Got this on dvd today, and watched it tonight.

It is a low budget film, but quite well made, and is an interesting film to watch.

Watching it I thought that what was outside was closer to the infected in 28 Days Later, than actual undead, but it is just a slightly different take on the undead.

The film mainly keeps it’s focus on the living and the interactions between them, but it does not lose anything because of this.

It is well worth watching though, and will interest many who frequent this forum.

Below is a review that will do better justice in selling the film than I could.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=64599481

My initial reaction was of the “Oh suffering Christ” variety. How many more remakes of Night of the Living Dead can the world cope with? Well if there’s room for one more then make it this one because there’s a lot to recommend it.

There’s a professional lustre to it which a lot of UK zombie knock-offs can’t manage, but more importantly it makes a virtue of its micro-budget concentrating on character and back story rather than red paint and digital pudding.

It reminded me a bit of Chris Gorak’s 2006 movie Right At Your Door but set in a drab Scottish landscape rather than an LA suburb. This is a compliment.

http://feexby.com/2010/02/27/220210-270210/

Kris & Kerry in Scottish Screen’s industry e-bulletin.

Kerry-Anne Mullaney and Kris Bird picked up awards at the festival

A film shot on location in the south of Scotland has taken two awards at a movie festival in Spain.

The Dead Outside won best film and Kerry-Anne Mullaney took best director at the 10th Estepona International Horror and Fantasy Film Festival.

It was filmed in Auldgirth near Dumfries and beat off competition from some bigger budget rivals.

Ms Mullaney currently has two more feature films in the pipeline which she also hopes to shoot in the region.

She said she was delighted to have received the recognition for her work.
“I was so thrilled to receive best director. I never expected to receive best film too,” she said.

“People came up afterwards and told me how much they loved the film and its foreboding atmosphere.”

Ms Mullaney runs film company Mothcatcher along with producer Kris Bird.
They recently moved to the village of New Abbey in Dumfries and Galloway, from a base in Edinburgh.

Mr Bird said the festival awards were a “major achievement” which would hopefully help to secure the support necessary to start filming another feature film later this year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/8268372.stm

There’s more great news for the film as it just won the Best Film and Best Director for Kerry-Anne Mullaney at the Estepona International Horror and Fantasy Film Festival.

These awards add to the Special Jury Mention at Festival Internazionale della Fantascienza di Trieste last year and the Best New Work, Director, Producer, and Writer at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards this year. The story comes through the BBC.

Frankly I don’t know why this film isn’t getting more publicity, and I hope I can help a little in that area, because it is so damned good and rather clever.

It was filmed in just fifteen days in Dumfries and Galloway and takes a huge, worldwide event and looks at the effect on a couple of isolated people.

While it’s deemed a zombie film, it’s really a psychological horror that takes some clever views of the lead characters, how they are affected by the events and how they interact with each other.

I really enjoyed the film when I saw it and, liked One Day Removals, was surprised by how good the film was. This is small scale Scottish cinema, unaided by the people who should really be helping Scotland grow their cinema base but is too interested in the big, headline grabbing names and projects.

I’d recommend keeping an eye out for The Dead Outside and for anything that this Scottish production team come up with next. I have high hopes for their next film, and the producer tells me that we’ll be hearing more when it develops.

As for now a well done to the team and the film, and a reminder to you all to try and get your eyes on this film. Here’s the official site to help out.

http://www.filmstalker.co.uk/archives/2009/09/the_dead_outside_wins.html

Set in the Highlands of Scotland (although filmed in the Borders) Mullaney and Bird tell an intimate tale of two survivors of a neurological disease which has effected all of Britain (and possibly the rest of the world). As the story progresses we’re introduced to Sharon Osdin as Kate, who threatens to break the strained relationship these two survivors have formed. With a closed off April refusing to reveal exactly her story it soon becomes clear that there’s much more to her existence than is first apparent.

The first thing to note is that the ‘zombies’ in The Dead Outside aren’t the classical re-animated undead and are instead more akin to the rage infected viral zombie with the exception that they maintain their ability to speak. All the zombie vocalization though alludes to a similar motive and perhaps an effect or even the cause of the epidemic. This, like many questions in the film, is left unexplained and The Dead Outside is not a movie that wraps the story up in a neat bundle within it’s 80 minutes.

