When “Jennifer’s Body” screened at Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, the Oscar-winning writer, Diablo Cody knew something was wrong. “I realized in that moment that nobody got it,” she tells Variety. “That sickening feeling, and I don’t mean sickening in the positive way people use it now.”
Sixteen years later, Cody produced “Forbidden Fruits,” a witchy, female-led dark comedy now in theaters. It premiered at South by Southwest earlier this month to the kind of reception she once could only imagine. “Hearing people in the audience at South understanding the movie was really healing for me,” she says. “Even though I didn’t make this film.”
Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried in “Jennifer’s Body.”
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Early audiences are now invoking “Jennifer’s Body,” “The Craft” and “Forbidden Fruits” in the same breath. This time, the comparisons are a compliment, and as Cody says, “the room is getting it.”
Cody came on board alongside producing partner Mason Novick after hearing a pitch from first-time feature director Meredith Alloway and playwright Lily Houghton that she describes as “one of the most imaginative, fleshed out, exhaustive, magical pitches I’ve ever heard.” She didn’t need long to decide. “We hung up the Zoom and immediately we’re like, we have to do this. This is what we do.”
The pitch came before the script existed. Cody and Novick told Alloway and Houghton to go write it, and they did, developing it over several years before cameras rolled. Cody’s fingerprints are on those drafts somewhere, though she didn’t recall a specific part of the story. As a self-described creative producer, her focus is story above all else: reading every draft, flagging what isn’t working, drawing on decades of experience in a storytelling space to know intuitively when the rules are being followed and when they should be broken. “I’m always all about the script,” she says. “That’s my area of expertise, period.”
What Cody and Novick do, specifically, is a sub-genre Hollywood has long dismissed: the female-led satirical horror comedy, sharp-tongued and unapologetically weird. After “Jennifer’s Body” grossed just $31.6 million against its $16 million production budget, marking it as a box office flop, Cody didn’t get to make another horror comedy until “Lisa Frankenstein.” “If I had pitched something like ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ right after ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ people would have said, you tried that. It flopped,” she says.
Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse in “Lisa Frankenstein”
©Focus Features/Courtesy Everet
What the industry missed, and what the internet eventually corrected, was that the audience was always there. It just had nowhere to gather. Tumblr subcultures, queer online spaces and the slow but steady accumulation of women saying publicly what they had long felt privately rewrote the film’s legacy and impact. When films like “Bottoms” arrived in 2023 and found its audience almost entirely through online queer communities, it confirmed what Cody had long suspected. The infrastructure had finally caught up to the stories. “Girls and women didn’t necessarily have the public spaces to discuss what they were going through at the time,” she says. “The people who love this kind of thing needed to find each other.”
However, there was also the matter of what Hollywood was willing to greenlight and how it chose to sell it. When “Jennifer’s Body” was in production, Cody says the team had to fight just to keep a single kiss in the film. The studio’s eventual marketing campaign angled the movie toward a male audience, obscuring the very dynamic that made it resonate with women. “The assignment is understood,” she says of the “Forbidden Fruits” campaign, an important contrast to what came before.
Lili Reinhart as Apple, left, Victoria Pedretti as Cherry and Alexandra Shipp as Fig in “Forbidden Fruits.”
sabrina lantos
Cody describes the film itself as “aesthetic coquette, toxic female friendship, deep, biblical, intellectual sauce.” The casting, she adds, was everything. “This is a very sparkly cast,” she says, and credits the strength of the material for attracting the right talent both in front of and behind the camera. “If the material is strong enough, you can attract the appropriate talent and go from there. But movies like this don’t get made without the right people involved.”
What strikes her most is that for all its reverence for the genre, it feels genuinely new. “It feels like Lily did something new with the narrative, and that is very unusual. At no point would I know where that movie is going.” She hopes audiences leave the theater feeling the same way: “invigorated and inspired.”
On the question of whether the zeitgeist is ready for more movies like this, Cody is nothing but hopeful. “There has never been a better time to tell these stories,” she says. “The audience is there now.”
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