“Right now I do feel like Horror Girl”: Pollyanna McIntosh on Let Us Prey

Pollyanna McIntosh is talking a mile a minute as we walk through the lobby of the Manchester hotel that's her base while in town for Grimmfest, the Northwest’s annual festival of horror and cult films. A group of middle-aged men, all of whom are wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with various heavy metal insignia, are loitering around reception as we make our way outside. These wizened rockers turnout to be legendary outfit Goblin, who are in town to perform live to Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria. The veteran Italians are Grimmfest’s headline act, but McIntosh is undoubtedly its queen.

The Scot, best known to mainstream audiences for her supporting turn in Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth, is all over this year’s programme, with a trio of screenings. There's self-proclaimed 'Scottish referendum horror movie' White Settlers, short film Herd – a dystopian nightmare where women are bred as milk-producing livestock (it’ll put you off dairy products for life) – and opening gala Let Us Prey. If you want more evidence of her dominance, when the digital print of Till Kleinert’s much-anticipated Der Samurai is unable to be played, The Woman, in which McIntosh has the title role, is drafted in as a replacement.

Standing outside the hotel, braving the autumnal chill for a quick cigarette, a jet-lagged McIntosh is thinking back to how she got into acting. “I started when I was nine ‘cause my mum thought I was too hyper,” she recalls, her face framed by a hard-edge bob of onyx hair and a chunky yellow scarf. “She thought I needed to expel some of that, so she sent me to acting school.” And not some posh drama institution, McIntosh is quick to clarify, but an after-school class one day a week.

The young McIntosh was a level-headed kid, though; there were no stars in her eyes. “I didn’t think of it as a career choice,” she explains. “I never thought I could go off and do that properly. So when I went and studied drama and theatre when I was older. I did it with psychology, so I had a backup.” Looking at her upcoming schedule, her psych training can stay on the back-burner for a while. After earning her acting stripes with a small turn in the 1999 adaptation of Welsh’s Acid House and guest spots in the likes of Taggart and Waterloo Road, plus a great recurring role in CBBC’s MI High, the 35-year-old has been steadily making a name for herself on the big screen, with parts in British productions like John Landis’s black comedy Burke and Hare and psychological thriller Exam. And, as her omnipresence at Grimmfest attests, she’s very much in demand in the horror world, equally at home as the final girl (see White Settlers and Let Us Prey) or as the monster (Offspring and The Herd). Think of her as a modern day Barbara Steele.

McIntosh in White Settlers

“It kind of happened for a variety of reasons,” McIntosh muses on her success in the horror genre. “I think The Woman was a film that captured a lot of people’s imaginations.” It’s certainly a striking movie; once seen, never forgotten. Directed by Lucky McKee, it’s a bracing study in misogyny and madness, where a seemingly all-American Mid-West family proves to be rotten to its core when its psychopathic head of household captures a feral woman while out hunting in the woods and drags her back to be ‘housebroken’. Her rehabilitation into polite society includes torture, degradation and rape. Some filmgoers failed to see McKee’s no-holds-barred critique of America’s patriarchal society. Conservative filmgoers were appalled (see the 'more info' box for a link to the reaction at its world premiere at Sundance), but genre audiences took it to their hearts, thanks in no small part to McIntosh’s ferocious, dialogue-free turn as the captured female. McIntosh says: “That film has resulted in me being offered roles straight up, with no auditioning, so that kind of allows you a bit more freedom to collaborate with the people you’re making the film with.”

Three such projects are the films in the Grimmfest programme. “It just happened that these three characters, and these three projects, were for me,” she says. “I’ve also got another movie that’s doing the rounds at the moment called Love Eternal. It’s a completely different kind of film, but, yeah, at the moment – right now – I do feel like Horror Girl.”

Is typecasting a worry?

“Definitely it’s a worry. It’s amazing how fast people want to pigeonhole you in this business,” she says. “I’m not against horror at all, but I don’t want to be typecast in any genre, or in any kind of character – I just want to do everything. I turn down more horrors than I do any other kind of film, because there’s just more of them, and there a lot of writers who just don’t think through female characters. I had an offer for a movie recently that wasn’t a horror, it was totally female-driven, and I think it thought it was being really progressive – it was about a lesbian couple on a road trip, kind of Thelma and Louise-ish – but it truly wasn’t considered from a female perspective, whether straight or gay.”

So misogyny isn’t just a horror problem? “God no, it’s a life problem. It’s a world problem.”

In Let Us Prey, however, McIntosh says she found in PC Rachel Heggie a character who felt real, who she could relate to. “She’s both very strong and there’s a lot of darkness and vulnerability and a complex history to her character,” explains McIntosh. “And working with [Game of Thrones'] Liam Cunningham [who turns up at the start of the film as a taciturn stranger in town] was a big draw because I think he’s fantastic and he turned out to be a lot of fun.” The film itself is more grim than fun, though. The action takes place in and around the police station of an unnamed Scottish town where Rachel is starting her first day of work. It turns out to be a busy night, and the cells soon fill up with the town’s scumbags, psychopaths and sadists. But they prove to be pussycats compared to Rachel’s unhinged colleagues.

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“I don’t want to be typecast in any genre, or in any kind of character – I just want to do everything” – Pollyanna McIntosh

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While the film is hardly nuanced, its whacked out story, which starts like a celtic take on Assault on Precinct 13 before going off in a bloodier direction, keeps you guessing, and director Brian O'Malley gives the grizzly material a velvety sheen and brooding atmosphere. “Brian O'Malley is a great director,” says McIntosh. “He’s done a couple of shorts that I’d seen – a producer friend described him to me as the best feature director in Ireland that hasn’t made a feature yet.” After sitting through his debut we wouldn’t go that far, but there’s enough here to suggest he could make a great film if given a better script. McIntosh, too, is propping up the material: while those around her are losing their heads – sometimes literally – McIntosh is a steely, gutsy presence.

The role also allows her to kick some ass – and she does so with panache. Standing 6ft-tall in her cotton socks and with shoulders as broad as her cheek bones are high, she’s an imposing, statuesque figure. One can imagine her making quite the action hero. “I’ve actually been attached to this action movie for ages,” she reveals, “which is so much fun. It’s such a great script.” Unfortunately, though, we won’t be seeing it for a while. “Oddly enough the director didn’t get his meds right and he almost died on the side of the freeway, so we’ve had to postpone the filming cause his schedule is now taken up with other films that have backed up” – she’s not telling us who the director is. “And there was talk from another company just a week ago about doing an action franchise with me” – again, she’s tight-lipped with details. “So yes, I’m totally down. I’d love to do some action roles.”

When McIntosh reels off the filmmakers she’d most like to work with – Pedro Almodovar, Bobcat Goldthwait and Kathryn Bigelow are the eclectic trio who come to her mind first – it’s clear she’s keen to spread her wings wide. On the horizon she’s excited about the release of a film (titled Como Quien No Quiere La Cosa) she made with standup Trevor Lock. “I told him how brilliant he was and how I wanted to work with him because I saw a play he did at the festival,” she explains, with great enthusiasm. “I’ve never done this before, but I just contacted him on Facebook and said ‘I want to work with you.’ He says he was off to Peru to make this movie and was thinking of moving there, so I followed him.”

She’s also working on her own film, a comedy about a female standup. “I’ve got a script that I’ve written – it’s getting produced next year, and I’m going to be directing. It’s called Perfect.” But McIntosh's horror fans shouldn’t despair: “It’s about someone who seems to the world to be very outgoing but she’s inwardly fearful, and ultimately self-destructive.” This venture into comedy sounds as dark and brooding as any of her films at Grimmfest.