the hospital, confused, incoherent, amnesiac, with no ID on him. Forrester has to do an intake, figure out where they’re going to put him because they’re stuffed to the gills as it is and so there’s pressure (implied or otherwise) to find a reason to let him go or alternatively make a case for him as absolutely, positively needing an extended stay. So now we have the story of Dr. Forrester trying to figure out who this John Doe is. This way, information can be doled out gradually, intercut with our second story.

So once we’ve established that Forrester is trying to work with this John Doe to figure out who he is so he can get him the appropriate help (or just get him off the ward), we cut to Graham, at the scene of the suicide, finishing up and heading back to his office. His next story beat is the next day, as he follows up with the medical examiner (because again, more on this in a bit) to find out a cause of death for his paperwork. Just routine bureaucratic desk-clearing. Only it turns out they can’t find the body of the suicide victim. This is a problem - Graham can’t close the case without a body, so he’s forced to return to the scene to see if he missed anything that might provide a clue as to who the suicide victim was, all the while checking in with the hospital to see if the goddamn orderly who lost the goddamn body has had any luck in finding it. This isn’t to say that some folks won’t catch on right away, but it isn’t as blatant as the actual opening, and if you stick to the very grounded, day-in-the-life feeling of the film, it doesn’t have to be obvious.

From there, the body of the film becomes a matter of alternating between the two stories, gradually revealing more and more information over time. Forrester tries different things to varied success, Graham revisits the crime scene and discovers John Doe’s ID where he hid it, John Doe tells Forrester that he was dead, and the first person is found dead on the ward. Graham uses the ID to track down his nearest living relatives and his home, John Doe tells Forrester that he’s been dead before, and he thinks he brought something back with him. The nurse is found dead on the ward. Initially, we don’t see what’s killing people, which would be another departure from the original film. We’d just get hints - the flickering lights, someone wandering into a dark room with a half-open door, only to be found dead or almost-dead, gasping their last. Graham gets a look at the basement of Michael Clark’s house, all of the news clippings, death, disaster, cryptic imagery, the mysterious hole in the floor. John Doe tells Forrester that he thinks he did bad things, that he’s responsible for a lot of deaths, and then as John Doe remembers that he is Michael Clark, we get our look at the ID Graham found - it’s Michael Clark. Then we revisit the ambulance scene, but follow through to show Clark waking up in the body bag after the attendant left, quick intercuts to the two or three deaths so far in between. There’s our “oh, shit” moment.

Who Are You?

The next big problem I had with the movie was how Forrester and Graham were characterized. Not so much the dialogue, which felt believable and naturalistic for the most part (though Dr. Grey’s exposition dump to her boyfriend about Forrester’s trauma felt clumsy - I think you could get rid of that without it hurting the film at all), as much as who these people were supposed to be. Forrester is written very much as the loose-cannon doctor who doesn’t play by the rules because he either cares too much or is troubled himself. In Forrester’s case, it’s both, and it ends up sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of what is otherwise a very grounded, realistic portrayal of emergency psychiatric medicine. I’m not an MD, but it seems to me if your particular brand of bad behavior results in increasing costs in an already-underfunded section in healthcare AND invites malpractice lawsuits on top of it, you’re not going to last long. At the very least, you may be shuffled off to a desk job or fobbed off on another hospital, as seems to be the case from what I know about medical misconduct. It’s not that unethical doctors don’t get to keep practicing, it seems like they do, but Forrester’s particular brand of unethical in his particular field at this particular hospital doesn’t seem like it’d be indulged for very long. It strains plausibility and takes you out of the film.

