Baby steps, giant strides: how Alice Lowe turned motherhood into murder and made one of the blackest British comedies for years

The feeding baby is Della, Lowe's one-year-old daughter, clad today in an animal-print romper suit. She has a cameo in Prevenge, in a scene filmed just eight days after she was born. But as a sort of in-utero prop she features in virtually every other scene too.

In the film Lowe plays Ruth, a pregnant woman who is ordered by the voice of her unborn child to exact bloody vengeance on the men and women responsible for the death of her partner. Among the victims are Scottish actor Kate Dickie, comedian Tom Davis (star of BBC comedy Murder In Successville) and Gemma Whelan (Yara Greyjoy in Game Of Thrones). Each is dispatched with weapons ranging from razor-sharp to blunt, though the appendage Ruth slices off Davis's character Dan requires a particularly deft underhand cut with a kitchen knife. Watch that bit through your fingers, fellas.

As well as directing and starring, Lowe wrote the script (in a week) and, while special effects were all-important in making the killings look real (Lowe went “old-school” in that regard, with “tubes, fake blood, hand-moulded prosthetics” and even a hand-operated puppet of a foetus), they obviously didn't extend to her bump.

We're talking in a hotel in Edinburgh's New Town, one of those whose black flock wallpaper and spherical rope chandeliers (“I could make those out of Hula Hoops,” Lowe quips) put it firmly in the boutique category. Lowe is in the capital for a special preview screening of the film, one of several in a UK-wide mini-tour which aims to build word-of-mouth buzz ahead of Friday's national release.

It hardly needs it: Prevenge premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival last September and met with warm praise from critics. Variety dubbed it a “striking, raven-dark comedy of pregnancy and serial murder” while the Hollywood Reporter praised its “uniquely exhilarating disregard for conventional morality … just what a juicy slasher movie needs”. Mind you, it did offer the admonition: “Avoid during pregnancy.”

I suspect Lowe would advise the exact opposite, because Prevenge is an exaggerated meditation on what it feels like to be pregnant – the hormone surges, the mood swings, the doubts, the fears – as well as a side-swipe at cinematic representations of pregnancy, either in horror movies like Rosemary's Baby or in Hollywood comedies like What To Expect When You're Expecting.

“I wanted it to be different to stereotypes I've seen,” she explains. “I love a film like Rosemary's Baby but Rosemary is completely naïve about what's going on. She's got this optimism about it and she's very much out of the loop in terms of what's really happening. So there's the horror stereotype, with the pregnant woman, and there's the comedy stereotype, which again is a ridiculous figure who's very out of control but it's a punchline to a joke. She's screaming and squealing and it's everyone around her who's going, 'What are we going to do about her?' It's very much from the outside of her experience, not from the interior. It's like a bit of clowning or something.”

All this was going through her mind when she sat down to write the script for Prevenge, a task undertaken in some haste as she was already six months pregnant when the chance to shoot the film presented itself. To Lowe, pregnancy was “a much stranger and darker and existential kind of experience” than she had ever seen represented on screen, and she tried to put all that into her script.

“I think we fool ourselves that if we take control of pregnancy we can tame it with knowledge but at the end of the day it's just a really primal experience that you have very little control over,” she adds. “I felt there was a lot of hypocrisy about it, I suppose, all this weird sanitisation of it, going to pregnancy yoga and all these things. I just thought, 'This feels very alien to me'.”

She also threw in a curveball in the form of Travis Bickle, the mohawk-sporting anti-hero played by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver. If the character of Ruth was inspired by anyone, she says, it was him.

“He's this outsider, maverick, loner character. I was like, 'Why are there no female characters who are like that?' Female characters are usually very connected to society. On screen they're usually about upholding rules or structures or they're the wife saying, 'Don't do this' or the flatmate saying 'When are you going to grow up?' I was like: 'What about someone who's shattering all those pre-conceptions and they're female?'.”

Initially the idea was that Prevenge would be made by Jamie Adams, who directed Lowe and fellow comedian Dolly Wells in improvised, low-budget 2015 comedy Black Mountain Poets. But as the script took shape, Adams excused himself. “He looked at the pitch and said, 'It's brilliant but I only make rom-coms. This isn't me. I don't do horror'”.

In the end, Lowe decided it was time for her to step up. “I'd already got the [directing] bug and I felt I understood how it worked in terms of getting it done and how you can achieve stuff on time with a low budget. And I'd done a lot of short films, so all that experience went into the film. I had a lot of confidence that I could do it. It just wasn't my ideal to be pregnant during my debut directing experience.”

But as well as being a commentary on pregnancy and birth, Prevenge sets out to subvert the horror film genre by undercutting the scenes of gore and murder with the sort of semi-improvised comedy of manners at which Lowe excels. Even more subversive, it's a slasher flick directed by a woman in which the woman is hunter rather than prey. Despite that, does Lowe feel any unease about the level of violence in the film?

