Why do we worship cult movies?
Featuring MEREDITH ALLOWAY, director and co-writer of FORBIDDEN FRUITS
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No movie is born a “cult movie.” Cult status is bestowed by the audience - not the general audience, mind you, but a self-selecting, freakishly devoted subset who build flamboyant rituals around repeat viewings.
The first cult movie may have been The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a 52-minute German silent horror film that played in the same theater in France for seven years straight. Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula,” became a cult movie when Bram Stoker's widow sued the production company, and all copies in Germany were torched. Were it not for a scattering of illicit copies abroad, the film might have vanished entirely.
Cult films are often campy, offbeat, and deviant - some by design, others by accident. They flout the expectations of both megaplex and arthouse, pushing against formal conventions and the boundaries of so-called “good taste.”
The term cult film emerged in the 1970s to describe the popularity surrounding aberrant midnight movies and censored oddities, but it wasn’t until 1981, when film writer Danny Peary wrote “Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird and the Wonderful,” that cult films were canonized. “Few movie books have endured and continue to influence cineastes with a taste for the offbeat and overlooked,” declared Susan Wloszczyna of rogerebert.com while commemorating the book’s thirty-fifth anniversary.
Peary’s selections ranged wildly: from the Ronald Reagan-and-monkey curio Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) to Michael Powell’s once-reviled Peeping Tom (1960), to David Lynch’s industrial nightmare Eraserhead (1977). Devotees like director James Gray have described spending years tracking down the rarest titles, chasing the thrill of the obscure.
With the arrival of the internet, cult fandom escaped the musty confines of repertory theaters and VHS collections, exploding into global online communities. Meanwhile, the term was being co-opted by marketing departments, softening what was once defiantly ugly and subversive to now include “cult classic” studio pictures like Josie and The Pussycats (2001) and Mamma Mia! (2008).
Do cult films still exist as they once did? And if so, what purpose do they serve beyond the commercial value of an engaged audience, or the private ecstasies of adoration?
Film scholar David Church suggests that cult spectatorship can function as a form of resistance: a way of talking back to cultural authority (so long as it doesn’t simply reproduce the same hierarchies it seeks to reject). Film cultism can also be a project of preservation or reparation, maintaining a film’s legacy while seeking to correct the ambivalence or hostility that greeted it on release.
Take Jennifer’s Body (2009), written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama. Misunderstood and dismissed upon release, it has since been resurrected by online communities. Like a demonic Megan Fox, the movie has risen from the dead as a bona fide classic, with a sequel now in the works..
To discuss the strange afterlives of films like Jennifer’s Body, and the gleefully deranged new horror-comedy Forbidden Fruits (produced by Diablo Cody), I spoke with director and co-writer Meredith Alloway.
Given that Alloway’s film centers on a literal cult - a coven of retail witches operating out of a Dallas shopping mall - and revels in the aesthetics of cult cinema’s golden age (camp, gore, exploitation, satire), she had more than a few thoughts on the subject - though she was quick to dismiss any notion of engineering a cult hit herself: “That’s like making a movie and saying, ‘I’m going to win an Academy Award.’ You can’t control how people perceive your work.”
You can watch, or read, the conversation below. But first, the news.
News Reel
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If the U.S. Won’t Stop the Mediapocalypse, Maybe Europe Can, writes Anthony Kaufman. Citing the E.U.’s recent establishment of the A.I. Act and Netflix tax - which requires Netflix to invest a portion of its revenue in local media industries, Kaufman calls on the U.S. to work together to “bolster and support the many state tax incentives, as well as a federal film incentive program, to help independent filmmakers.”
“Creativity is not just some commodity, trapped in the imagination, that can be tapped and sieved by technology. It is a skill that must be learned, not just unleashed. The dreaded ‘gap between imagination and creation’ is not some inefficiency that can be ironed out by a computer program. It is where creativity itself emerges.” - John Semley in his latest Wired article, “‘Thank You for Generating With Us!’ Hollywood’s AI Acolytes Stay on the Hype Train.”
