A Witchy Comedy Horror Starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung & Victoria Pedretti

“I feel like I’m in a David Lynch film,” says Meredith Alloway from her home in New York’s East Village. “Like I’m in ‘Mulholland Drive.’ I’m going to wake up on my couch and it was all a dream.”

The filmmaker is back in her apartment after a whirlwind experience at SXSW premiering her new movie “Forbidden Fruits,” one of the festival’s most anticipated.

“This is such a tiny indie that could,” Alloway says. “When I had to introduce a movie in front of 1,200 people at the Paramount, I was having an out-of-body experience.” 

“Forbidden Fruits,” which is director and writer Alloway’s feature-length debut, is a comedy horror film that follows a group of friends — all with fruit first names — who work at a boutique in their local mall. When Cherry, Apple and Fig meet Pumpkin, an employee at a pretzel store, they recruit her to join them at their store — and into their after-hours witchy coven. The film stars Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Chamberlain and Gabrielle Union-Wade. 

The script is based on a play, called “Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin, and Through Her We All Die,” by Lily Houghton, who cowrote the screenplay with Alloway. Houghton and Alloway share a manager, who first suggested the two become familiar with one another as he knew they were both working on features about female killers. 

“He’s like, ‘You both have listened to hours of podcasts about why women commit crimes and kill and whatever,’” Alloway recalls. “And then when I read this play, there were no deaths. It was like someone steals a baby pink thong, there’s a mutiny, whatever. But what I loved was that it was just about women. It was about the nuance between female relationships in a way that I was like, ‘Wow, this is so sad that I have not read something like this in a really long time.’”

That inspired her to think about the play through the lens of body horror, a genre she is drawn to as a way to “hyperbolize feelings that you feel watching what the character’s feeling” and “relate to what women go through.”

The “fruits” work at a store called Free Eden, a nod to Free People, in a mall setting that Alloway based on the Dallas mall she went to growing up. 

“I was nostalgic for it, particularly coming out of a time where we’re doing all this online shopping,” she says of the mall setting. “There’s an ecosystem to the mall too that I was like, ‘I think we’ll better understand who these girls are to other people by placing them in relation to the food court, other employees, other shoppers.’”

The movie is made up of some of today’s most in-demand young actresses, who Alloway describes as “such hard workers and so vulnerable and so witchy in their own ways.”

“And I think they really wanted to do something fun made by women for women, because for actresses of that age, it’s rare that they all get to be in a movie together,” she adds. 

The wardrobe had to be witchy in nature, which naturally featured plenty of Rodarte on the Pinterest board. Alloway is a self-described fangirl of designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, and had interviewed them for their movie “Woodshock,” and decided to take her shot when it came to costuming “Forbidden Fruits.”

“I just felt like Rodarte is witchy and feminine and perfect,” she says. After a few unanswered emails, she’d all but given up hope when she was encouraged to try one last time. 

“Laura emailed back and, literally, Sarah [Millman, the costume designer] and I started jumping up and down with tears in our eyes,” Alloway says. “Our first AD walked in and he was like, ‘What is going on?’ We were like, ‘Rodarte!’”

Alloway grew up as a theater kid who always knew she wanted to make movies. Over spring break, while other kids were off on fancy ski vacations, she and her friends would hang out at each other’s houses attempting filmmaking. She was raised on horror movies: the whole family loved “The Lost Boys” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” and had posters up in bedrooms and a collection of movie T-shirts. 

“The movies became a part of the world and the movies created a world that we were a part of,” she says. “And so I think I always loved that part of it. It’s not just about the final product of the movie, it’s the world that the movie builds.”

She moved to L.A. after theater school with hopes of pursuing screenwriting, and fell into film journalism, writing for publications like Vanity Fair, Playboy, Filmmaker Magazine, IndieWire and Nylon, eventually moving to write and direct her own work, including the shorts “Deep Tissue” and “Ride.” 

Now, with her feature debut, she’s getting to do some of her own world building. At the SXSW screenings, fans came dressed up and she recalls seeing one group dressed as fruits and another next to them as the coven aspect of the movie. 

“It goes back to that world building. I was like, ‘Me and the girls and Sarah had such a collaboration.’ The actresses brought a lot of their own insight and ideas to the table,” she says. “We were like, ‘OK, if someone dresses up as one of the fruits for Halloween, we’ve done our job.’”