What’s more, I don’t think it actually adds anything to the story. It makes more sense for Forrester to be written as troubled if this were a film about one doctor’s descent into madness, or if grappling his demons were necessary to stop Clark, but neither seems to be the case. All we get to indicate that Forrester is troubled is the aforementioned exposition dump, which isn’t super-detailed, and its only relation to the story seems to be that he goes all squirrelly toward the end. It would make more sense if, for example, it meant that he became more suspicious of Clark over time, and that it was a question of whether or not Clark really was responsible for these deaths or if it was Forrester’s delusion. As it is, that’s right out the window because we know by the end of the first act that Clark is responsible. Whether it was meant to be film about Forrester or not (and it’s definitely synopsized that way), it doesn’t invest enough in Forrester as a troubled or unstable doctor to pull it off. It’d make more sense to just make Forrester a competent, if overworked, doctor trying to do his best with the meager resources he has, trying to figure out how to coax information out of someone who starts off near-catatonic. He doesn’t have to use unapproved techniques or dangerous drugs to get results that move the story along - the urgency comes from a basically decent person under pressure to figure something out before this poor bastard gets thrown out into the street. That’s a much more grounded, believable character in a much more grounded, believable situation, more befitting of how the rest of the movie feels.

The issues with Graham aren’t nearly as egregious, in my opinion - his character just makes more sense as a detective than a medical examiner. He spends most of the movie chasing down one lead after another, which just doesn’t feel like something you would do if your job were primarily examining a body and declaring a cause of death. Once the body has left the scene, that should be it for the medical examiner - he should be headed back to the hospital to do the autopsy. So when he’s allowed back into the crime scene later, it immediately stuck out to me. When he questioned Clark’s parents and family without any other officers present, it immediately stuck out to me. I thought “why is this medical examiner doing this? Don’t they have detectives for this?” Again, it took me out of the story. And like with Forrester, recharacterizing Graham as a police officer doesn’t affect the mechanics of the story that much. If anything, it affects them even less. He’ll still be invested in the discovery of the missing body, and given that the time frame for this story is relatively short - a few days at most -  it’s plausible that he’s still working the case. What should be a routine follow-up with the medical examiner for his report becomes him spending the next day chasing the story down, and so his actions and motivations are more in character than they are in the original film, and it makes his actions more believable.

Convergence And Symmetry

My final problem with the film was how it ended. Forrester sort of flips his lid and gets restrained, Graham goes chasing after Clark, Forrester manages to escape when all hell breaks loose at the hospital, both arrive at Clark’s home too late, Clark kills Graham, Forrester catches up to Clark after he’s wiped out pretty much the whole cul-de-sac, he beats him to death with a baseball bat and it’s hinted at very strongly that whatever spirit possessed Clark has passed to Forrester in your standard “The End…OR IS IT?” ending. The last act still has its moments, but the very end just feels so obvious and sort of anticlimactic after everything that came before. Here, what I’d do is further leverage the structure of two stories converging, and highlight narrative symmetry that’s already present.

The way I’ve constructed the middle of the film, it becomes a more deliberate investigation story on two fronts, with Forrester realizing there’s something wrong (people on the ward are dying mysteriously) around the same time Graham is (as he hears some pretty distressing stories from Clark’s parents and discovers the wall of news clippings in the basement). The reveal that Clark is John Doe and yes, he did come back from the dead and appears to be sucking the life out of people hits us, and Graham rushes to the hospital, but it’s too late - Clark gets released and goes home. So “he’s the embodiment of death…” lands and then “…and he’s back out in the world” lands immediately after it. This should ratchet up the tension considerably. Graham meets up with Forrester and convinces him that he needs to bring in Clark for questioning. It’s not implausible - at the very least he’s seriously disturbed and may have killed his wife. They follow him back home, but it’s too late. Clark’s already been on his own for awhile at this point, and he’s had plenty of time to do what he came to do. Graham and Forrester arrive at a cul-de-sac already wiped out - doors hanging open, everything silent and awful. Every home, including Clark’s, full of nothing but bodies sprawled out, desiccated just like the bodies at the hospital. It’s too late, he’s in the wind now. Graham calls for backup, and this plays out much like it does in the original film, the neighborhood lit by the lights from ambulances and squad cars, police with flashlights canvassing the area, stacks of body bags echoing the single body bag at the beginning of the film. We end on an aerial shot of multiple ambulances, no sirens or flashers, headed to the hospital, as lights start going out all over the city.