Interview with Forbidden Fruits director Meredith Alloway
Condensed for clarity below. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
“Anytime you’re doing satire, it’s all so tricky. You’re kind of observing something from the outside in. I do love films that have a sense of humor about something that’s going on that’s otherwise too dark to look at without some candy coated glam going on.”
- Meredith Alloway
Alex Rollins Berg: I saw this movie a few weeks ago. It’s so wild and fun and enjoyable, but I don’t want to spoil too much. I wonder if, for those who haven’t seen Forbidden Fruits, if you could tease what it’s about?
Meredith Alloway: Basically, it’s about these women, who are all named after fruits, who work at a mall in Dallas, and they need to hire someone new. They meet the new girl who’s working at Sister Salt’s, an Auntie Anne’s-type pretzel spot, and they bring her into the store, Free Eden, that they work at. We come to find out they also run like a witchy coven after hours, and [the new girl, Pumpkin] starts to peel back the layers of their sisterhood and starts to see the secrets and the lies. And she has her own secret.
Alex Rollins Berg: I want to ask about the origins of this. Lily Houghton wrote a play a number of years ago that this is an expansion of, and you co-wrote this screenplay together?
Meredith Alloway: Yeah, yeah. When I read Lily’s play, “Of The Woman Came The Beginning of Sin And Through Her We All Die” - mouthful - what I loved about it was it really is about the multitudes in female relationships. I was also really drawn to the fact that it’s not in relation to a man, it’s not, “Oh, they’re arguing because someone stole someone’s boyfriend.” It really is just about the sort of roller coaster that can be female relationships. When we met, she had sort of said, “I’m looking to make this kind of like a campy, horror adjacent.” And I was like, what if we sort of use body horror and use the slasher genre as a way to help people understand how these characters are feeling? Like the beauty, the violence, the joy, the flaws, the successes. I love horror that does that.
And so we dove in, and wrote on WriterDuet across from each other most days. She would take a scene and I would take a scene and, you know, make each other laugh.
Alex Rollins Berg: And you had help from an amazing producer, Diablo Cody, who came aboard after apparently hearing you pitch the project. She called the pitch one of the most imaginative and magical pitches she’s ever heard - which is high praise. What did Diablo bring to this production as a producer?
Meredith Alloway: Diablo has been such a hero of mine and Lily’s. She has quite literally paved the way for movies like this to get made, and Mason Novick, her producing partner as well. We pitched, like, 40 producers, and this was towards the end of the process, and we were like, “Man, nothing is really clicking.” For a movie this wacky - like, I know how crazy this movie is - you really want someone that [gets] it, you know?
I remember we got off the call and we were like, “This will never…” And pretty quickly, we heard they wanted to do it. And I have a screenshot of a FaceTime of me and Lily, like, crying, you know, on FaceTime. Like, “What??” You know, it’s beyond our wildest. But I think Diablo and Mason have this… this isn’t their first rodeo. And they were such mentors throughout - even from who we were working with from a financing standpoint and a studio standpoint, to just fight for the integrity of the project and what we really wanted to say.
Alex Rollins Berg: The cast is absolutely incredible. How did you put together these four principal roles?
Meredith Alloway: It really started with the “Apple” of it all, because she’s what you could say is the Queen Bee, you know, and we really wanted to find our Apple and build out from there. Lily Houghton, who was involved in the casting process, which is great to have your sort of right hand person there alongside you, your partner in crime. We met with a lot of actresses. It was an embarrassment of riches. And, you know, when we met Lili [Reinhart], we like to say she went full “Apple” in the meeting. She wore, like, a little cunty black cardigan. And we were like, we’re kind of scared of her. She’s perfect, you know? And Lili already was embodying and bringing her take on Apple, this woman who needs to control. She is perfection, you know. And of course, as you peel back the layers on Apple, you realize she is by no means a perfect person at all. She’s hiding her own flaws from women. Lili brought a lot of ethos to that character.