Each of the characters is very well realised, which is surprising from a film with such little dialogue. It’s far from a silent movie, with most of the story revealed through the characters interaction, but the tone and pace set in the opening ten minutes is succesfully throughout the movie. From Daniel first coming across April, to the emotionally driven conclusion, these characters are people and Mullaney successfully puts you there with them.

Despite being the first feature from Mothcatcher and the limited budget the film’s shot on, the directorial skills Mullaney learned from shooting music videos makes this an accomplished piece to watch. The only downside to the direction is that the action pieces and fights with the zombies are akin to Batman Begins, in that we never see any of the action as the camera flashes and jumps.

Unfortunately the actors themselves suffer from what I call ‘watching my sister act syndrome‘ where I’m very aware that they are putting on a performance. That said, other people don’t suffer from it when watching my sister and it may be the Scottish accent that I notice more (I’m Scottish). That said Sandra Louise Douglas does manage to get across a hint of menace and fear and doesn’t come across as just a typical ‘angry at the world’ teenager.

Much of The Dead Outside is left cloaked in mystery and the only thing that really stops me loving it is that I don’t think the blanks will ever be filled in. Many things which are hinted at in the film could have any number of equally satisfying and unsatisfying conclusions leaving a decidedly frustrating quality to the ending, despite the final act being it’s most powerful.

Will hopefully have a interview with Kerry and Kris soon and will try and get some answers, until then you can sign up to be told when the DVD is released.

http://www.zombiecommand.com/reviews/movies/dead-review/

The Dead Outside has an overwhelming air of purposefully half-explained menace: the virus might still be airborne; touching the afflicted in any way might result in infection; the turned victims are after blood and attracted by noise, so living a quiet life becomes vital to survival. So what better place to be than in the Scottish borders? Sparsely populated, lots of space and plenty to eat if you find a suitably isolated farm and can grow your own. Which is exactly what Daniel does after his wife and child are infected. But he wakes up the next morning to find April peering down the barrel of a shotgun at him. Braehead is her family’s farm and she doesn’t exactly welcome strangers, not even healthy ones.

The two put up with each other as they struggle to survive; but there’s more to April than meets the eye. Why does she spend nights outside the safety of the farmhouse on her own, why does she shoot every infected person on sight, burying them in the woods around the farm, and why hasn’t she been infected by all this contact? When a third survivor stumbles onto the farm, this fragile and untrusting dynamic is threatened.

The Dead Outside shares the same main problem as The Zombie Diaries – a lack of turned plague victims, (in fact, if it were not for the differences in the disease and infected, these two films might almost be companion pieces), but Director Kerry Anne Mullaney’s choice of Dumfries and Galloway as a location tempers this accusation in two ways – naturally, there are less people here, and most impressively, the bleakness of the countryside is captured in the blues and blacks of the eerie dusk/night exterior shots, (when most of the action occurs). The area’s wet and dreary weather conditions, shown through deceptively simple, lingering shots of the farmyard, the surrounding fields and woods, and farm buildings going to ruin as nature reclaims them, more than makes up for the too-few, (but effectively savage), encounters with the infected.

Mullaney has crafted a rough-edged independent Post Apocalyptic gem: the dialogue is economical; the acting is convincing; the farmhouse’s rooms clogged full of a lifetime’s clutter constrict and suffocate those hiding within, eventually forcing them outside to face the truths behind April’s attachment to Braehead Farm.

The Dead Outside is a nervous and personal snapshot of the apocalypse, as the characters subtly probe each other’s motivations in an unforgiving, and tense environment. A is for Apocalypse, and Ambiguity, but also for Atmosphere and The Dead Outside literally drips with it.

Shot in two weeks, on a micro-budget, (the makers wouldn’t divulge the amount in their Frightfest Q&A session, due to the fact they’re trying to sell the film at the moment), The Dead Outside is a stylishly dark mood piece, and if The Zombie Diaries can do well in the straight-to-DVD market, The Dead Outside surely will, and deservedly so, as it is a prime example of thoughtful, twisted story-telling and aspirational independent film-making.

