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.
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.