Victoria [Pedretti] - such a fan of hers. And we’ve seen her play these tragic scream queens on “The Haunting of Hill House.” When she smiles, she sort of lights up and and that really was “Cherry,” the sort of modern Bridget Bardot, Marilyn Monroe. She just fully transformed for that part.
And Alex Shipp, when we met her, we were like, “Oh, my God, she is so in the world of this movie.” Fig is kind of a tricky part because she is a scientist and loves Ed Sheeran, yet somehow fits into the coven. And Alex, when we met her, she’s so goofy, but also so wise. And we were like, “Oh, I think her energy really ties that character together in a way.”
Lola - “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” such a fan of the show. When we met her, I was like, “Oh, she’s a Scorpio. She’s got a spiciness to her. I want to see her do something a little dark.” [Pumpkin] is sort of the innocent, wide eyed new girl. And then you’re like, oh, she’s up to something. So I was excited to see all these women play a role we hadn’t necessarily seen them do.
And then Emma Chamberlain, you know, what a gift to have her do this movie. I knew I wanted “Pickle” to be an outsider. People don’t know Emma for her acting work yet. They will.
Alex Rollins Berg: Another element of this movie that I think is so amazing is the story world that you build. It’s not even one story world - there are worlds within worlds in this movie, which are so rich and particular, like the restaurant. What is it? Yeast Garden or something like that? It’s like there’s a whole other culture that’s governing that space, and you feel like there’s a world behind every door in this mall. To what degree did you guys work out that lore, and how far did you take it outside of Free Eden?
Meredith Alloway: The Yeast Garden joke, the Sister Salts, even the Arizona Latte at the end of the movie is a result of pre-production and legal going, “All of the names are taken that are a spinoff of an Olive Garden.” Thank you for noticing. Because did we have fun printing those menus! Ciara [Vernon], our production designer, Jef [Silver], our set deck, Steph [Kelly], our props master - we had so much fun just building the world. And I appreciate you noticing because every single choice was specific.
Alex Rollins Berg: You’re a Dallas native, and Dallas seems to loom large over this as well. I know the original play was set in NYC. I just saw this Robert Altman movie, you may have seen it, Dr. T and the Women, have you seen that? It opens in a mall, and the fountain really factors into the plot of the movie. The minute this movie started - I know you shot it in Toronto - but I did feel like I was watching Dr. T and the Women. So I’m wondering what other elements, either through costume or dialog or set design, did you bring to make this authentically Dallas?
Meredith Alloway: Well, I love that you bring up. I forgot about that movie. I watched Three Women a lot and The Long Goodbye, just for visual influences. But that movie opens at the mall that we’re spoofing. And that fountain is what we recreated at the mall in Toronto. So I appreciate you bringing that out, because the fountain at that mall is a character in and of itself.
Dallas, growing up there, it is this strange thing because it’s in Texas, but it’s very metropolitan. People are like, “You don’t have an accent.” And I’m like, yeah, but when I go home, I slip back into it and like, I can get lazy with it. We worked with the vocal coach, Kate Wilson, who is just incredible, who teaches at Juilliard, who sort of did a kind of overhaul meeting. Victoria really leaned into that because it really made sense for Cherry. So it was like down to that. But I was like, I don’t want them to have these over-the-top Texas accents because it’s not really Dallas. Growing up, certain friends of mine dressed more Texas than others. I didn’t grow up wearing cowboy boots. But I had friends that did. So I think it was really going with each character, honing in on what is their style, how to how “Texas” do they dress?
The most important thing was Texas is very tradition and ritual based. There were inductions that I had growing up as a woman. I was explaining all this to Lily Houghton, she was like, “What?” And I’m like, yeah. Like it’s very tradition, ritual based. You think it only exists in sororities, [but] I was experiencing that in high school, in my female dynamics. And this want to belong to that ritual and be a part of the nostalgia and history of the women that came before - that was like a big part of, I think, what the movie is about.
Alex Rollins Berg: This edition of Underexposed is about cult movies. Forbidden Fruits feels like a “cult” movie in a few ways. Obviously, it deals with this coven, cult-type hierarchy, but also aesthetically, it seems to draw on what we think of as cult movies - exploitation or B-movie kind of stuff. No movie is born a cult movie, of course, but were you at all consciously influenced by any cult movies?
