Both films are zombie stories, which is of course something that invites natural comparison to George A. Romero and his trilogy of zombie films Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1985). Of course the comparison with Romero only serves to highlight exactly at what opposite ends of the zombie theme that both directors are operating. In Romero’s films the dead are an apocalyptic threat that has brought the whole world crashing down; Parkinson’s zombies are staggeringly ordinary and dull who, but for their putrefaction and taste for human flesh, slot into the everyday with indistinguishable normalcy. There’s something rather alarming about ordinariness of Dead Creatures’ zombies – about the girls’ problems of moving flats contrasted with them posing as hookers, knocking tricks over the head to get fresh meat and sitting around in the bathroom carving up bodies. (Like Romero, Parkinson holds nothing back when it comes to gore).

Dead Creatures tells a multi-stranded story following the various girls, the character of Reece abducting and killing zombies, and the lone male zombie Christian. It is not always clear what is going on – like what Reece is up to and why, or exactly the relationship between all the girls. And sometimes Parkinson’s approach is so low-key as to be infuriating. But when he does succeed in uniting all the strands of the story together, the glimpse of a social future where people are inexplicably turning into zombies and being forced to hide together in small enclaves, fearing the encroach of physical decay, all the while holding it off by feasting on the freshly murdered dead, is startling in its originality. This is without any doubt the freshest, most interesting voice on the topic of zombies since Romero fell silent on the subject. One wishes somebody would give Parkinson a decent budget as he could probably do miracles with it.