Interviews
‘Forbidden Fruits’ Director Meredith Alloway Added Memorable Kills to Witchy Play Adaptation [Interview]
A toxic coven comes undone in director Meredith Alloway‘s feature debut, Forbidden Fruits.
The Diablo Cody-produced horror satire is an adaptation of playwright Lily Houghton’s stageplay Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die, with Alloway and Houghton co-writing.
The film, like the play, follows a witchy femme cult in a trendy retail store who are forced to face their own poisons with the arrival of a new employee.
One of the first notable changes to Houghton’s stage play is that some of the film’s characters are doomed to a bloody fate; the friendships descend into violence.
“There were no deaths in the play,” Meredith Alloway revealed when speaking to Bloody Disgusting ahead of Forbidden Fruits‘ premiere at SXSW. “I think the highest stakes are that the girls working at the store, basically, one of them steals a baby pink thong, and it starts a mutiny. It’s hilarious. It’s hilarious.
“When I read Lily Houghton’s play, Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die, I got to get the whole title out, what I was drawn to, and I think you of all people will understand that we’ve kind of been in a movement of horror directed by women that is revenge movies, for the most part. I love that. I think that we needed to go through that phase where I could think of so many movies that feature revenge in relation to a man. It’s still in relation to a guy.
“When I read this play, I was like, ‘There’s no relation to any men.‘ There’s Norman in the play. I believe he’s the only man in the play, and he’s also a character in the film. I was like, ‘This feels radical. This feels like something that I could spend the next couple of years of my life exploring.’
“When I met with Lily, I was like, ‘What if we take how violent female relationships can feel, how intense, dark, and beautiful female breakups can feel, and what if we use body horror to sort of elevate it?‘ So that was, I think, the avenue that was the most interesting part to me.”
It’s worth noting that Alloway doesn’t just add kills to Houghton’s source material; she makes them count with shocking violence. That includes one showstopper that feels right at home in the world of Final Destination.
Photo courtesy of Sabrina Lantos. An Independent Film Company and Shudder release.
Alloway did her homework to ensure it looked gnarly. “I unfortunately did my research. Even in the script, it says this could technically happen; don’t look it up. I mean, we go a little hyperbolic, of course, because we’re having fun. But yeah, I mean, I think that’s the fun thing about writing kills is going, ‘Why don’t I start with a seed of my own anxiousness?‘”
Also updated in Forbidden Fruits is the setting, Lili Reinhart‘s Apple has full reign of both store Free Eden and the entire mall. Alloway injects stylistic flourishes, complemented by a production design that feels almost removed from time.
The filmmaker also credits her cinematography for making the setting pop.
“Something I will say, working with Karim Hussain, who’s a dream and I’m such a fan of his work with Infinity Pool and Possessor, I knew that he could elevate a mall. I knew that he would go, ‘We’re not going to make this look like shit. We’re going to make this feel magical.‘ The biggest thing that we were up against was that the lights stayed on in the mall. The fluorescents are always on. So this idea of, especially horror film set in malls, of this, it’s all dark and just one neon sign at the end. Nope. The lights are on at all times. It is capitalism in your face, wasting electricity all the time. We leaned into that.”
Forbidden Fruits‘ self-contained story does leave things slightly ajar for an expansion of this film’s deeply messy and murderous women, something Alloway would be game to tackle if the situation presented itself.
“I think that’s really the root of the stories I’m telling. We see the crimes that women, particularly, commit, and we don’t ever really get, well, what led them there? I think a lot of my stories exist in that landscape.”
Independent Film Company and Shudder will release Forbidden Fruits in theaters everywhere on March 27, 2026.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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