Deadline’s review of They Will Kill You closed with an observation that deserved its own article. Tucked into the final paragraph, the critic mentioned that the film caps off “a fun theme of sisters taking on cults, which popped up over the past week in Ready or Not 2, Forbidden Fruits and Seekers of Infinite Love.“
That sentence ran once, and nobody picked it up. No trend piece. No follow-up. Nothing. That’s what this is. And the timing couldn’t be better, two of those four SXSW 2026 horror movies, They Will Kill You and Forbidden Fruits, open in theaters this Friday (March 27).
This isn’t a coincidence of programming. Four horror films, one festival, the same structural obsession. All of them asked what happens when an institution, a cult, a wealthy family network, a doomsday sect, a coven’s internal hierarchy, uses female bonds as either a weapon or a target. Horror fans watching the SXSW lineup roll out had a front-row seat to a week-long meditation on sisterhood under siege.
Four Films, One Pressure Point
The films each approach the template differently, which is exactly what makes the pattern interesting.
In Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, Grace and her estranged sister Faith are hunted by four rival Satanic elite families competing for a seat of power. The sisterhood here is the target. Two working-class women dropped into a killing field run by the obscenely wealthy. The class critique is right on the surface; the film doesn’t bother hiding it.
They Will Kill You flips it. Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) takes a maid job at a Manhattan high-rise specifically to get close to her estranged sister Maria, who’s been absorbed into a Satanic cult of wealthy elites who use their working-class staff as offerings. The sisterhood here is the motivation, the fuel that drives Asia through a building full of people trying to kill her.
Same class structure as Ready or Not 2, different angle. The Muschietti-produced New Line/Warner Bros. release (the first film out of their Nocturna banner) hits the same “eat the rich” nerve, but the emotional register is warmer.
Forbidden Fruits does something stranger with the setup. Apple (Lili Reinhart) runs a witch coven out of the basement of a mall clothing store. The institution here is the sisterhood, and the story is about what happens when a new member, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), refuses to accept someone else’s definition of what that bond means. This Diablo Cody-produced, IFC/Shudder release, directed by Meredith Alloway and adapted from a stage play, inverts the whole thing. The power structure being interrogated isn’t external. It’s internal. Apple built the cult; the film is about whether she can survive someone questioning it. Read the full Forbidden Fruits SXSW review for a deeper look at how Alloway executes that premise.
Then there’s Seekers of Infinite Love, the quietest of the four. Three siblings set out to rescue their youngest sister from a doomsday cult. No class satire, no slapstick. Family as the corrective force against institutional capture. Same skeleton as the others, stripped to its emotional core.
All four involve a closed power structure, wealthy, hierarchical, or self-appointed, trying to control, exploit, or define what female bonds are worth. That’s the thread.
What Horror Is Working Through Right Now
The “eat the rich” current in horror isn’t new. Get Out, Ready or Not, The Menu, Parasite, Barbarian, there’s a clear lineage running back several years. What SXSW 2026’s horror movies added to that conversation is the foregrounding of female solidarity, specifically as the force that resists the machine. Not a lone survivor. Not a final girl in isolation. A bond. Sisters, literal or chosen.
And if you want a fifth data point, Deadline’s SXSW roundup called Pretty Lethal “an emotionally satisfying story of sisterhood” in the same festival week. Five films. Same festival. Same pulse running through all of them.
Horror has always been good at catching an anxiety before it fully surfaces. Whether audiences are working through something about institutional trust, about who gets to define loyalty, about whose bonds get protected and whose get exploited, these films seem to be circling the same question from four different directions. That’s rarely accidental.
The genuinely unusual part is that They Will Kill You and Forbidden Fruits both land in theaters on the same Friday. Two very different takes on sisterhood and institutional power, opening the same weekend. Horror audiences have a rare chance to see the same cultural nerve hit twice in one weekend, once in a blood-soaked Manhattan high-rise, once in a mall basement that smells like new clothes and bad intentions.