It’s the season of witch. The skies are grey, the temperature is dropping, and leaves are starting to fall. It is the perfect time of year to throw on a spooky psychological horror film and be spirited away. A recent offering is Prime Video’s House of Spoils, starring Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose as a talented and driven chef who is given her chance to open her own restaurant. Of course, the location selected starts to have a profound reaction to DeBose’s presence, haunting her dreams and disrupting her craft.
You may have seen writer/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy’s brilliant first feature, Blow the Man Down, which debuted on Amazon Prime Video back in 2020. While that film is fully immersed in New England maritime culture, there are many similarities between the characters in their first and second features. “We really want to tell stories of invisible women,” Krudy tells me. “With [House of Spoils], it was about the invisible women are pushed to the edges of society which are our witches. They are deemed invisible or sort of don’t belong, and we want to reclaim that archetype or at least invite you to see it differently.”
By casting Ariana DeBose, Krudy and Savage Cole also invite you to see another side to the multi-talented Ariana DeBose. “I loved that it was a character that did not sing or dance. I was like ‘Oh my gosh thank you for thinking of me that doesn’t require that skill set,” she told me. She also loved the script’s inclusion of the occult and the references to current gender politics. “It’s subtle but it’s so there. It’s perfectly couched in the culinary world. Its been publicly noted that there had been issues and that things are hopefully getting better, but there’s still a lot to work on – not unlike the entertainment industry.”
Watch my interviews with Ariana DeBose and Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy below.