Hopefully we’ll be seeing The Dead Outside in cinemas or on DVD before too long. Check out the official trailer here.

http://www.mathewfriley.com/2009/09/film-review-the-dead-outside/

La X Semana Internacional de Cine Fantástico y de Terror de Estepona ha sido patrocinada por la Diputación de Málaga y el Ayuntamiento de la localidad. Las publicaciones presentadas dentro del evento han tenido como tema central la mujer en el cine fantástico y la figura de los muertos vivientes, caso del escritor Ángel Gómez Rivero, que presentó su obra ‘Cine zombi’, que en palabras del autor ‘es el recorrido más exhaustivo editado en nuestro país sobre el cine protagonizado por muertos vivientes’.

Por otro lado, el máximo galardón del festival, el Unicornio de Oro a toda una carrera dentro del género fantástico, este año ha sido para Richard Lynch, carismático actor relacionado con grandes producciones del mundo del terror y el fantástico. Igualmente, durante el festival se han podido ver exposiciones sobre el mundo de la ilustración: es el caso de la exposición sobre la obra de Carlos Eskerra, que además recibió el premio Unicornio de Plata al mejor dibujante.

‘The dead outside’ se hizo con los galardones a mejor película y a mejor dirección, para la debutante Kerry Anne Mullaney. El Premio a la Mejor Interpretación fue a parar a manos de Ava Gaudet, por su papel en ‘Evil Angel’ de Richard Dutcher. El largometraje de animación ‘Igor’ obtuvo el premio al Mejor Guión. En las categorías técnicas, los premios a Mejores Efectos Especiales, Mejor Fotografía y Mejor Banda Sonora, fueron para ‘Laid to Rest’, ‘Evil Angel’ y ‘The pagan queen’, respectivamente.

La lista con el resto de premiados es la siguiente:
Mejor Película: The dead outside de Kerry Anne Mullaney.
Mejor Dirección: Kerry Anne Mullaney por ‘The dead outside’.
Mejor Interpretación: Ava Gaudet por ‘Evil Angel’.
Mejor Guión: Igor.
Mejor Fotografía: Evil Angel.
Mejor Banda Sonora: The pagan queen.
Mejores efectos especiales: Laid to rest.
Mejor Cortometraje: Together de Gigi Hernández.
Mejor Guión de Cortometraje: Carlosaurio de José Ramón Lorenzo.
Premio FNAC: Carlosaurio de José Ramón Lorenzo.
Premio Especial del Jurado: Jorge Grau.
Unicornio de Honor: Dolph Lundgren.

Original Article

Translated into English

Una pandemia provocada por un virus neurológico. Dos personas que no se conocen, pero que acaban aisladas en una granja de la campiña escocesa. El temor a que ya no quede vida en el mundo exterior. Esta es la tarjeta de presentación de ‘The dead outside’, una modesta cinta escocesa de la debutante Kerry Anne Mullaney que anoche se alzó en la X Semana Internacional de Cine Fantástico y de Terror de Estepona con el Unicornio de Oro a la mejor película y con el Unicornio de Plata a la mejor dirección.

Pese a la presencia en la sección oficial de películas de alto presupuesto, este inquietante y apocalíptico relato rodado con escasos medios convenció al jurado, que también distinguió con el premio a la mejor interpretación a la actriz Ava Gaudet, por su papel en ‘Evil Angel’, de Richard Dutcher.

En el apartado de mejor guión, el premio recayó en el primer filme de terror y animación para niños: ‘Igor’, dirigida por Tony Leondis y protagonizada por el maltratado ayudante de un científico loco.

Homenajes

No fueron los únicos que desfilaron por el escenario del Palacio de Congresos de Estepona, que se vistió de gala para la entrega de los galardones de un festival que ha tenido a los zombies como auténticos protagonistas.

