‘House Of Spoils’ Star Ariana DeBose On Her New Culinary Horror Film
From The Menu to Flux Gourmet, culinary horror is having a moment. The kitchen is a chaotic and terrifying environment already, so it only makes sense to use it as a backdrop for even more explicit horrors. The latest entry in culinary horror is co-writers and co-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy‘s House Of Spoils. Starring Ariana DeBose and Arian Moayed, this film focuses on a female chef trying to navigate the kitchen and supernatural forces.
In the film:
House of Spoils follows an ambitious chef (Ariana DeBose) as she opens a restaurant on a remote estate where she battles kitchen chaos, crushing self-doubts… and a haunting presence who threatens to sabotage her at every turn.
Krudy, Savage Cole, DeBose, and Moayed spoke with Dread Central about training as a chef, the similarities between chefs and filmmakers, and the trials and tribulations of eating on set.
Dread Central: My mom’s a chef, so I was very excited to see a movie about a female chef. We don’t see a lot of that. So why were you guys drawn to the culinary world and chefs in general when writing House of Spoils?
Danielle Krudy: The journey of a chef is a lot like the journey of a filmmaker.
DC: I never thought about that.
DK: It’s art and commerce. We’re talking like broad strokes, obviously.
Bridget Savage Cole: We worked in restaurants for years, many years, but we think of food and making food as a creative expression that many people can relate to, and we really wanted to write a movie about finding your voice. So using a chef was a way that we can bring a lot of our personal experiences as filmmakers and the crazy work environments we’ve been in and how we’re trying to do better and heal and do things our way. We really identified with reading a lot of biographies of chefs and what they were up against and what it felt like on the inside and then outside. I mean it’s really the internal struggles as well as the external forces working against you.
DC: The stories my mom tells are wild about the casual things people say to you in the kitchen. Well, do you guys have restaurant experience?
Ariana DeBose: I grew up in dance studios. But no, I fully acknowledge I was one of the privileged few that when I got to New York, I found other ways like bartering and cleaning dance studios as opposed to actually having to get a different kind of a job. It worked out for me.
Arian Moayed: My mom cooked all the time and so many times it was just me and my mom. So at a very young age she would teach me how to cut onions and I was always like her pseudo sous chef. I absolutely love cooking.
DC: Ariana, what was it like for you playing a chef and getting into that head space?
AD: It was very stressful, which I think it’s kind of par for the course. No, I will be honest. I watched a lot of footage. I didn’t necessarily read a ton, that I didn’t find helpful to me in my work, but I trained with Chef Ayesha [Nurdjaja]. She was incredible. That was horrifying for me. But for her, I know probably very entertaining, but I now have real knife skills, which is amazing.
DC: That’s no joke, either!
AD: She started to put me on the line and I was like, “No, thank you. No, no, no, no, no, no.” Some days I’m like, could I do that? I don’t know. But no, I trained all throughout making the film as well. Wow.
DC: So instead of having to do workouts, you did knife skill workouts.
AD: I have such respect for chefs and anyone in the culinary industry. It’s very intense. And I’ve never had more blisters on my hands. My lower back has never hurt the way it hurt making House of Spoils, but it was very cool. Also, there’s a dance-like energy that’s happening in the kitchen. So I could look at my scene work in the kitchen as a dance, which is really fun for me. It’s very heightened and the stakes are very high. Especially in our movie.
DC: What was it like working with the food stylist?
DK: Well, we want to call her a food creator. She’s another author in the movie. Her name is Zoe Hegedus and she’s Hungarian. And she really came from character and story, crafting a whole menu that changes as Chef changes. And she brought so much attention to detail and authenticity and care for every element.
BSC: It was really fun because as Chef grew, I could use the food as inspiration. We were growing together.
DC: Did you eat a lot on set?
DK: Movie sets are hard to eat on. You’re eating over a trash can, to quote one of our producers, most of the time. It’s like some low-brow stuff.
AD: I think I ran on coffee and sugar-free Red Bull.
BSC: By the time you’re done shooting with it, it’s like this tepid temperature.
AD: We did eat one day on set because, in the opening sequence, Chef is making sirloins. I think we went through 90 sirloins and then we fed the crew with them. I made a great deal of those and I think I did pretty well. Honestly, I make a mean sirloin and it takes a lot for me to want to make meat. So if I’m making you a steak, then you better appreciate it. I don’t whip that out for just anybody. [Laughs]
House Of Spoils is available now exclusively on Prime Video.
Categorized:Interviews
