How Meredith Alloway Conjured Her Witchy Debut Feature ‘Forbidden Fruits’

“Forbidden Fruits,” which just had its premiere at South by Southwest, marks the directorial debut of Meredith Alloway.

Not that you’d know it by the buzz that is already surrounding the witchy, mall-set thriller, starring a gaggle of talented young stars (Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti and Alexandra Shipp) and produced by Diablo Cody, which IFC and Shudder will release on March 27. (Universal is handling the distribution overseas.)

“There’s a fan that has already found somehow a Cherry look from the trailer. I believe it’s the exact same shirt and pants and hat. And was posting a video in it. I was like, ‘How do they do this?’ This is what movies are all about. It’s a world,” said Alloway shortly before leaving for the premiere in Austin, Texas. “You want people to come be a part of [it]. That’s what’s been so special so far. I don’t know what the future holds but everyone’s part of the coven.”

“Forbidden Fruits” started out as an Off Broadway play by Lily Houghton called “Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin, and Through Her We All Die.” Alloway and Hubbard share a manager and he set up a meeting. Alloway read the script and fell in love.

“I’ve noticed this trend in genre films with female revenge stories. And when I read this I went, ‘Oh this is just about women. I’m craving living in that world and I’m craving writing stories where it’s not the female lead in adjacent to the male character. It’s really about the dynamics between women,” Alloway said. She had just come off of writing another project that was similar to one that Houghton had also been working on – they had both spent plenty of time researching female serial killers. You know, as you do.

When they met, they had both devoured countless hours of true crime podcasts and were interested in raising the stakes of the play (“The craziest thing that happens is somebody steals a pink thong”). The result is the gonzo freak-out that New York Magazine described as “if ‘Mean Girls’ took place at a Free People in 2026.”

“I think that what I’m getting with her characters that she wrote, which were so funny and dynamic and heartbreaking and triumphant, was the intense emotions that can come from female relationships, that a female friendship breakup can feel worse than a romantic breakup,” Alloway explained. “And I was like, Can we use the slasher genre to turn up the dial and make people that maybe haven’t gone through that, or relate to that, relate to it?”

Describing the feat of getting “Forbidden Fruits” financed, Alloway uses the analogy of a washing machine. “Movies that are getting made and then they lose financing and they get financing and then they get financing and they lose financing, and then there’s a writers’ strike and then I’m laying on my couch going, Why do I do this for a living?” Alloway said.

“Forbidden Fruits” was set up with other financiers, with Alloway and Houghton writing the script on spec and taking it to prospective producers. She was interested in finding backers that really “got it,” which she found in Mason Novick and Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of “Juno,” “Jennifer’s Body” and “Young Adult” (among others). When she got the news that Cody was joining, Alloway said, she was crying to Houghton on FaceTime. They were tears of joy.

To keep the project alive, Alloway said, they had to keep it “intimate, keep it protected.” “It’s like a little plant,” she explained. “And then we can go out into the world with it.” They got their cast together and then the strikes happened, which meant yet another regroup. Some of this was for the best. Tung was initially busy with “The Summer I Turned Pretty” but freed up right before they shot. Another actress was cast in the role Shipp eventually played and now Alloway can’t think of anyone else in it.  

Eventually IFC and Shudder boarded “Forbidden Fruits” for domestic distribution, with Universal handling international distribution. They gradually pieced the movie together – they’d shoot in a mall in Toronto and get a generous tax rebate. Their little plant was watered and given sunlight and was eventually a full-fledged movie.

“I think it’s important to be transparent about how indie films get made,” Alloway said.

A number of the department heads on “Forbidden Fruit” were female, which Alloway said she was really proud of. “It’s about perspective. I think that if we are only looking at, Oh we need a percentage of women on a crew, we’re never going to get to the root of the issue, which is we need different people’s perspectives for different films,” Alloway explained. “That is what art should be. And with this movie in particular, I was like, We just need the female perspective.”

One aspect of “Forbidden Fruits” that we had to know about was filming inside of a mall. As it turns out, that wasn’t as much fun as you were probably expecting it to be – especially when you factor in extremely early mall walkers.

“We shot 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. most nights, because of mall hours. And let me just say that mall walkers show up earlier than you think. They show up at like six in the morning and you’re like, Oh my god.” Reinhart would hide from them because she didn’t want anyone spoiling her red hair. “That was an interesting challenge, to basically wait until the mall closed and everyone went away and we came out like little ants and took over,” said Alloway.

The mall was based on a mall in Dallas near where Alloway grew up, which she describes as “the last cool, nice mall in America – it’s almost like an art museum.” When she was scouting malls in Canada she was looking for something specific – not a dead mall, which would make the girls seem delusional and others that “feel like spaceships – not this movie.” She also wanted to stay away from any mall that would bring to mind movies from the 1980s, which frequently used malls as key locations (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” being perhaps the best-known, with its utilization of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, irreparably damaged during the Northridge Earthquake).

Finally, they settled on a mall that had some strange, magical aura fitting for “Forbidden Fruits” – they built out a fountain for a climactic showdown in the movie, only to realize it was the same fountain were a key moment from “Mean Girls” was also shot. Thet store that they used to primarily shoot “Forbidden Fruits” was an old Hollister.

“The lights stay on in the mall at night. This idea of the mall being creepy because the materialism and the capitalism doesn’t go away. They’re just spending money on these lights. When we were shooting in and out in the mall, everyone was wide awake [because of the lights]. It’s grotesque. It’s just money being wasted,” Alloway said. “It was an uncanny experience.”

When we asked how she was feeling, just days before her big premiere in Austin, Alloway said “grateful.” “What’s really emotional for me is like, how much the cast is showing up for the movie,” Alloway said. And they really are – showing up for talk show appearances and red carpet interviews, all together. The coven unbroken.

As for what’s next, Alloway can’t say exactly. She doesn’t want to jinx it. Maybe hex it is a better way to put it.

“I have a few projects in the pipeline. I wrote a lot in the last few years — was fueled by a lot of questions that were plaguing me and inspiring me, which is often how it goes. Those breed of stories I’m passionate about telling. The projects are all really different worlds, but all very female-centered,” Alloway said. “I have a Brooklyn-based erotic thriller, a female-led ‘Taxi Driver’-esque film, a Western erotic thriller with a trad-wife adjacent arc — for me, it’s all about building worlds and going on a journey with characters I want to see more of.”

“Forbidden Fruits” is in theaters on March 27.

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