Fue también el momento para dos homenajes. El guionista y director catalán Jorge Grau recibió el Premio Especial del Jurado por su obra ‘No profanar el sueño de los muertos’ (1974), que cumple 35 años de su estreno, mientras que el actor Dolph Lundgren (’Rocky IV’ o ‘Masters del universo’), fue distinguido con el Unicornio de Honor. A lo largo de seis días, la X Semana Internacional de Cine Fantástico de Estepona, patrocinada por la Diputación de Málaga y el Ayuntamiento, ha reconocido además con una calle en la ciudad a uno de sus creadores, el actor Paul Naschy, y al también actor Richard Lynch con el Unicornio de Oro por sus 25 años de carrera en el mismo género.

Original Article

Translated to English

La debutante Kerry Ann Mullaney ha obtenido además el Unicornio de Plata a la Mejor Dirección por esta película, una modesta producción escocesa que trata como dos jóvenes y un desconocido que tienen que unir sus fuerzas para protegerse de una epidemia neurológica.

La actriz Ava Gaudet, verdadero descubrimiento interpretativo del festival, ha obtenido el Premio a la Mejor Interpretación por su papel en la película de Richard Dutcher “Evil Angel”, filme que también obtuvo el premio a la Mejor Fotografía.

Por otro lado, la película “The pagan queen” obtuvo el premio a la mejor banda sonora, mientras que “Laid to rest” se hizo con el galardón a los mejores efectos especiales.

El filme de animación “Igor”, que será distribuido por Aurum próximamente, cosechó el Premio al Mejor Guión, mientras que el Premio a la Mejor Web de Cine Fantástico, que se ha entregado por vez primera, ha recaído en la página Tumbaabierta.com.

La cinta “Together”, de la cineasta Gigi Hernández, se hizo con el Premio al Mejor Cortometraje, mientras que la película “Carlosaurio”, de José Ramón Lorenzo, acaparó los premios de Mejor Guión de Cortometraje y el Premio FNAC.

El Unicornio de Plata al Mejor Dibujante de Cómics fue a manos de Carlos Ezquerra.

Por su parte, el cineasta Jorge Grau recibió el Premio Especial del Jurado, mientras que al actor Dolph Lundgren le fue entregado el Unicornio de Honor X Aniversario.

La gala de clausura de la X Semana Internacional de Cine Fantástico y de Terror de Estepona ha contado con la asistencia del presidente de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, Salvador Pendón, y del alcalde de la ciudad, David Valadez, entre otras autoridades.

Original Article

Translated into English

Yet a couple of things were standing out when I read the blurb, mainly because it sounded as though they were doing the Signs route which I’d already seen elsewhere during this Edinburgh International Film Festival with Pontypool (Filmstalker review), where they take a huge world affecting event and concentrate on a small group of people caught in the heart of it all but not in the middle of the action.

The story for The Dead Outside sees a world, or at least Britain, infected by a virus which has killed most of the population and turned them into walking dead. The disease is spread through human contact and has decimated the population. A man is travelling across Scotland, presumably trying to find some safe haven or find some sense amongst this madness.
When his car runs dry of fuel he hikes to a local farmhouse and finds that there’s another survivor living there, a young girl who has been put through so much to survive.

Initially she tries to push him away and force him to leave, but soon she realises just how much she has missed human contact and with a bond quickly forming between the two she decides he can stay. Another survivor arrives and the relationships become a little more complex, particularly as this new arrival is both female and the man’s own age.

However he’s discovered a secret about the girl, something rather special and unique, and this could be more important than any of them.

Quite early on with The Dead Outside you notice just how well thought through the story is and how well they’ve transferred that to the big screen. There are so many ways they could fall fowl of clichés and standard ways of telling this story and yet they’ve clearly put effort into not doing that and bringing out something a little more unique and interesting.

Stylistically the film is really good with some nice camera work, good cinematography and editing, and holding on tightly to the idea of the characters and their relationships rather than any huge action sequences of fighting hordes of infected people.

They don’t try and make the film show the epic scale of the events, or tackle the story from a solve everything angle, instead it’s purely about the characters that they are following and how they are dealing with the events at their level, on a day to day basis, leaving the whole larger, worldwide event, to be dealt with elsewhere.