“I've always watched sci-fi and gory stuff,” she says. “It's always been something I enjoy and I felt like just because I'm pregnant it doesn't mean I stop liking what I like. And also this idea that a pregnant woman wouldn't be able to cope with violence – well she's about to give birth and that is horror, isn't it? There's screaming, there's blood, there's transformation, there's a parasitic creature. All of this stuff ought to belong to women in a way. I mean it's Frankenstein, isn't it? It's Mary Shelley.”

BORN in Coventry in April 1977 and raised in nearby Kenilworth, Lowe has always been drawn to what you might call the dark side. In a sense it's her birthright: she hails from the Midlands, after all, that crucible of eyeliner and devil-worshipping heavy metal in which bands like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Napalm Death were formed.

“You have very little choice other than to become a Goth if you've grown up in the Midlands,” she admits, as Della burbles happily in her lap. “There's nothing but falconry and castles, so you might as well.”And yes, she loves Games Of Thrones as much as she loves sci-fi and gore. “But I'm kind of annoyed too. Fantasy was like the least cool thing for ages and now everyone loves it. But I liked Krull, Legend, Labyrinth – all these fantasy films were my favourite things when I was a kid.”

Lowe didn't grow up wanting to be a comedian or an actor or even a leather-clad warrior priestess in a Dungeons And Dragons-style epic. In fact she initially thought she might like to become a teacher, like her parents. But all that changed when she followed her elder sister to Cambridge University, where she had won a place at King's College to study (wait for it) Classics.

“I often think, 'Well, that was a wasted degree',” she laughs. “But actually for this film it was quite useful. I was looking at things like Medea, and the Furies as well.” There's even a quotation in Prevenge from Aeschylus, the so-called Father of Tragedy and a man whose plays would have made prodigious use of fake blood and prosthetics had they been available in Ancient Greece around 450BC.

Perhaps more useful than her degree were the friends she made at Cambridge. Three in particular would prove fateful: Richard Ayoade, now also a comedian, writer and director; Matt Holness, a writer and actor; and Paul King, BAFTA-winning director of the recent live-action Paddington film.

As students, Ayoade and Holness had created a fictional pulp horror writer they christened Garth Marenghi. Needing a third person for the comedy show they had built around him and planned to take to the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe, they recruited Lowe. King was the director. The production was nominated for the Perrier Award that year and Holness, Lowe and Ayoade went on to win the award in 2001. Lowe's path was set.

For the rest of the decade she featured in TV shows like The Mighty Boosh (directed by King); had a BBC Three comedy pilot; co-wrote and starred in a Channel 4 Comedy Lab one-off; wrote and performed a sci-fi themed Kate Bush spoof; appeared in Little Britain, Black Books and The IT Crowd; and landed a recurring role in both CBBC's Horrible Histories and Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive.

But her breakthrough came with a starring role in Ben Wheatley's lauded comedy horror Sightseers, in which she plays one half of a murderous caravanning couple who kill their way round some of England's more curious tourist attractions. Think Badlands meets Nuts In May, with ports of call that include the Cumberland Pencil Museum and the Ribblehead Viaduct. Importantly, Lowe also co-wrote the script.

Several more film roles followed, including one in Paddington, each one cementing Lowe's reputation as a comic actress and, increasingly, as a talented writer and improviser. But with Prevenge she takes it further, adding Woody Allen-style auteur to the list and in doing so putting herself in the vanguard of a new generation of trailblazing female writers, directors and actors, women like Andrea Arnold, Sally Wainwright, Jessica Hynes, Sharon Horgan and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

“For me there's always this fear that someone's going to say, 'Ooh it's a vanity project',” Lowe says. “When you're an actress turned writer turned director you worry people are going to say, 'Do you really have any ability or is it just that you want the attention or want to dominate or whatever?' But for me, I did feel I had a lot to prove.

“There is something really pleasurable about not ever being undermined in your decisions. That's been a thing in my work, where I've suggested something and people have just rejected it out of hand as being a crazy idea. This film has definitely been a validation for me in terms of my confidence … I feel like in the past there's been someone telling me I can't do that and in a way that's why I've decided to take control. It's not because I love to be in control.”

Trailblazer or not, her sense is that things are changing for women in the film industry – changing fast and for the better.

“There's still a way to go and I think Hollywood in particular is going slightly in the opposite direction,” she says. “But I've worked with more female directors in the last three years than in my entire career.” And, like her, these women “have been very much following their own vision, their own stories, and their own characters which they have devised”.

They just don't all feature prosthetics, serial killers, glinting blades and the warm red gush from an arterial spray.

Prevenge is released on Friday