At Free Eden, a Dallas mall boutique, four young women sell overpriced clothes, burn sage and run a secret after-hours coven. “Forbidden Fruits,” the horror-comedy from first-time feature director Meredith Alloway, is now open in theaters.
Adapted from playwright Lily Houghton’s stage work “Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin, and Through Her We All Die,” the film stars Lili Reinhart as Apple, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, Alexandra Shipp as Fig, and Lola Tung as Pumpkin. At Free Eden, Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the boutique’s basement after hours with Cherry and Fig. When new hire Pumpkin arrives and challenges their performative sisterhood, the women are forced to confront their own poisons. The film premiered at SXSW earlier this month and has already drawn comparisons to “Mean Girls,” “The Craft” and “Jawbreaker,” a lineage the cast and filmmakers are happy to claim… and complicate.
“We pitched it as ‘Mean Girls,’ but a slasher,” Houghton tells Variety, pointing to “Jennifer’s Body” as a guiding influence. “It was so before its time. We can only wish and dream to create that sort of energy.”
The film was personal for Houghton from the start. “I always found that’s the way that I speak, and it was always sort of dismissed as too girly or silly or dumb,” she says. “We wanted to show those voices and what’s boiling right beneath.” Drawing directly from her own life, Houghton wrote the original play at 21, fresh out of college and working retail, after her father died. “I kind of retreated into girlhood and used that as protection,” she says.
Lola Tung as Pumpkin, left, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, Alexandra Shipp as Fig and Lili Reinhart as Apple in “Forbidden Fruits.”
In the film, Reinhart’s Apple is a woman who has fully convinced herself she is the ultimate feminist. “She considers herself to be the ultimate girl’s girl, and then ultimately would not do any of those things,” Reinhart says, adding that she can receive adoration, but has no idea what to do with actual love. “She doesn’t get it from her family, so she has to get it from other people. And the way she goes about it is by control.”
Central to the film is a biblical motif the story keeps returning to: the snake in the garden. That tension manifests in Tung’s Pumpkin, who enters as a skeptic, though not exactly an innocent one. “She kind of is the snake,” Tung says. “Because without her showing up, maybe paradise wouldn’t have fallen apart, or at least not as quickly or as violently.” At her core, though, Pumpkin is searching for something more — belonging and sisterhood. “She wants to believe in the good of this group. But sometimes wanting something that badly is what cracks everything open,” Tung adds.
Alexandra Shipp as Fig and Victoria Pedretti as Cherry in “Forbidden Fruits.”
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Pedretti’s Cherry is the coven’s earnest heart, curious and loyal and often in over her head. “Her loyalty to Apple runs deeper than self-preservation,” Pedretti says, “which is exactly what makes it so hard to watch.” Fig, meanwhile, has drunk the Kool-Aid entirely, Shipp explains.
Whether any of the magic is actually working, Alloway says, isn’t the right question. “That’s like saying, is God real? It’s more: do these characters believe it?” Houghton intended for it to be left open. “I hope people come out of the movie thinking totally different things about the magic.”
Ultimately, ‘Forbidden Fruits’ is about what women do when men aren’t the point. ‘We never get good scenes with one another,’ Tung says. ‘It’s always like we’re competing for a guy.’ In the film, they aren’t. None of which, Alloway is quick to point out, makes any of these women the bad guy. The way she sees it, ‘these women are trying to build a garden in a cement block.’ The mall, the boutique, the social architecture — that’s the antagonist.
Lola Tung as Pumpkin and Lili Reinhart as Apple in “Forbidden Fruits.”
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For all its slasher elements, “Forbidden Fruits” isn’t interested in pitting the girls against one another as heroes and villains. The filmmakers insist the real threat is the world they’re trying to survive in.
“The villain is expectations of women,” Alloway says. “It’s capitalist systems. It’s quite literally the mall itself.”
Houghton agrees, “If those systems didn’t exist, they would be dancing in a forest, summoning the goddesses, and not killing each other.”
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