House of Spoils sees Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose facing a chef's worst nightmare. Her newly opened restaurant is plagued by chaos as the spirit of the building's previous owner haunts the kitchen, determined to sabotage her success. With a unique blend of food, horror, and female empowerment, the film explores the dark side of culinary perfectionism.

FILMHOUNDS spoke to directors and writers Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy about the importance of representation within the horror genre, the inspiration for the food sequences, and the development of the film's protagonist, Chef.

What was your approach to filming and editing around the food? I found myself almost relating it to body horror—perhaps food horror.

Bridget Savage Cole: We thought about what our relationship is to the food. We really tried to think of it from a storytelling perspective, like the food essentially being Chef's journey. Our food stylist—who we call food creator because she really stepped into an authorial role here—Zoe Hedges, really helped us find a journey for Chef's voice as a cook, and also her specific nightmares. This is a chef's nightmare film, so the food is disgusting and horrific, it's this sort of repulsion. Also, a draw for her is something she has to go through in order to let go of her perfectionism.

You both have backgrounds in cooking. How did you inject your own experience with that into the film?

Danielle Krudy: Spoiler alert, Bridget and I—we're not the best chefs around, right? We like cooking, but it was more we worked in restaurants as servers and bartenders. But we had had the experience of working in some really nice restaurants, so it did feel like we knew the world. We read about women chefs. We read a lot of women chefs' biographies as we were doing our research and we started seeing a lot of ourselves in these journeys to be chefs and to self-realise and to run businesses. It was less of a straight line, we love food, but it was more of this arc that we were into, this journey that a chef goes on to establish themselves.

In recent years, we've seen more diverse voices, especially within the horror genre. For House of Spoils, women are front and centre. What does it mean to you to see women represented on screen, especially in horror films?

BSC: That's just what our modus operandi is. We are women, and we grew up loving movies and big tales. A lot of times the models for female characters were side characters and love interests. Our whole ethos as filmmakers is to tell three-dimensional characters that are female, that are messy, that are imperfect, that aren't models, that aren't just the moral voice. We want these messy characters, and that's just something that we would like to see. That's really where we're coming from.

Are there any other female characters in the film world who you particularly took inspiration from when writing Chef, or was it really important that she remained incredibly unique in this piece?

DK: I think that was a lot of the motivation to write this movie. When we were searching for references and searching for types of characters, it actually felt like there was this more narrow spectrum of exactly this. This is such a specific journey to go on, and it is like Bridget said, like a warrior's journey or the hero's journey—of leaving the comfort of your world and being subject to external forces. We really wanted to devote ourselves to crafting a tale that could be just that was important to us on its own, just exist. We were so lucky to have Ariana DeBose, Barbie Ferreira, and all the other people embody these characters and add this other layer to the story. It really came out of just wanting to add another different kind of story to the spectrum out there.

House of Spoils is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.