Meredith Alloway: I wasn’t consciously, like, “I want to make a cult classic movie,” that’s an impossible bar to set on yourself. That’s like making a movie and being like, “I’m going to win an Academy Award.” It’s not what it’s about. You can’t control how people are going to perceive your movie. All you can do is control, to the best of your ability, especially in indie film, the story you’re telling.
Alex Rollins Berg: Are you in any movie cults around any movies that you couldn’t share with us?
Meredith Alloway: Oh, man. I mean, yeah. My Own Private Idaho. I love this movie so much. I’ve got like, sweatshirts. I am part of the My Own Private Idaho River Phoenix fan club cult for sure.
It’s so imperfect, like, it’s a Shakespearean tale meets a queer love story meets a road trip meets like a trauma movie, all cobbled together. And I love that because you can watch it every few years and see something new that you didn’t notice before.
I love movies like that. Daisies was a big influence on Forbidden Fruits, and I just got my Criterion BluRay at the big Criterion sale. I think, to your point, you can’t control what is and what isn’t a cult classic, but it is funny how movies somehow tap into the zeitgeist 30 years down the road for whatever reason is happening in society, or cultural trends or whatever. There are a lot of movies - like Jennifer’s Body is a perfect example - that sort of have circled back because it was tapping into something timeless. And I do love movies like that. Maybe a cult classic is something that is timeless, you know?
Alex Rollins Berg: Jennifer’s Body is amazing. A number of my students, so many of them, bring in scenes from Jennifer’s Body. You know, these are kids who are born not that long ago. And that’s the way I can sort of gauge their tastes, but also understand the legacy of some of these films that didn’t get an appropriate reaction when they were first released.
Meredith Alloway: I mean, American Psycho. Yeah. American Psycho is the perfect example of, “people didn’t get that.” It was at Sundance and people were like, “What?” And that was a huge influence on Fruits, just from a performance perspective, with the cast.
Any time you’re doing satire, it’s all so tricky. It’s a really hard genre to nail because you’re kind of observing something from the outside in.I didn’t make my job easy, and I have no idea if I succeeded, but I think that I, I do love films that sort of, have a sense of humor about something that’s going on that’s otherwise kind of too dark to just look out without some candy coated glam going on.
Alex Rollins Berg: Yeah, well, I love how ambitious it is, and how - in the best way, like My Own Private Idaho - how cobbled together it feels. There are moments that shift tones completely. I won’t go into the ending, but the endings being one of them, one of many.
I wanted to ask you about Shudder. Shudder has sort of cultivated, speaking of cult, a viewership, a brand that a lot of people see as a mark of distinction. What was it was like to work with them on the release of this film?
Meredith Alloway: Yeah. IFC and Shudder came on really early, before we made the movie. We sort of pieced it together with distribution deals and a rebate and other sort of EP’s and, you know, I think about the movie Revenge, Coralie [Fargeat]’s film that Shudder acquired. I remember seeing the imagery from that plastered across the platform and social media. What an incredible movie to get behind. They really champion subversive films, and also just new voices. You know, it’s really hard out there. A lot of people don’t want to take risks on that. They don’t want to spend the money. And I think that Shudder and IFC really helped, because they did see cuts of the movie. So they were very involved in things. And really, it was an amazing experience to trust the type of movies that they brought into existence. And even just the team at IFC, I was a journalist for like a decade, so a lot of them I had known for years, and that was really special to work with them. But, you know, I think you want a partner who’s going to say, “Hey, this isn’t clear,” or “Hey, we know what your intention is, and that’s not coming through.” And there were a lot of conversations like that. So, yeah, it’s an honor to be a part of the Shudder and IFC family.
Where to Watch Forbidden Fruits
Still playing in select theaters! Go see it this weekend.
That’s all for the free edition. Paid subscribers get access to a bonus video, Meredith Alloway’s Underexposed Guest Pick, and this week’s edition of Off The Shelf.
