Very bad things have been happening in the Big Brother house. The floor is swimming in blood, claw marks score the walls; outside, the water in the spa bath is a worrying vermilion. A side door swings open to reveal even grislier terrors: bowls of innards, corridors piled high with corpses.

Have the Endemol bosses finally lost control and left the housemates to rip lumps out of each other? Only in the splendidly warped world of Charlie Brooker. As the creator of the influential TV Go Home website, the presenter of Screenwipe and an acerbic TV critic for The Guardian, Brooker has been providing twisted takes on popular culture for almost a decade. But his dreams are finally being made flesh (flesh being the operative word) as the writer and executive producer of Dead Set, a five-part series for E4 that imagines a country overrun by zombies, where the only safe haven is the Big Brother house.

The devastation in front of us suggests that it doesn’t remain safe for long. Indeed, the idea of reality TV contestants swapping their vacuous jostling for a fight for survival against the shambling undead clearly tickled Brooker. He came up with the idea when he was watching 24, which he describes as “the TV equivalent of pistachio nuts.” Its only flaw is that “the terrorists are so implausible they might as well zombies,” says Brooker, who is far more amiable than his misanthropic colums suggest.

“Then one night I was watching Big Brother and I thought, that is the perfect place to hide in a zombie apocalypse: a fortified house, full of people chosen not to get on with one another.” The zombie genre, of course, has a proud satirical tradition. While George Romero took a swipe at 1970s cosumer culture by setting Day of the Dead in a shopping mall, nowadays, says Brooker, “You couldn’t get more of a Zeitgeist setting than a reality TV show.”

We are approaching the end of the eight-week shoot at QinetiQ studios, a former weapons testing site in Surrey. Brooker thinks there is something appropriately creepy about the place: “I don’t think it shows up on sat-navs and probably not on most atlases either. It’s exactly the sort of place that a Resident Evil-style zombie outbreak would occur.”

In a nod to Resident Evil, the protagnist of Dead Set is female, an over Just deserts? Davina McCall gets it in the neck; and Jaime Winstone, the star of Dead Set worked Big Brother runner called Kelly who manages to take refuge in the house while her colleagues are being munched by the zombie invaders. She is played by Jaime Winstone who, says Brooker, is “great because she seems vulnerable but also really tough. She has to threaten to stab somebody quite early on and you believe that she will.”

Winstone is currently shooting with Adam Deacon, who plays Space, a housemate whom Brooker partly based on Science from Big Brother 6. She admits that today’s scene, in which she and Deacon are ambushed by a zombie in a dark corridor, feels tame compared with yesterday’s, when she “smashed someone’s face in with a fire extinguisher”. Her old man, Ray, would be proud, having done something similar in Scum with some snooker balls in a sock. “I’m upping the game!” she says, grinning proudly and picking fake blood off her co-star’s sweatshirt.

So aren’t the Big Brother bosses bothered by such brazen desecration of their brand? Not a bit, it seems. Brooker’s production company, Zeppotron, is affiliated with Endomol, the owner of Big Brother, which gave him and his crew free rein to film at real eviction nights, recreate the studio, complete with diary room, and even use some of their personnel. So Marcus Bentley’s Geordie tones can be heard on the voiceover, and there’s an appearance by Davina McCall, with a predictably gruesome outcome.

Several real Big Brother contestants also have cameo roles, fromBrian Belo, the winner of Big Brother8, who everyone agrees makes a very convincing zombie, to Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, the “ghetto princess” from Big Brother 7, who is currently sitting in front of a mirror with half her windpipe ripped out. Catching sight of Brooker, she asks him for some tips about zombie deportment. “I thought I should pretend I was really heavy,” she says. “The main thing is that they’re stupid,” he answers fondly. “That’s why we picked gormless people like you and Brian.” Horgan-Wallace never expected to be doing this, she admits, “Although I have fantasised about biting and eating some of my former housemates.”

As her realistically ravaged gizzard attests, the production values are high. The opening episode is handsomely shot, slickly edited, darkly funny – and genuinely scary. Many of the trappings of the house lend themselves well to horror, such as the one-way mirrors in which housemates stare gormlessly at their own reflections, oblivious to the zombies slavering on the other side of the glass.

Brooker hopes that the show, to be broadcast on five consecutive evenings, will appeal to Big Brother fans, splatter geeks (“because we’ve got some quite spectacularly horrible things happening”) and those for whom reality television represents the collapse of civilisation.

The bleakest, funniest lines are reserved for Andy Nyman’s producer, who views the contestants much as an SS colonel might regard concentration camp inmates, and Joplin, the token middle-aged housemate, played by Kevin Eldon of Nighty Night. “Joplin basically fancies himself as a bit of a Newsnight Review pundit who decides to go on a reality show to show how it works. He’s really just being vain and conceited; he’s probably closest to me, actually.”

And now Brooker’s work will be thrown before that other pack of bloodthirsty monsters, his fellow critics. As the co-writer of the Hoxton satire Nathan Barley, which received decidedly mixed reviews, he has already tasted life on the other side of the divide.

“In some respects, it should make you a better critic in that you have more of an understanding of how decisions are made. I forgot that it takes bloody ages to make anything, and then some f****er like me comes along at the end and goes, ‘Well that wasn’t worth bothering with.’ ”

There is also the prospect of meeting those whom you have previously lampooned. Veronica, another of the housemates in Dead Set, was originally based on BBcontestant Saskia Howard-Clarke, about whom Brooker had written “some really nasty things” including the suggestion that she “could pass for Giant Haystacks’ sister on a dark night”. But when she came in to do a cameo on Dead Set, “she was really pleasant to everybody and I thought, ‘Who’s the dickhead in this?’ ”

Perhaps as a result of this, he isn’t always as hard on the fictional housemates as you might expect. “I didn’t want to just do something where they’re all thick, fame-seeking s***s,” he says, as we make our way through a mocked-up control room, bearing a list of housemates, several of whom have been ominously scrubbed out with a marker pen.

Not that Brooker misses too many chances to put the boot in. One of the opening episode’s most delicious moments comes when a housemate, confronted with the fact that the world outside is in zombie meltdown, whimpers forlornly, “Does this mean we’re not on telly any more?”

Dead Set, from Monday to Friday, 10pm, E4

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