When “Jennifer’s Body” was shown in Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody knew something was wrong. “At that moment I realized no one got it,” she says. Diversity. “That disgusting feeling, and I don’t mean disgusting in the positive way that people are used to now.”
Sixteen years later, Cody produced “Forbidden Fruits,” a quirky, female-led dark comedy now in theaters. It premiered at South by Southwest earlier this month and received the kind of reception she could only have imagined. “It was really a relief for me to have people in the South understanding the film,” she says, “even though I didn’t make the film.”
Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried in “Jennifer’s Body”.
Fox Atomic/Cobble/Shutterstock
Early viewers are now mentioning “Jennifer’s Body,” “The Craft” and “Forbidden Fruits” in the same breath. This time, the comparisons are appreciative, and as Cody says, “the room is getting it.”
Cody came on board with producing partner Mason Novick after hearing a pitch from first-time feature director Meredith Alloway and playwright Lily Haughton, which he described as “one of the most imaginative, elaborate, detailed, magical pitches I’ve ever heard.” It didn’t take him long to decide. “We turned off Zoom and immediately we were like, we have to do this. This is what we do.”
The pitch came even before the script existed. Cody and Novick asked Alloway and Haughton to write it, and they did so, developing it over several years before the cameras came up. Cody’s fingerprints are somewhere on those drafts, although he does not remember any specific part of the story. As a self-described creative producer, his focus is on the story above all else: reading every draft, flagging what isn’t working, drawing on decades of experience in storytelling to intuitively know when the rules are being followed and when they should be broken. “I’m always thinking about the script,” she says. “That’s my area of expertise, period.”
What Cody and Novick do, in particular, is a subgenre that Hollywood has long rejected: the female-led satirical horror comedy, sharp-tongued and unapologetically weird. “Jennifer’s Body” grossed only $31.6 million against its $16 million production budget, marking it as a box office flop, with Cody not getting a chance to make another horror comedy until “Lisa Frankenstein”. She says, “If I had put out something like ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ immediately after ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ people would have said, You tried that. That flopped.”
Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse in “Lisa Frankenstein”
©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett
What the industry missed, and what the Internet ultimately corrected, was that the audience was always there. There was nowhere to collect it. The Tumblr subculture, queer online spaces, and the slow but steady accumulation of women saying publicly what they had long felt in private rewrote the film’s legacy and influence. When films like “Bottoms” came out in 2023 and found audiences almost entirely through online gay communities, it confirmed what Cody had long suspected. The infrastructure finally caught up with the stories. “Girls and women didn’t necessarily have a public space to discuss what they were going through at that time,” she says. “People who love this kind of thing need to find each other.”
However, it was also a matter of what Hollywood wanted to greenlight and how they decided to sell it. When “Jennifer’s Body” was in production, Cody says the team struggled to keep just one kiss in the film. The studio’s final marketing campaign steered the film toward male audiences, obscuring the dynamics that made it resonate among women. “The assignment made sense,” she says of the “Forbidden Fruits” campaign, “which is a significant contrast from the campaign that came before.”
Lili Reinhart as Apple, left, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry and Alexandra Shipp as Fig in “Forbidden Fruits.”
Sabrina Lantos
Cody described the film as “beautiful coquettes, toxic female friendships, deep, biblical, intellectual sauce.” She further says that casting was everything. “It’s a terrific cast,” she says, crediting the strength of the material for attracting the right talent both in front of and behind the camera. “If the content is strong enough, you can attract the right talent and go from there. But movies like this don’t get made without the right people involved.”
What impresses him most is that despite all his reverence for the genre, it actually feels new. “It feels like Lilly has done something new with the story, and that’s very unusual. At no point will I know where that movie is going.” He hopes audiences will leave the theater feeling the same way: “excited and inspired.”
As to whether the zeitgeist is ready for more films like this, Cody is optimistic. “There has never been a better time to tell these stories,” she says. “The audience is there now.”
