Loved ‘Forbidden Fruits’? 5 Movies to Add to Your Pink Horror Watch List
By Dread Central
5 min read“Pink horror” describes media exploring the social pressures women face through blood and guts. Check out five horror movies about just that.
“Pink horror” describes media exploring the social pressures women face through blood and guts. Check out five horror movies about just that.
If you’re now a card-carrying member of Forbidden Fruits hive, pour a little bubbly and enjoy the following pink horror films. These movies aren’t just women-fronted horror, but movies with that sickly sweet, pink-tinged aesthetic. They smell like Victoria’s Secret body spray and remind you that going through a borderline homoerotic toxic frenemy era is a canon event.
We can’t talk about Forbidden Fruits without talking about another modern horror classic that centers women’s magic: The Love Witch. It’s peak pink horror because the film shows a constant tug-of-war between Elaine decentering men and falling back into her boy-crazy ways — a central tension in Forbidden Fruits.
Pink is also a literal motif in The Love Witch. Elaine is dressed in all pink when she meets her landlord at the tea room and delivers a crucial line that tells you everything about her journey as a woman: “The day he left me was the day that I died and was reborn… as a witch.” Watching Elaine lean into her dark feminine energy in a room awash in pink florals is peak pink horror.
If there is a godmother of pink horror movies, it may very well be Jennifer’s Body. Female revenge emerges as a theme in Forbidden Fruits, and it’s also present in Jennifer’s Body. And again, this entry into the pink horror canon has a strong visual aesthetic. Pink is everywhere: The singed tongue of Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) when she proclaims, “I am a God,” or her pink-and-red-heart track jacket as she flounces through the school hallways.
I always think of the early scene of Jennifer’s room as emblematic of everything to love about this movie: Here we have a demon chilling in her room with salmon walls, a magenta lightshade, a cutesy bedspread, and an emo boy band up on the wall. Then, boom: We get one of the most iconic pink horror movie title cards since Rosemary’s Baby.
Also, in a full circle moment for pink horror, Diablo Cody, who wrote and produced Jennifer’s Body, produced Forbidden Fruits as well.
If Darren Aronofsky did one good thing, it was giving us the gold-standard crashout queen movie of the 2010s: Black Swan. This psychological horror film astutely depicts the pressures women face, especially in visual industries like modeling, acting, or performing arts. Women’s brains become a monster of their own making, and that is horrific enough.
The Black Swan aesthetic is very much “girlhood depression,” and one of the eeriest lines of the film touches on this visual theme explicitly. “Look how pink! So pretty,” Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) croons, romanticizing the mere grapefruit that will make up her food intake for the day.
For better or for worse, this trending Black Swan audio has endured among cinephile girls on social media for the longest time, which shows just how hard Aronofsky’s pink horror film hits 15 years later.
Can you girlboss too close to the sun? This is the question that Forbidden Fruits asks; ditto with this film. And so much of The Substance is literally pink: Sue’s plush lips, the diluted blood passing over white tiles into the drain, Monstro Elisasue painfully oozing corporeal form. The most noteworthy instance of pink in this pink horror film is the cut-out, glittery latex bodysuit Sue wears in The Substance.
While so many of the close-ups on Sue’s body, especially in this outfit, have made a lot of viewers uncomfortable, it was all crucial. Like everything in Fargeat’s film, the bodysuit feels like a direct jab at the overbearing social directives about what is beautiful or desirable.
Top notes: Rainwater and white liquor. Middle note: Dirty chlorine. Bottom notes: Sweat and that faint powdery scent all drugstore makeup has. This is what Bodies Bodies Bodies smells like. Reijn’s murder-in-the-dark game movie is one part playful, two parts sinister.
After watching both films, it’s clear that Forbidden Fruits and Bodies Bodies Bodies are cut from the same sexy, terrifying cloth. Stranded in a mansion during a hurricane, an all-star cast of messy bitches go a little stir-crazy and end up majorly violent. Sound familiar?
And of course, pink is a pervasive theme in Reijn’s film. From Pete Davidson’s pink hoodie, to the toxic lesbian subplot, to the cattiness that turns lethal, Bodies Bodies Bodies is pink horror at its finest. Because what’s more pink horror than a slumber party gone horribly wrong?