I really like that aspect, as can be seen by other films I’ve reviewed that employ the technique, because we are so much closer to the story and there’s so much more time to develop characters and their relationships. We aren’t thrown into huge action sequences and piles of gore unless the characters are, we see events and experience them as they do, from their viewpoint, instead of pulling out to a much larger view and trying to scare us with epic horror. Neither does the film try and answer every aspect of the event from its beginning to the end and any resolution, there’s no need to over explain events rather than just showing them effect the characters, and all that makes for a much more believable story.

The camera work and cinematography is one other aspect of the film that raises it above others in its bracket, and during darker scenes and outside moments they remain strong. Of course it still carries a low budget feel, but it’s filmed and made far better than you would expect.

There are some instances though were it’s not as strong. Some of the fight sequences are blocked out a little too much and the editing and filming of these could have been a bit better in order to maintain the same quality of the rest of the film, but it’s not particularly poor, it’s just not as good as the rest of the film raises the bar too, bear in mind that these scenes are short and hardly as confusing as the Hollywood action sequences we are often subjected to.

The performances are good too, for me the best was undoubtedly the girl who lives in the house played by Sandra Louise Douglas. She gives a convincing performance, and does manage to show a fair amount of anxiety hinting at something more than just straight up anger. The underlying fear that she carries with her, a fear that shows itself in her attempts to continually push people away, continues to bubble under the surface and gives her character an edge that your never really sure is dangerous or just extremely cautious. It helps to show that there’s something more hidden there, something that reveals itself as the film goes on.

Alton Milne and Sharon Osdin are also good in their roles. Milne doesn’t ever seem to overplay his character and neither does he underplay it either. To begin with I thought he might be coming from the moody looks and little dialogue school of acting, but that’s the reality of the world created in the film, and reflects the cautious and suspicious behaviour at being a survivor. As the film continues and the relationships develop his character comes forth a bit more and we start to see there’s more to him than the moody survivor.

The Dead Outside is a big surprise of a film for me. I was expecting a cheap, low budget atypical British horror, the kind that is beginning to dominate in the higher end market and defining the British section of the genre to the foreign film viewer. However it’s far from that, there’s no comedy and it’s all about the psychological horror, the emptiness, the loneliness, the distrust and the feeling of being alone, and to top it all a bit of survivor guilt.

The script is good and doesn’t rely on clichés, and the lead actress gives a strong performance, ably backed by her two co-stars.

The atmosphere and style of the film is the best surprise though, and doesn’t give away it’s lower budget status. It concentrates on the characters and the smaller locations, bringing the isolation and loneliness to the fore and not concentrating on some big, epic zombie story. Instead we get a horror-thriller concentrating on characters and relationships, something I really didn’t expect from current British horror, much less Scottish horror.

The Dead Outside is another great example of Scottish film providing something new, intelligent and with a bit more quality than many other low budget films being produced in Britain. It’s a fine example of film-making and should get far more exposure, this is undoubtedly a sign of what Scottish production should be investing in, and not the depressing drug taking and horror-comedies that we’re continually being exposed to.

http://www.filmstalker.co.uk/archives/2009/07/the_dead_outside.html

Come see The Dead Outside expecting buckets of blood and non-stop zombie action, and you will be disappointed. The Dead Outside is more the zombie-film equivalent of listening to your favorite Oval LP, which turns out to be not at all a bad thing.

Moody and hovering, with an excellent soundtrack that veers from drony buzz into gentle piano melodies, The Dead Outside reads like a side tale to 28 Days Later if directed by Atom Egoyan. As with Morgue Story, the action here centers on an unconventionally attractive heroine, a hard-boiled, chip-toothed goth girl who’s slaughtered her own family in order to survive, and is played with resonance by Sandra Louise Douglas (who seems destined to flash her violently blue eyes on bigger screens.) The danger in The Dead Outside is less in the infected that keep getting stuck in the barbed wire outside, than it is in the minds of the survivors who must live out the daily drudgery that is post-zombie-plague existence. Again, the expectations of horror purists may be let down here, and the film also loses minor points for dropping critical exposition to the lack of subtitles (it’s been a long time since I saw Teenage Fanclub, and my Scots is rusty.) Though The Dead Outside does have a few scenes of seat-jumping zombie action, that won’t be why you remember it. Its muted blues and greens, and matter-of-fact realism, tell a very atypical and understated horror tale.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/06/morgue-story-the-dead-outside.html

