The witchy women of ‘Forbidden Fruits’ talk spirituality, horror, and catharsis

Based on Lily Houghton’s (admittedly less winsome in title) play, Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, and pushing its roster of it girls to their physical and mental limits, Alloway’s film is a story of an Eden that gets corrupted. It is biblical in its aspirations and narrative, even while maintaining its intimate scope. Set in a store called Free Eden, a coterie consisting of Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), moves through the shopping mall as if they’re salacious, authoritative sheriffs. They’re secretly a witch coven, and use blood rituals and black magic to curse their enemies or bring about their own prosperity. The dynamics of the group shift when Pumpkin (Lola Tung) encounters the women and seeks to join, unaware that her new eyes, optimism, and iconoclastic spirit threaten to disrupt the hierarchy set in place by Apple. 

For Tung in particular, she was grateful that the film provided a way to put a particular sensation on screen: that shorthand among women who have enough shared experiences that things don’t have to be explained. “It can be exhausting to have to explain your realities when you feel something deep in your bones,” she says.

JoySauce recently spoke with the quartet of actresses as well as Alloway. They shared how they view the film as part of a canon of films that ground their action in sprawling malls, the spiritual undertones of the film, and the ways the film—with its centering of female struggle and rage—acted as a cathartic release for them. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Zachary Lee: I know that the film was shot in the same mall that the iconic Mean Girls fountain sequence was filmed in. It made me reflect on how malls in American cinema—from Dawn of the Dead to Fast Times at Ridgemont High—have acted as these epicenters of artifice, excess, and community. How do you all feel about Forbidden Fruits joining this canon?
Meredith Alloway: That’s a flattering compliment for you to say it’s part of the canon. The movie hasn’t even come out yet, and we have that honor? 

Alexandra Shipp: You said it...not us! 

MA: When I read the play, I was like, “First of all, when you translate it to cinema, you think about the possibilities that come with that adaptation.” One of the first things I wanted to do was to know how other people felt about the Fruits. The mall that it's sort of based on in Dallas is beautiful. I remember growing up and walking by Abercrombie and thinking, “Those are the cool people who work at Abercrombie.” It was back when they had no shirts on. There is an ecosystem to the mall, and I think we like mall movies in the same way that we like Mean Girls because it’s set in a school. The food court scene is an example of that. The mall acts as a way to see how other people feel about (the Fruits) and gives them a canvas for these larger personalities to take form. Malls bring people together who are hired separately; you’re not seeking out those friendships or that ecosystem. You’re all kind of put in there together, and that's really interesting to me. It’s alchemy in a way. 

Victoria Pedretti: I really thought about Cherry as a follower and a consumer. Meredith cut this part, but there are a lot of scenes of me eating,  primarily gummy bears [Laughs]. This part of the scene is cut out, but there’s a scene where I’m eating salad, and I eventually spit the salad out and start shoving French fries in my mouth. I was thinking about excess a lot with her and the act of consumption, whether it was buying things, eating food, or engaging with sex as a coping mechanism. 

ZL: I was struck to learn the full, biblically coded title of Lily’s play. In the film, there’s witchcraft, sacrifice, and an exploration of shame, which all dovetail with religion and faith. How were you all thinking about the spiritual wavelength of the film? I feel like it gives a divine, cosmic heft to these questions being explored about sisterhood.
Lola Tung: We absolutely were. The whole time the girls are in the dressing rooms, there are crystals everywhere, there’s a Ouija board. They make circles of glitter. Everything is so much about energy and ritual. 

Lili Reinhart: Paradise is the girls’ religion and spirituality. They’ve grafted these iconic spiritual images and practices, like confession, onto the rhythms of the shopping mall. The rules they follow are like their 10 commandments. 

AS: It is very culty, religious, and spiritual. There is such beauty in the idea that all of the Fruits have different intentions for why we're in paradise in those moments, but regardless of our intentions, we are all connected by this throughline of belief. We’re drinking the Kool-Aid. There’s power when human beings not only have intention but genuinely believe in what they’re doing. That undercurrent of faith drives the film, that we all believe what's happening on a spiritual level is working, that the hexes, black magic, it’s all real. Once we start with belief, that's when things get a little fun. 

ZL: Lola, I’m struck by something you shared about your experience in working on this film: “Girls just know horror because the world is a terrifying place and these female-led horror movies that become cult classics are an escape from that terrifying real world, and they’re controlled by us. It’s our release.” How has this film acted as a release for you all?
LT: I remember at dinner when I was sitting in a group of my girlfriends, and we had a guy friend. We spent the entire time explaining why we would choose to be with a bear in the woods versus a man in the woods. The entire dinner, he couldn’t process it. He was like, “But you wouldn’t really.” And we were like, “No, we’re serious, we’re choosing the bear.” I bring that up to say that when you're with a group of women who creatively align, who are on the same wavelength, there are some sentiments—like the bear versus man—that don’t need to be explained. 

ZL: There’s that shorthand.
LT: Exactly. I think that shorthand is, in so many ways, what that movie is about. That’s a testament to the set that Meredith created, where there’s that witchy, female energy, where as women we don’t have to explain ourselves. Especially with these characters and with what we’re trying to tell with Forbidden Fruits, it’s important to showcase what that catharsis can feel like. It can be exhausting to have to explain your realities when you feel something deep in your bones.

LR: I was zoning out—not in a bad way—because what you were saying was making me think, “God, women are so accustomed to violence.” The whole existence of a woman is violent and bloody. It just is, and it's just something a man could truly never f*cking understand.

I hate the phrase “feminine rage” because rage from a woman is far more vicious than anything. I’ve wanted to do a movie that captures the centuries of pain women have experienced. I think this movie has that, and Apple in particular walks around rage fueled. Apple does have a scream, and the word she wants to scream is “f*ck.” In our third week of filming, we all went out to get drinks, and Meredith was telling me that she realized our movie didn't have the scream. There are screams in the movie, but there isn’t a rage scream, which is different from a scream out of fear. We had to have that, and Meredith had shared about how when Apple was fully starting to fall apart, that’s when the scream could come.

MA: To be quite honest, that scream was rooted in a point of unraveling. I realized that we couldn’t have a movie about female fashion without someone saying, “Get these f*cking fancy clothes off of me right now,” and throwing hangers. We needed to show her and all of the others crack, and it’s nerve wracking and exciting to see it build to that unraveling.