Dish up some ‘culinary horror’

The new culinary horror film “House of Spoils,” starring Ariana DeBose, premiered on Prime Video Thursday. This spooky, witchy movie follows an ambitious fine-dining chef (DeBose) as she starts a new restaurant venture at a farm in rural upstate New York, and encounters the threatening spirits of the cooks who inhabited the gardens and kitchen before her.

Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy (their coastal New England noir “Blow the Man Down” is also available to stream on Prime Video), “House of Spoils” is stylish, atmospheric and entirely unpredictable, anchored by a terrific star turn from DeBose, with Arian Moayed co-starring as her restaurant partner, and Barbie Ferreira as a striving sous-chef. While “House of Spoils” flirts with horror and requires its head chef to dive into some terrifyingly unexpected places, the film has deeper, more interesting things to say about power systems, heritages of knowledge and tapping into one’s own unlikely intuition in order to transcend oppressive notions of how things “should” be.

“House of Spoils” is the perfect kickoff to spooky season this October, and it calls to mind other entries in the somewhat scanty “culinary horror” subgenre, which have started to bubble up with the cultural interest in food and cooking shows that have become popular over the last 20 or so years. The first movie that comes to mind is the 2022 film “The Menu,” directed by Mark Mylod, a dark comedy/satire starring Ralph Fiennes as a stern chef operating an exclusive restaurant on a remote island, where he has assembled a group of diners who will experience a surprising (and violent) dining experience. Stream “The Menu” on Prime Video or rent it on other platforms.

And while the FX series “The Bear” has scooped up a number of awards for “comedy,” the genre hybrid series spans drama/comedy and even touches on horror in some of the depictions of family strife (see the tense Christmas episode, “Fishes”). It also captures the stress and anxiety of working in restaurant kitchens in the same way that “House of Spoils” does. Stream “The Bear” on Hulu.

Another chef-driven film that touches on genre elements is the recent Nicolas Cage vehicle, “Pig.” Cage stars as a former lauded chef who has carved out a quiet life for himself hunting truffles in the Oregon wilderness. When his beloved truffle hunting pig is kidnapped, he goes on a quest to find her and exact revenge. Stream “Pig” on Hulu or Kanopy or rent it on other platforms.

British auteur Peter Greenaway pioneered this unique genre blend with his distinctive 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” starring Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds. This operatic and highly stylized marriage drama plays out in a high-end restaurant, where the wife of a gangster starts an affair with a restaurant regular, unfurling a shocking cavalcade of violence. Stream “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” on Paramount+.

Finally, while it’s not a horror/thriller, the delightful and humorous 1985 Japanese film “Tampopo” flirts with genre-hopping in this celebration of all things ramen. In a series of loosely connected vignettes, the film nods to the Western, and other familiar genres, in this sensual celebration of food. Make sure you have some ramen at the ready. Stream it on Max, the Criterion Channel, or rent it on iTunes.