Horror is practically baked into the cake of pregnancy; after all, what is a baby but an ever-growing parasite, poised to gorily burst forth after strip-mining its breeder’s nutrition? Adam and Eve may have hatched the idea that women are vessels of evil, but horror films have turned the notion into a fertile sub-genre, encompassing such classics as Village Of The Damned, It’s Alive and, of course, Rosemary’s Baby, as well as the more recent 2007 French horror Inside.
Prevenge is the latest in the litter, a darkly funny slashfest that rides roughshod over conventions by presenting its heavily pregnant protagonist as predator, not prey. It’s the brainchild of writer and star Alice Lowe, and it’s also her directorial debut. Most famous for accidentally-on-purpose murdering caravanners in 2012’s black comedy Sightseers, Lowe plays Ruth, a lonely lady in her second trimester who suffers from unusual pregnancy cravings. She’s got an appetite for homicide, egged on by the voices in her womb. “People think babies are sweet, but I’m bitter,” coos her malevolent foetus, as Ruth turns serial killer and methodically cracks a charmless businesswoman’s skull against a table, or deftly detaches her date’s testicles with the flick of a knife.
In the very personification of the adage “necessity is the mother of invention”, Lowe came up with the concept when she found herself jobless and pregnant for the first time at 37 years old. “I had projects in development and it was taking ages and I was getting frustrated,” she says, sitting in the conservatory of a south London art gallery. “I got pregnant thinking: ‘Nothing’s happening right now with the film world, if I’m gonna have a kid, it’s gonna be now.’”
After she submitted a one-page pitch to a production company about a pregnant widow violently avenging the death of her husband, she was pretty sure it was a non-starter. “I thought the company would say: ‘No, we can’t get insurance, that would be ridiculous,’” she says. “And when they went: ‘OK, let’s do it’, I was like: ‘What?!’”
Lowe bashed out the script in two weeks, and shot it a month later on a schedule of just 11 days. An incredible accomplishment for any film-maker, but particularly for a first-timer who happened to be nearly eight months away from her due date. The director she planned to use, who usually does rom-coms, deemed it “too dark” for him and suggested that she do it herself. “It wasn’t part of the plan to direct while pregnant,” she laughs. Fuelled by pregnancy energy (“Some people redecorate their whole house, and my version was: ‘Yes! I’m gonna make a film!’”), Lowe put stuff in the script to be shot quickly, so that she “wouldn’t get too tired” during the shoot. By the time her daughter was born, Lowe was supervising the edit.
Prevenge’s goriest (and funniest) scene – which may for ever be known as “the one where Ruth cuts off the balls” – came about accidentally. “I asked the special effects guy: ‘What have you got lying around?’ and he said: ‘I’ve got some testicles.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, I can do something with that.’ [Guffaws delightedly.] So that’s in the film!”
The film’s tone, meanwhile, is a mash-up of lo-fi horror and the melancholic British comedy of embarrassment; unsurprising considering that Lowe was a regular in surreal comedies such as The Mighty Boosh and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Lowe believes that horror and black comedy are closer than you’d think. “In gross-out comedy, you are aiming for that money shot. At the end of a scene which would be really funny already, there would be vomit or shit,” she says, “and that would be hilarious. I guess I’m now doing the same but with blood.”
Like Carrie, Kill Bill and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Ruth is motivated by her own demons. “Ruth feels society’s a mess, and it is like Travis Bickle going: ‘I’m going to take it upon myself to clean this place up.’ But in doing it, she’s actually cutting herself off from the world,” Lowe explains. “Female characters are always mothers or girlfriends who provide some sort of network for the hero, who then goes out and does whatever he wants. But what about a woman who’s cut off from society? Ruth’s philosophy is that society is selfish, and collectively [her victims] made a bad decision to destroy the love of her life [her husband whose death we learn about via creepy flashback], and ruined the future of her baby.”
Did she have an agenda when writing Prevenge? “To test people’s boundaries in terms of what they’ll empathise with,” she says. “The biggest compliment to me would be for a 15-year-old boy or a 75-year-old man to say: ‘I really cared about this female character, I felt like it was me.’ If people can identify with a cartoon fish, I think they can identify with a woman.”
Prevenge is in UK cinemas now; see prevengemovie.com
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