A Fairly Spooky new offering from Amazon Studios within the Genre of Horror
It is an incredible time to be alive as we watch these different companies such as Amazon, Hulu and Apple tv enter the film industry with their own studios, giving us new creations, talent, and productions procured for audiences directly to our global living rooms.
Enter House Of Spoils, a spooky new offering from Amazon Studios within the genre of horror. Directors Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy somewhat shook the audience this week (including myself) at Fantastic Fest 2024 in Austin Texas with this spine-chilling tale, which was only shown on the big screen once and will be released on the Amazon Prime streaming service on October 3rd.
After the film screened, the producers and the main cast got up on stage for a Q&A in true Fantastic Fest style. The director shared some of the creative processes therein and it was wonderful to get an inside look through their words about their on-set experiences: The building/renovating the crew had to do on the set (the haunted house), the creative process of the actors, and the fact that this wasn’t even originally intended to be a “Witch flick”.
House of Spoils is reasonably successful. It has a lot of fun whilst also giving the viewer sweaty palms from its high-stakes and proverbial edge-of-your-seat scares. Centered around a young can-do Chef (played by thespian Ariana DeBose), the film takes viewers on an exhilarating ride as Ariana’s character tries to meet the expectations of her bougie investors in setting up a high-profile fine-dining restaurant with uniquely procured menu ingredients. We follow our protagonist as she struggles to create this experience for the upper echelon of the gastronomic world to attend.
I loved the blend of horror with this culinary arts theme and DeBose wins audience buy-in from the get-go. We want to see her succeed.
The film offers a unique twist which I will not reveal, but that which injects a fresh direction for the story and it becomes clear at that twist that we were intentionally misdirected from the start about the evil that lurks. Where traditional movies in this genre might end in tragedy with a horrific bloody climax, House of Spoils did something different and I felt it worked splendidly.
Why I say earlier that the film was only reasonably successful, is because while I truly enjoyed the movie, I did hear others complain about the said weird twist at the end and I do see where they are coming from. Furthermore, nobody actually even dies in the movie. I am therefore not surprised that the film doesn’t seem to have landed with many horror purists.
Despite these facts, House of Spoils is still definitely worth a watch at home on Prime regardless. Feel free to write me at @jordi_rad on Instagram and let me know your thoughts on it!