By George & Josh Bate
The fruits, fun, and frustrations of female friendship are explored in the new horror comedy Forbidden Fruits, premiering at this year’s SXSW.
Marking the feature directorial debut of Meredith Alloway, Forbidden Fruits follows Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), three young women that comprise a witchy femme cult operating out of a clothing store in a mall. The interpersonal dynamics of the trio are uprooted when Pumpkin (Lola Tung) enters the group and slowly begins to question Apple’s leadership and the dark history of the coven.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Forbidden Fruits director and co-writer Meredith Alloway about the new film, its unique shopping mall setting, employing a restrained approach to the supernatural, the film’s American Psycho inspirations, and more.
Forbidden Fruits is the product of and all about female friendship. The project began as a stage play by Lily Houghton titled “Of the woman cam the beginning of sin, and through her we all die.” The cinematic scope and feel of Houghton’s play eventually led her to collaborate with writer-director Meredith Alloway to transform her play into a screenplay for a feature film. Together, Alloway and Houghton worked side-by-side in crafting a story of sisterhood, longing, and the desire for community for the big screen, with the two trading ideas and bringing unique, personal elements of their own to the project.
Forbidden Fruits depicts how difficult it can be to retain one’s individuality and desires when situated in a close-knit group, especially when that group is overseen by a domineering personality like Lili Reinhart’s Apple. This idea of retaining individuality through collaboration paralleled Alloway’s experience working with Houghton to write the screenplay, albeit in decidedly healthier and more collaborative fashion than depicted in the film. “I think as an adult in my 30s, and Lily being the same thing, I think that you champion each other’s individuality,” Alloway explained. “I think that, when you get older, particularly as a woman, you’re like, ‘Wait, I can contain multitudes? Wait, I can be a part of a group and I can be my own person and truly be your best friends [with] men, women, whatever?’ It’s not just with other women. Women will champion you doing your own thing. And I think Lily and I absolutely did that and fought for our own things. There are certain lines or moments or that we fought for like, ‘Oh, I know you feel this, but just trust me.'”
Of the four women at the heart of the story, Alloway found herself drawing parallels between Victoria Pedretti’s Cherry and Alexandra Shipp’s Fig. Cherry, the most emotionally intense and tender of the bunch, finds herself in the crosshairs of Apple’s incessant criticisms and yet does not waver in her loyalty to her leader and their coven. To avoid criticism, Cherry begins to conceal aspectss of her individual desires from her group, including various sexual escapades. “I think Cherry absolutely as well [I relate to],” Alloway said. “I mean, the whole montage of her hooking up with guys in dressing rooms, I grew up in Dallas. I might have dabbled. But then as you’re like, ‘Oh, do I share that with my group of girlfriends? Are they gonna judge me for that?'”
Fig, meanwhile, resembled Alloway’s conflicting aims to belong and be an individual. “I really relate to Fig growing up in Dallas,” said Alloway. “I felt like I knew I wanted to get out and I knew I wanted to make movies. I was making movies since I was literally nine years old. But I also had a lot of girlfriends and I wanted to belong. And I also just always felt a little bit like an outsider. And so I really relate to Fig in that way and grew up, to your point, sort of fighting for that individuality.”
The shifting dynamics of the four members of the Free Eden witch cult largely occur within the confines of a shopping mall, an unexpected setting for such a film. Upon joining the project, Alloway suggested that the story be shifted to a mall, a decision that went on to give the film a novel visual identity. “I think when we moved the movie to a mall, I was like, ‘Oh, I think that the mall is an avenue for us to literally from a technical standpoint, not make the movie feel like claustrophobic. We can open it up, we can breathe. We’re not just in the store with the girls. And also we can learn more about them through the eyes of other people in the mall.’… It allows us to get outside of Free Eden and understand that the girls are really living in a cocoon. It’s like there are other places you can belong other than this coven. And it’s a constant reminder to hopefully us as an audience how insular they are.”
The insular nature of the cult means that the members don’t necessarily have the space to question its rigid rules and, more broadly, the factuality of its supernatural tenets. Unlike other similar movies like The Craft, Forbidden Fruits employs a more restrained approach to witchcraft, to such an extent that viewers may question whether the characters are actually witches in the first place. For Alloway, the ambiguity surrounding the supernatural was intentional.
“We got asked, when Lily Houghton and I were pitching around the take of what the film would be, trying to find our producing home, we got asked a lot, ‘Is the magic real? Is it supernatural?” Alloway detailed. “And we were like, ‘It’s like asking, is God real? It’s like, ‘What? That’s not the point.’ And so we really decided it’s vastly more interesting, I think, for an audience member to take away different things because the girls in the film, some believe it, some don’t, some didn’t believe it.”
Alloway elaborated on the decision to exercise restraint in the depiction of the supernatural in her film. “The moment you levitate someone, the audience goes, ‘Oh, it’s supernatural,'” described Alloway. “And, to me, it takes you out of the fact that I want people to be like, ‘Are the people at Abercrombie at my local mall running a coven in the basement after hours?’….And the moment you become supernatural, you kind of lose that nuance.”
With a more nuanced approached to the supernatural, Forbidden Fruits tows a delicate tonal balance. Alloway discussed how American Psycho played a key role in helping her find the right tone for her film. “From the beginning, American Psycho, which is also awesomely directed by a woman, [inspired me],” said Alloway. “The satire and the line that it rides of really laughing at Patrick Bateman and his extreme actions – like, it’s a business card, dude, and you’re sweating. That was a guiding light with the actors and the performance. These women, it’s life or death to them. And the audience is like, ‘What?’ until it really is life or death and descnts into madness and chaos.”
Beyond American Psycho, Alloway said she had trouble finding what she was looking for from previous films when deciding on the visuals and tone of her movie. “I was like, ‘I literally cannot find what I’m looking for,'” Alloway recounted. “And the only place I found that was in films from the late 60s, Giallo films, Blood and Black Lace, Torso, Mario Bava. This sort of dreamy, feminine genre. That feels more unexpected. And I say the movie is very much 60s by way of 90s by way of now…I was like, ‘No 80s, no 80s.’ Now we watch a lot of 80s mall movies and are like, ‘Okay, we don’t want to do that, but how can we pull this of?’ So we stayed away from the 90s and watched a lot of late 60s and 90s movies.”
Headlined by four of the most mesmerizing young actresses working today and exploring sisterhood and community through a supernatural lens similar to Jennifer’s Body and The Craft, Meredith Alloway’s directorial debut Forbidden Fruits has all the makings of a movie ahead of its time. It feels destined to become a cult movie, a fitting status given the positioning of a witch femme cult at the heart of its story.
Watch our full interview with Forbidden Fruits director and co-writer Meredith Alloway below….
