Working at a mall was once, during peak in-person retail culture at least, a rite of passage. In places where mall culture is alive and well, it still is. There are mall politics – shops that are more coveted to work in and places in the food court where it’s more popular to eat your lunch. This teenage mall hierarchy is explored in the new American comedy horror film, Forbidden Fruits, starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Alexandra Shipp and Emma Chamberlain. In it, the actresses play retail workers (who all have fruit names and represent a different season of the retail cycle) who sell overpriced clothes at a boutique in a Dallas shopping mall, Free Eden, by day. At night, they run a witchy femme cult in the basement. 

The mall in Forbidden Fruits is the same one as in the early 2000s classic Mean Girls – there’s even another pivotal scene that takes place at the mall fountain. And, in many ways, Forbidden Fruits does have the makings of the quintessential teen comedy that defined the early aughts. Like in Mean Girls, here are ‘rules’ that they have to abide by in order to be in the coven, along with an icy and controlling man-hating ringleader, Apple, who’s played by Reinhart. The film’s stylist, Sarah McMillan, even dressed the girls in classic mall brands, combining designer vintage with pieces from Hot Topic, American Eagle and Reformation. “All of it is filtered through the mall,” she says. “They work in the mall; they’re campy.” 

The magic in Forbidden Fruits also harkens back to Jennifer's Body-style level of teenage camp horror. For example, the girls all wring their their underwear, combined with tears, into a cowboy boot for the new recruit from Sister Salt’s, an unfashionable pretzel shop, Pumpkin (who’s played by Tung), to drink as an initiation. Also, they confess their sins to a changing room mirror and hex people’s boyfriends. 

The film is based on a play by Lily Houghton called “Of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her we all die”. Ultimately, it’s about sisterhood. There’s the obvious biblical Garden of Eden reference, and ties to the mythological figure Lilith throughout, with Apple’s license plate reading “6LILITH6”. In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Lilith began as a winged demon, but medieval Jewish texts reimagined her as Adam’s first wife, one made from the same earth and who refused to be subservient to him. When Lilith left Eden, she was replaced by Eve. More recently, after Lilith was found by the feminists in the 1970s, Lilith has become a symbol of autonomy. Only the so-called ‘autonomy’ that all the fruits in the film have is still based within the structure of the mall, and entirely dictated by Apple. 

“Being a witch is being a sister; they’re sort of synonymous,” Meredith Alloway, the director of Forbidden Fruits, told Dazed ahead of the film’s release at SXSW on March 16. She also called oppression and witchcraft “synonymous”, nodding to the Salem witch trials. “These women are trying to support each other, but they’re also trying to build a garden in a cement parking lot, a capitalist place.” When asked if Apple is running a coven or a cult, Alloway says it’s up to the audience to decide. In the film, they didn’t set out to focus on labelling what type of witchcraft these women were doing; it was more about the characters’ journeys themselves, and how they relate to one another. But of course, in recent years, especially, the witch has become a powerful feminist figure – it’s why the phrase “we are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” often does the rounds on social media. 

Being a witch is being a sister; they’re sort of synonymous. These women are trying to support each other, but they’re also trying to build a garden in a cement parking lot, a capitalist place

“We are living in systems that have oppressed women, and it’s because they are scared of what we can do, particularly when we get together,” says Alloway. “When making a film, I need a yearning for an answer and, for this, I think it was really an answer of how women could maybe heal me, and my grief.” Throughout the process, Houghton and Alloway connected over being part of the “dead dads club”, which is something everyone but Fig (played by Victoria Pedretti) connects over in the film. While watching it, you get the sense that these girls could help each other if they were honest with one another. “All these women are trying to spare people from their own shit, and if they only shared that with each other, I think none of the chaos would ensue,” she says. Yet, the end of Forbidden Fruits does get very chaotic, all while never really leaving the mall. 

Alloway herself has long worn a Lilith signet ring from Awe Inspired, which released a collection with the film on March 26, which includes a tooth pendant (you’ll get the reference when you watch the movie), poison vial necklace, snake in the garden ring, spiked heart locket and Lilith pendant. The brand’s ethos around the collaboration is perhaps captured best with this: the figures we were taught to fear are often the ones most worth becoming. “I think people connect to Lilith because she was too tempting and had too much power, so they were like ‘Get her out of here, let’s get Eve in here,’” says Alloway. “What does that do to your psyche as a young woman to believe you are the origin of sin? Well, as you get older, you can be like, ‘That’s so cunty’.”

Forbidden Fruits is out now. The ‘Awe x Forbidden Fruits’ collaboration is also available now.