Shot in two weeks on a tiny budget with a small cast in miserably cold-looking locations, this 28 DAYS LATER-influenced movie shares the bleak, eerie mood of other recent Scottish horror films like ISOLATION and WILD COUNTRY.

   At the outset of THE DEAD OUTSIDE, a mysterious, devastating airborne virus has decimated the population, leaving precious few survivors and a wealth of confusion and death. Those afflicted with the virus are turned into deranged, violently dangerous sub-human creatures not a zillion miles away from Danny Boyles’ “infected“. A widely used vaccine has only served to give the virus more time to incubate and thus make those vaccinated even more vulnerable.

   Against this grim backdrop, haunted Alton Milne is forced to leave his home following the tragic death of his immediate family, and finds young, lone survivor Sandra-Louise Douglas at a remote farm. Trust breaks down, paranoia mounts and danger encroaches as a third survivor shows up and the virus never seems far away.

  This sparse, downbeat movie has the pessimistic mood of early Romero movies, as characters are driven to despair in a world where a “shoot to kill” mentality has been adopted in a desperate bid to survive. The wintry, isolated external locations add a lot to this low-key microcosm of the apocalypse, as does the relentlessly creepy, minimalist sound design.

   Commendably, director Kerry Anne Mullaney avoids cheap scares and conventional zombie movie shocks, while retaining ambiguity about the exact nature of the threat facing the small group of central characters. There’s not much in the way of action and at least one key performance never quite convinces, but some sense of genuine alarm is generated during a torch-lit climactic confrontation, and the movie fades out on an appropriate downer.