M IDNIGHT
ALICE LOWE TALKS PREVENGE
Alice Lowe’s British horror comedy PREVENGE centers on a pregnant woman receiving murderous instructions from her fetus. AFI: You wrote, directed and acted in the film while you, yourself, were pregnant. That must have been quite an experience.
Alice Lowe: I just felt ecstatic that I was getting to have my cake and eat it — have a baby and direct a film. Every day was a joy. I think any filmmaker itching to make a film for many years feels that way when they actually get to shoot. It’s a relief and cathartic. A bit like giving birth. All this stuff bursting to come out of you finally gets released!
AFI: How did the premise of the screenplay come to you?
AL: I thought pregnancy was going to prevent me from working. I was actually really worried about it. But then I thought, “This is a perfect way of combatting that.” I’d been thinking about revenge structures and themes for a while. I was never going to make a story about a pregnant woman who has a minor emotional dilemma about what color to paint the nursery. My bugbear as an actress is characters that are women first, and characters later. I was really sick of reading characters that are cut-and-paste mother characters. They’re always so bloody kind and self-sacrificial. What about their personalities and goals? Have they just disappeared when they’ve become mothers? Not on my watch, anyway.
AFI: Were you inspired by any films while making this one?
AL: I’m a big fan of horror that deals with human transgressional boundaries. Films like THE SHINING, DON’T LOOK NOW, CARRIE and ROSEMARY’S BABY all deal with very human drama, and that’s where the horror comes from. The supernatural is an invisible threat, but the human threat is real and tangible — parents trying to kill their children, bullying, husbands betraying their wives. And many of these films deal
with liminal rites of passage — becoming a teenager, a parent.