It takes no more than two minutes for Meredith Alloway’s new dark-comedy Forbidden Fruits to let the audience know just how wild the ride is going to be.
In the campy horror film’s first scene, Apple, a red haired (well, red wigged), Lili Reinhart, tosses her steaming hot cup of coffee all over the lap of a pervert parked beside her in the mall’s parking lot, just seconds after his license plate “#1DADDY” is shown on screen. And it only gets wilder from there.
Directed and co-written by Alloway, Forbidden Fruits centers on the women of Free Eden, a trendy women’s clothing store in a Dallas mall, that happen to make up a witchy cult. Apple, the Regina George of this mall universe, is flanked by her fellow fruit-named Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), when newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) levels up from food court worker to Free Eden employee.
Apple and co. induct a clearly-has-a-motive Pumpkin into their after hours cult, and things start unraveling from there, slasher style. The film is based on a play by Lily Houghton, who also co-wrote the script with Alloway.
“When I read Lily Houghton’s play, I was coming off of a lot of research on female criminals and serial killers,” Alloway tells The Hollywood Reporter on a Zoom days before the film opened. “Women do this for such different reasons than men. I’m continually upset when another male serial killer thing comes out, which is fine as long as there’s also women that we’re exploring.”
Alloway was introduced to Houghton through their mutual manager at Linden Entertainment. The director notes that Houghton loves Jennifer’s Body (Body screenwriter Diablo Cody later boarded as producer their new movie), and both yearned to create something campy. “What if we do a slasher?” the director recalls asking Houghton when they met to discuss a collaboration. “What if we use genre as a tool to help people understand how these people feel, how violent and chaotic and messy and beautiful and joyful female relationships can be?”
Alloway and Houghton succeeded on that front. Forbidden Fruits’ core group of women are all, in their own increasingly unhinged way, driven by the bond of female friendship. Tung’s Pumpkin, however, is less convinced about the sisterhood element. So, it makes sense when the third act reveals that Pumpkin and Apple are actually half-siblings, and Pumpkin sought out the Free Eden gang to avenge the death of their father.
The screenwriters kept the heightened language of Houghton’s play, with help from Cody.
“We, I think particularly as women, come up with these codes and these languages and secret ways of communicating, especially when you’re young. [We were] tapping into that,” notes Alloway. “The biggest challenge was finding a cast that could deliver the language, take the world seriously, still understand the comedy and in the back of their brain, be present in a scene and [know] ultimately the tone of this is satire.”
Reinhart, Tung, Shipp and Pedretti walk that line the entire film, even when it digs into its darker, less campy, moments. The group’s former friend Pickle (Emma Chamberlain) is the source of much of that darkness, along with the girls’ often vulnerable confessionals in the fitting room mirror. “The confessionals were the heart of who the characters were. Lily and I from the beginning described the movie as a razor blade in a Jolly Rancher,” Alloway explains.
Alloway says there was one group rehearsal with the women before shooting and several conversations about the characters and the motivation behind pieces of dialogue. “We talked about the costumes. We talked about the ways that they use their makeup and their hair and what they’re wearing as armor for the way they want to present [themselves] to the world,” she says.
The director told the actresses to make Pinterest boards for their characters and direct message her anytime. “It was really fun to see what the girls came up with,” she notes.
The women of Free Eden meet tragic ends one-by-one as a tornado approaches — Cherry in a mall escalator and Fig being struck by the mall’s skylight. Eventually, it comes down to Pumpkin and Apple, fighting to the death in a mall fountain, a more intimate moment by choice, according to Alloway.
“I think sometimes horror in particular just puts the pedal to the gas even more, and then by the end of the movie, you’re just spiraling out of control. I wanted the end to be intimate, and I wanted the girls to be wet and messy,” she says.
Ultimately, Pumpkin is strangled to death by her half sister in the fountain, a move Alloway says she waffled on. “Honestly, I really didn’t want to kill Pumpkin. Up until we were shooting, I had an alt version where maybe she doesn’t die, and Sharon finds her and she comes back to life. She wasn’t drowned. She was just knocked out,” she admits.
“I was like, no, the whole point of the movie is that these women relationships aren’t perfect, that we’re operating in systems that don’t allow us to all survive in the way that we should. It would be a bow on the ending that wasn’t earned and didn’t feel honest and real,” she continues.
With the film now out, Alloway says wishes she knew what Apple does next. “Poor Apple, her whole life, she’s been trying to protect the women around her, including her mother who has also abandoned her,” she says.
“Being abandoned as a woman can pit you against other women, can increase your need to survive, which I think Apple’s always trying to find the snake. In that moment, she’s thinks, unfortunately, ‘My sister is the one who has created all of this chaos,’ and she has a psychological break and is just trying to survive,” Alloway adds. “Apple has had to protect herself for many, many years and survive.”
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