Daniel (Alton Milne) has been through tough times recently, but then the whole country has after it was struck by a fast-spreading virus which affected its victims psychologically, turning them from rational people into raving mad murderers accusing all around of various heinous crimes with no proof, simply a paranoia which has blinded their senses to anything but the insanity raging through their minds. Daniel is not one of the afflicted, but he saw his family fall prey to this, thinking they would be safe in their isolated cottage...
For a film shot for a couple of weeks on a tiny budget, The Dead Outside was some kind of achievement, even if you could understand that it was never going to be as slick as your typical Hollywood zombie movie, or even its most obvious predecessor, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later... which had similar roaming bands of angry zombies-but-not-really striking terror into the hearts of the characters. Here director and co-writer Kerry Anne Mullaney's real strength was atmosphere, with a dingy blue hue to the proceedings which emphasised the desolation.
Of course, the Scottish countryside can look very attractive indeed, so it was all credit to Mullaney for making it appear as inhospitable as a landscape blasted by nuclear war rather than rolling hills of lush green fields. The overcast skies helped with that mood of gloom, but then there were times where the whole enterprise was leaning so far on the dour Scot mindset that it veered close to self-parody. Certainly the teenage girl Daniel finds on his travels, April (Sandra Louise Douglas), is a right miseryguts, barely cracking a smile for the entirety of the film.
To be fair, she has been through just as much as Daniel, and when he breaks into her farmhouse home where she lives alone she's probably correct to be wary of him, seeing as how the infected are difficult to distinguish from the just plain traumatised. Unfortunately the finer points of the plot were hard to distinguish as well, as the general murk tended to bring the narrative down to terse conversations mixed with windswept shots of the surroundings - occasionally April will kill off one of the wandering infected who get caught in her defensive measures - barbed wire and the business end of a shotgun, mostly.
The notion of a virus which exaggerated the air of ill-feeling in the Britain of the twenty-first century to violent degrees was a good one, and this is what Mullaney capitalised upon even if she lacked the resources for a good old-fashioned mob. Intrigue arises when there might be more to April than she's letting on - is she actually immune and for what reason? Daniel has to rely on injections of a vaccine to ensure (he hopes) that he will not succumb to the plague, but there's another character who shows up at the halfway mark, Kate (Sharon Osdin), who proves just as able to jeopardise this uneasy couple's peace as any of the madmen and women. Bleak, grim, joyless: The Dead Outside was all those things, but turned them into virtues while the question of what was actually going on was slipping away from the audience. At least it didn't look like a home movie. Music by Felix Erskine and David Wilsoni.
