With its wild, remote landscape and its tiny isolated communities, the Highlands might seem a natural setting for a horror film. But when the producer Ros Borland proposed what seemed a sure-fire hit — “Gregory’s Girl with werewolves”, she calls it — she was stunned by the cool reception her plans received.

She had high hopes for Wild Country, a teen horror movie with a twist, which pits holidaying Glaswegian kids against a lecherous weirdo and Highland wildlife whose numbers run well beyond red deer and otters.

It was 1998, and she had been working as a business development manager at the BBC, before joining forces with fellow producer Catherine Aitken to set up Gabriel Films. It was only after mailing her synopsis to 150 companies that she began to realise the difficulties that lay ahead.

“There does seem to be quite a lot of snobbery about horror,” says Borland. “They thought it was quite funny that these two girls wanted to do horror movies. People looked at us like we were B-movie wannabes.”

Undeterred, Borland raised a budget of about £1m privately, about half of which would be spent on special effects. She persuaded Martin Compston, star of Sweet Sixteen, and Peter Capaldi to join an otherwise unknown cast, she worked for nothing and even mortgaged her house to get the film made.

It was a huge gamble. But it looks like it might pay off.

Scottish horror films are rare. It is more than 30 years since The Wicker Man was made, and it is telling that the remake, starring Nicolas Cage, will be shot in Canada.

Borland and Aitken talked to the scriptwriter Craig Strachan, a film graduate from Milngavie, about Wild Country. He describes the film as “cathartic”, but admits he never really believed it would get made.

“In Scotland still there’s a sense that it’s not a respectable genre, indeed it’s a thoroughly disreputable genre,” he says. “Scotland retains a philosophical attachment to social realism, which is about as far away from horror as you can get, although with Wild Country we blur the boundaries a wee bit.”

Compston echoes Strachan’s view. “We just seem to make bleak social films. We’re really good at that, but we get stuck in that rut.”

Wild Country, he says, was a thrilling script. “It just seemed really Scottish. There was none of that American rubbish about it.”

The film was shot in October- November 2004 at Mugdock Country Park, near Milngavie, Fourmerk Farm in Stirlingshire and in Anniesland, Glasgow. Compston plays Lee, the ex-boyfriend of Kelly Ann (newcomer Samantha Shields), who gives their baby up for adoption in an opening 10 minutes that plays like typical social-realist drama, maladjusted kids and a young(ish), streetwise priest (Capaldi).

But then Wild Country veers off in a dramatically different direction. Kelly Ann goes off with friends for an overnight hike and they are menaced by a strange beast. In the ruins of an old castle they find its lair.

Wild Country received a low-key premiere at London’s FrightFest horror festival last year. “The FrightFest crowd gave it a standing ovation,” she says. “We thought, ‘Well, there’s an audience for this film,’ because when you’ve been working on something for five years it’s very hard to be objective.”

Borland confesses “I just like being scared” and has been a fan of horror films since she watched Hitchcock’s The Birds aged five. But perhaps the scariest moment of all was when she mortgaged her house to raise the money for Wild Country. “That kind of scary is much worse than any horror movie,” she says.

However the prospects now look much brighter for Borland than they do for the characters in her film.

Wild Country receives it Scottish premiere on February 18

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