Arrow Video Preps Writer/Director Billy Senese’s The Dead Center For DVD And Blu-ray Release On Oct. 22

The Halloween season gets a slow-burn horror tale that would put a sinister smile on any crypt-keeper’s otherwise stoic puss.   Arrow Video, with domestic sales and distribution expertise supplied by MVD Entertainment Group, has selected Oct. 22 as the street date for both DVD and Blu-ray editions of writer/director Billy Senese’s twisted horror tale, The Dead Center.

Senese arrived on the feature film scene in 2014 with Closer To God, his award-winning take on the Frankenstein legend as presented in terms of modern science.    With The Dead Center, he is back with another horror gem that is both claustrophobic in its setting and at the same time filled with dread … dread in terms of the inevitability of a fearful outcome that builds, and builds … and builds! 

Unidentified, the toe-tag simply reads “John Doe” — he actually has a name, Michael Clark (played by Jeremy Childs — Closer to God, The Last Castle, After Darkness), but that isn’t important.   We are introduced to him on the slab of a morgue run by medical examiner Edward Graham (Bill Feehely — Blood Rogues, At the Edge) … he’s dead, dead, dead.   

But in no time, Michael awakes and takes to walking the halls of the hospital, which leads him to an empty bed in the psych ward, where he settles in for a little nap — it’s been a rough day, being dead and all.   

He’s soon discovered by a nurse making her rounds — an “extra” nut job, that’s strange — who alerts Dr. Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth — perhaps best known as a filmmaker in his own right … the award-winning Upstream Color), the head shrink, who takes the mysterious new arrival under his wing and tries his best to sort out how “John Doe” got there.

Meanwhile, Graham has begun an inquiry of his own.   Where did “John Doe” get off to … and who the heck is he!!   Unbeknownst to him, Forrester has begun interviewing the mysterious “John Doe,” only to hear a story from the now lucid “corpse” that gives him the chills.   

As events unfold, it becomes clear that the wandering stiff has some real issues that can’t be explained by the rational Forrester … and there in lies the path to his own hold on sanity.  

Bonus goodies include commentary with filmmaker Billy Senese, producers Denis Deck and Jonathan Rogers and cinematographer Andy Duensing, plus there are nine deleted scenes, an alternate ending and a newly-prepared documentary on the making of The Dead Center which is titled “A Walk Through The Dead Center.”

Other bonus nuggets are on-set video sessions with actors Shane Carruth and Poorna Jagannathan, the featurette titled “Head-Casting with Jeremy Childs,” Billy Senese’s 2011 short film, The Suicide Tapes, and a half-dozen Midnight Radio Theatre radio plays written, produced and directed by Billy Senese — “Insomnia,” “The Long Weekend,” “Disposable Life,” “The Suicide Tapes,” “The Woman In The Basement” “Blood Oath” and “Flu.”