Schlock and gore

NOT so long ago, would-be film producers Kieran Parker and Arabella Page Croft had doors closed in their faces whenever they tried to pitch ideas to executives. Now Hollywood studios are chasing the Glasgow-based pair begging for details of the projects they currently have on the drawing board.

"Last week we had phone calls from Sony, Warner Brothers, Pathé, Content, all saying, 'When are your scripts ready and what have you got for us?'" says Page Croft, who is Parker's partner in both senses of the word.

The dramatic change in their industry status is due to a low-budget horror movie about Nazi zombies that used Dumfriesshire to double for Eastern Europe and got made only because the pair could not get the cash together for other more prestigious film projects.

Outpost recouped its £1.2 million budget even before anyone had seen the finished version, when Sony bought UK and US rights on the strength of 15 minutes of footage.

It has already been released on DVD in the US, where it not only received positive reviews, but also prompted a serious internet debate about the logic and viability of the secret Nazi experiments at the heart of the story.

We meet the morning after the film screened to a sell-out audience at Edinburgh's Dead by Dawn festival, ahead of its UK cinema release on 16 May. Page Croft and Parker were up until four in the morning discussing the film with fans and look just a little bleary-eyed over breakfast.

In the film, a shady businessman recruits a squad of mercenaries, including Ray Stevenson, from the mini-series Rome, and Richard Brake, who played the villain Joe Chill in Batman Begins.

They head off on a mysterious mission to a remote former Nazi bunker in Eastern Europe. They think they are to bring back a shipment of gold, but it turns out to be a machine that can bring dead soldiers back to life. And they can seemingly appear and disappear at will.

It sounds like nonsense. It is nonsense. But the film, directed by debutant Steve Barker, treats its subject with a huge amount of seriousness.

"We did a lot of research and you end up with books like this, which you can't really read on the train," says Parker, producing a copy of a book called The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. "It's about the technology in the Second World War that the Nazis were becoming involved with. This is about anti-gravity."

Towards the end of the Second World War, the top-secret new weaponry was supposedly taken from a secret bunker in Silesia on a flight to Argentina, while the SS murdered the scientists involved in the project. The film also draws on rumours of American tests to render a ship invisible, the so-called "Philadelphia Experiment".

Parker says: "There's one particularly good review where one guy was saying any film that makes you pause halfway through to go to Wikipedia to check out the Philadelphia Experiment has to be doing something right."

Quite apart from what the producers call "the science bit", the film also possesses a great atmosphere of chilly fatalism. It takes place almost entirely at the Nazi bunker. They shot in Dumfriesshire, at Balmaghie private estate and a former munitions factory at Dalbeattie, and built a set at Film City studio in Glasgow.

"Shooting in Scotland in January meant that we got free terrible weather and it looked the part," says Parker. "The only time we ever lost filming time because of the weather was one moment when it was too sunny."

After Outpost, Parker and Page Croft may just be the most commercial producers to emerge in Scotland since Andrew Macdonald first pitched the notion of Shallow Grave a decade and a half ago.

Page Croft originally came from Brechin, Parker from Whitehaven in Cumbria. Glasgow is more or less half-way and the centre of the Scottish film industry. They are both 37 and operate as Black Camel Pictures.

Outpost represented one last desperate attempt to break into feature film production, following years living hand-to-mouth, making shorts for next-to-nothing and failing to get feature ideas off the ground.

"We were getting to that point where we knew we had to make a film come what may," says Page Croft, "and we sat down and Kieran went, 'We've got to do the zombie Nazi one'." He had previously come up with an idea for a short he describes as "Platoon meets The Sixth Sense", set in the space between the death of the body and the death of the mind.

Writer Rae Brunton and director Steve Barker came on board and they worked it up into an idea they reckoned would be cheap and commercial.

"I was at art school with Steve in 1990 in Blackpool," says Parker, "so we've known each other for 18 years. I had done short films and pop videos with him and we had sort of grown up through the industry together. And he had just done a short film for Channel 4 with Rae."

After art school, Parker went on to study film at Portsmouth University and took whatever work was going as a runner or assistant director in London.

Meanwhile, Page Croft studied social anthropology at Edinburgh University and cut her teeth on the L!VE TV soap opera Canary Wharf. "I was a runner, location manager, assistant director. They had no money and I didn't know any different. I did every job. It was the best training ground."

She met Parker in 2001 when looking for a unit manager for a no-budget short she was making with Ford Kiernan called Tattoo, using her old family home in Brechin as a base. Parker offered to work for nothing if she would pay his rent in London while he was away.

"I said, 'No, I'm not going to pay his rent, I'll pay his train fare'," Page Croft recalls. "We started off with a row and have carried on ever since."

Page Croft must have relaxed her hard line a little – she was pregnant with their second child while they shooting Outpost and Isaac was born during editing. "The baby went under the desk and we just got on with it," she says. "We had really tense, creative conference-calls with the execs and the sales agents, with the baby squeaking away."

They have several films at different stages of gestation, and while they did not set out specifically to make horror films, their next project may well represent a return to the genre, with Steve Barker once more joining them as writer and director.

Page Croft describes Blood Makes Noise as "a vampire cop revenge movie". Parker adds: "We want to mix the architecture of Glasgow and Edinburgh together. We have got a cracking script, which we're going to get people to read at Cannes. In an ideal world it will be pre-production in September, shooting January next year."

A sequel to Outpost is also in the works. Page Croft says: "People are chasing us for it, which is a nice place to be.

"The transformation within the last two years, from doors that we were knocking on, that were closed, to those people now chasing us… it's just wonderful."

• Outpost is in cinemas from 16 May