The script refuses to layer on exposition, leaving the characters room to behave like real people, but sometimes frustrating and alienating the viewer (reminiscent—as is their production company name—of the work of fellow Scot Lynne Ramsay). Motives are unclear and intentions admirably guarded, but this causes a couple of scenes to fall flat, and there tends to be an over reliance on sound design to maintain the (admittedly effective) David Lynch-like atmosphere. This is balanced by a clear understanding of how to ratchet up tension—particularly in an early scene where April aims her scope rifle at Daniel, as she considers whether or not to simply kill him, and later in a point-of-view shot from under a vehicle, where the marauding infected are seen as slowly shuffling feet—and an admirable treatment of the infected, who are often confused and emotional before they attack, with their faces cast down, covered by hair, but then seen in lingering close-up after death, reinforcing their lost humanity (one slow pan down the corpse of an elderly lady reveals what appears to be dog shit on her shoe).

Shot in two weeks, and self-financed on a micro budget, which is hardly an issue (though the barbed wire perimeter barely looks up to the task of keeping out sheep, let alone hoards of infected crazies), the production team of Mullaney and producer/co-scripter/cameraman Kris R Bird (who together created promos for Drive-By Argument and Cosmic Rough Riders), demand a lot from their audience, which is refreshing in an age where the horror film seems designed to evoke nothing beyond revulsion, and while this may leave their debut struggling to find an audience, it shows immense promise, and adds another strong, intelligent team to the new league of British horror auteurs.

http://www.amazingmovieshowblog.com/2009/06/dead-outside-2008.html

Made for a small independent budget the lack of apocalyptic images in a viral outbreak are made up by the well-written dialogue and intimacy between characters. Daniel and April interact with contempt initially and then devoted interest. Later, focusing on the relationship triangle between April, Daniel, and Kate the virus seems secondary until characters and topics come together in a bloody climax.

Filmed in the farmlands of Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland the isolation of the location creates independence and self-reliance in the characters with the acting believable, co-ordinated, and entertaining to watch. Sandra Louise Douglas as a sixteen year old survivor of biological experiments and vengeful grandparents is played with understandable vehemence and mistrust. Alton Milne shows more compassion while Sharon Osdin plays her character with dramatic flourish all inside a tense environment.

To be shown at the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival beginning June 7 in San Francisco “The Dead Outside,” is a pleasure for those with a sweet tooth for the dystopic, virus filled fantasy world of tomorrow. Let your imagination go wild as conflict and madness spill across the screen in this first film from director Kerry Anne Mullaney.

8 Leering Skulls out of 10.

http://www.28dayslateranalysis.com/2009/06/dead-outside-movie-review.html

In a stark and terrifying future, a pandemic has transformed the general populace into murderous maniacs. Two of the uninfected, Daniel and April, meet on a remote Scottish farm. In spite of the situation outside the razor wire-encrusted walls of the farm, Daniel is certain there is both a cure and a solution. April has seen too much already in her 16 years on the dreadful and infected planet and clings to horrifying memories and the smoking barrel of her gun. Watch the trailer!…

Daniel has a number of hair-raising close calls with the infected. However, he ultimately finds the real enemy may not be the virus, but something equally deadly. THE DEAD OUTSIDE is a beautifully crafted nightmare within a nightmare. This film is presented flawlessly and delivers a haunting sense of ongoing fear and unsettling anticipation. THE DEAD OUTSIDE will scare you senseless!

http://www.pretty-scary.net/content/kerry-ann-mulaneys-dead-outside-plays-san-francsico

http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_12503525?IADID=Search-www.insidebayarea.com-www.insidebayarea.com

An unusual zombie film in that it delivers its jolts through suspense and style rather than blood and gore, “The Dead Outside” breathes much-needed new life into the increasingly tired subgenre. The picture capitalizes on one of the most universal fears — being left alone — and conjures up a chilling tale of isolation. There are zombies outside but the real drama happens indoors as two former strangers come to terms with what they now mean to each other.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/movies/ci_12503525