The British comedy-horror film, Prevenge (2016), was written and directed by Alice Lowe who starred in the film while in the eighth month of her first pregnancy. The film is a revenge fantasy in which the protagonist seeks out and murders those who were on a hiking trip with her husband when he had to be cut loose from his security ropes, falling to his death. Lowe stalks and kills the group one by one, egged on by the voice of her unborn child. Her disturbed inner life is contrasted with banal and mundane interactions with healthcare professionals who repeatedly fail to understand the severity of her mental state. The film uses comedy and horror to deal with real, under-represented issues. In my contribution I will focus on the issue of perinatal mental health, while reflecting on how sexism, gender roles, and sexuality contribute to creating the conditions for perinatal depression and psychosis. Fantastika (horror, speculative fiction, and fantasy) constitutes an important genre discourse for approaching these topics, and one that acts as a helpful supplement to the unimaginative pragmatism of healthcare encounters which serve a normative, imagined ideal patient. My thinking on this is part of my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship project, ‘Products of Conception: Traumatic Pregnancy and Science Fiction, 1968-Present.’
