The new culinary horror film “House of Spoils,” starring Ariana DeBose, premieres on Prime Video Oct. 3. This spooky, witchy movie follows an ambitious fine-dining chef (DeBose) as she starts a new restaurant venture at a farm in rural upstate New York, and encounters the threatening spirits of the cooks who inhabited the gardens and kitchen before her.
Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy (their coastal New England noir “Blow the Man Down” is also available to stream on Prime Video), “House of Spoils” is stylish, atmospheric and entirely unpredictable, anchored by a terrific star turn from DeBose, with Arian Moayed co-starring as her restaurant partner, and Barbie Ferreira as a striving sous-chef. While “House of Spoils” flirts with horror and requires its head chef to dive into some terrifyingly unexpected places, the film has deeper, more interesting things to say about power systems, heritages of knowledge and tapping into one’s own unlikely intuition in order to transcend oppressive notions of how things “should” be. “House of Spoils” is the perfect kickoff to spooky season this October, and it calls to mind other entries in the somewhat scanty “culinary horror” subgenre, which have started to bubble up with the cultural interest in food and cooking shows that have become popular over the last 20 or so years.
The first movie that comes to mind is the 2022 film “The Menu,” directed by Mark Mylod, a dark comedy/sa.
