It’s the most wonderful time of the year for horror lovers – especially those who are subscribed to more than one streaming service. While the new arrivals on Netflix so far this October have been awesome, Prime Video has a scary supernatural story that belongs on your watch list. Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy for Blumhouse Productions, House of Spoils follows an ambitious chef who leaves her disempowering job to open a new restaurant at a remote location. What sounds like a dream come true quickly moves into nightmare territory as “a haunting presence threatens to sabotage her at every turn.”
Ariana DeBose Stars as Chef in New Supernatural Horror Story
Ariana DeBose is known to the audience only as Chef. She’s introduced after House of Spoils opens with a sickly woman lying on a rock outside, eating a mashed-up, red concoction resembling internal organs and blood. Around her, spooky voices chant, “Feed the soil!” The story then takes us to the kitchen of a fancy restaurant where Chef has quit her job to start fresh at a new elite eatery opening in a remote location. Her old boss, Marcello tells the young woman that she’ll surely fail, making her all the more determined to succeed.
At her new workplace, Chef meets the owner, Andres, who informs her that a high-profile culinary legend named Magnus held the position before her, but ultimately dropped out. He insists Chef fire his friend, Lucia, as a sous chef to help her create a sample menu for one of the restaurant’s biggest donors. Upon discovering bugs in the kitchen, Chef wants to cancel, but Andres insists the show must go on. An acclaimed food critic bashes the new hire’s “unoriginal” menu, but when Andres threatens to fire her, Chef begs for two weeks to prove herself.
Behind the kitchen, she finds an overgrown garden where a vision of an old woman urges her to “feed the soil.” Chef turns back to her work creating a new menu, and takes a bite from an old tomato she had found outside while fighting frustration. To her surprise, the produce is delicious; she immediately heads outside to gather more ingredients inspiring her to come up with dishes that are “earthy, witchy, wild and feminine” as Decider puts it. In this process, Chef finds herself naturally shifting out of the hypermasculine attitude she adopted working under critical Marcello at her past job.
Who Is the Creepy Man Spotted in the Woods?
As things seem to be going in Chef’s favor, one of her staff notices a man stumbling around the nearby woods, noting that he could be looking for the witch who owns the property. The employee tells his boss that she had “a coven of women that did witchy stuff in the woods together,” including alleged human sacrifices. Chef admits to seeing her ghost in the garden but doesn’t believe the woman has bad intent. In fact, she believes the witch’s spirit wants to see her succeed, and even adopts a symbol she saw in the garden as her logo.
Chef wins Andres over with her updated menu and they decide to move forward with a soft-launch. Ahead of the event, she finds the man from the woods eating his finger in the kitchen; upon closer inspection, Chef realizes it’s her predecessor, Magnus, who Andres confirms suffered a stress-induced mental breakdown. As Chef’s weird visions continue, she grows paranoid that it was the influence of the witch who drove Magnus mad, so on the night of the family and friends dinner, she orders staff to cook using ingredients from local vendors instead of their own garden.
Lucia quits in protest and the evening turns out to be a disaster, but it’s too late for Andres to cancel opening night. He fires Chef and replaces her with Lucia, then locks the former in the wine cellar for the duration of the dinner so she can’t interfere. As she tries to escape, Chef finds a tunnel behind a bookcase, but is shaken up to discover a dead body is already inside. While trying to back out, the lead character triggers a cave-in and finds herself trapped. While trying to climb over the body, Chef realizes she’s come face-to-face with the witch from her visions earlier in House of Spoils.
‘House of Spoils’ Ending Explained
In the House of Spoils ending, viewers learn what witches were actually doing during their “rituals” via a telepathic vision shown to Chef. The previous owner and her friends did make potions and engage in other witchy behaviors, but only with the intent to heal – not harm. The “blood and guts” shown in the opening scene is revealed to be mashed-up fruit to help the woman who was sick. Without taking time to understand them, the nearby town accused the women of witchcraft and ran them out. One fled to her basement and tried to dig a tunnel to escape but died underground clutching a trowel.
As inventive as ever, Chef uses the same tool to dig her way out. Once above ground she kills a rabbit and stumbles into the restaurant during Lucia’s service to promise more food on the way. Chef cooks the animal on a bonfire outdoors, and while Andres first tries to shut her down, he decides to give her one last chance to save his reputation, which she successfully does. “Chef found a new way to run the restaurant – by embracing femininity, the earth, and yeah, a little bit of blood,” as Decider explains.
