‘House of Spoils’ Ending Explained: What Happens in Ariana DeBose’s Amazon Movie?

If you’re looking for something witch-y to watch this weekend, look no further than House of Spoils, the new Ariana DeBose supernatural horror movie, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, House of Spoils is the latest horror movie from Blumhouse Productions—so you know it’s going to be good. DeBose stars as the new head chef of her very own restaurant. Unfortunately, opening a new restaurant isn’t easy—especially when the venue is maybe, kind of haunted. Think of this as The Bear, but with a lot more witches, spooks, and feminine energy.

House of Spoils is a fun new horror movie with a feminist message, anchored by a delightful performance from Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose. That said, like most horror movies, the ending is a little muddy. If you got confused, don’t worry—Decider is here to help. Read on for the House of Spoils plot summary, and the House of Spoils ending explained.

Warning: Major spoils for the House of Spoils ahead. You might call this… the house of spoilers. (Sorry.)

House of Spoils plot summary:

The movie opens with spooky voices chanting ominously, “Feed the soil.” We see a sickly woman lying on a rock outside. She is fed a mashed up, red concoction, which looks an awful lot like blood and guts. That doesn’t seem good!

Cut to the kitchen of a fancy restaurant, where we meet our unnamed protagonist played Ariana DeBose, listed only as “Chef” in the credits. Chef quits her job in order to go be the head chef at a new elite restaurant opening in a remote location. Her old boss, Marcello (Marton Csokas) tells her she’ll fail, because she doesn’t have what it takes to be the boss.

Chef meets with Andres (Arian Moayed), the owner of the new restaurant. We learn Chef was a last-minute hire after the previous high-profile chef, Magnus, dropped out. Chef reluctantly agrees to hire Andres’s friend Lucia (Barbie Ferreira) as her sous chef. Andres wants Chef to serve a sample menu to one of the restaurant’s biggest donors before opening. Chef tries to cancel the dinner when she discovers an infestation of bugs in the kitchen, but Andres insists. At the dinner, an acclaimed food critic, Hiral (Amara Karan), criticizes chef for her uninspired, unoriginal menu. Andres threatens to fire Chef, but she begs for two weeks to prove she can do better—and come up with an original menu. He agrees.

Chef discovers a spooky, overgrown garden behind the restaurant, where she picks a shriveled, rotten tomato. She also has a vision of an old woman who tells her, “feed the soil.” After she is unable to come up with any inspired new dishes, a frustrated chef takes a bite of the old tomato from the spooky garden. To her surprise, it’s delicious. She goes to the spooky garden to harvest more ingredients. After some trial and error, and with the help of Lucia, she creates a new menu with the new ingredients. The vibe is earthy, witchy, wild, and feminine. At the same time, Chef starts to unlearn the hypermasculine, macho, abusive attitude she inherited from her old mentor.

One day, a haggard looking man stumbles out of the woods toward the restaurant. One of the local boys that Chef hired tells Chef that the man may have been looking for the witch. He explains that the previous owner of the property was an older woman who had “a coven of women that did witchy stuff in the woods together,” including human sacrifices. Chef confesses that she saw the witch’s ghost, but that she doesn’t believe the witch is evil. She believes the witch wants to help her succeed. Chef even uses the cryptic symbol she found in the witch’s garden as the restaurant logo.

Andres loves the food prepared by Chef and Lucia from the witch’s ingredients. They move ahead with a soft launch “friends and family” dinner to open the restaurant. However, before the opening, Chef finds that haggard man from the woods eating his own finger in her kitchen. It turns out to be Magnus, the chef who quit. Andres confesses that the reason Magnus left his post is that he lost his mind. Andres believes it was a stress-induced mental breakdown. But Chef, who has also been seeing weird visions, worries he was driven insane by the witch.

Chef decides she wants nothing to do with the witch anymore. On the night of the family/friends dinner, she throws out all the garden ingredients and commands her staff to use local vendors instead. Lucia quits in protest, and the dinner is a disaster. But it’s too late to cancel the restaurant’s official opening night.

Due to the bad press from the friends and family dinner, Andres fires Chef and replaces her with Lucia. Chef tries to fight him on it. Andres—worried she is losing her mind like Magnus, and that she may do something rash—locks her in the wine cellar for the duration of the dinner. While trying to escpae, Chef finds a hand-dug tunnel in the dirt behind a bookcase. She crawls through it… until she finds a dead body. She quickly tries to back out of the tunnel, but triggers a cave-in. Now Chef is trapped underground. When she tries to climb over the corpse, she realizes it’s the dead body of the witch.

House of Spoils ending explained:

The witch’s corpse/ghost telepathically sends Chef a vision of everything that went down. Basically, yes, the witch had a sort-of cult of women who were making potions and doing weird blood rituals in the woods. But they weren’t hurting anyone—they were helping people. We see that all the women have cuts on their arms, suggesting that they were voluntarily cutting their arms to feed blood to the soil. (“Feed the soil!”) Hey, it’s rich in iron and nutrients! It’s sort of like fertilizer… right?

The mash of blood and guts we saw in the opening scene was actually a mashed up fruit, which was used in a potion to help the woman who was sick. However, the town accused the women of being witches. They ran them out. Our witch fled to her basement, and tried to dig a tunnel to escape. She died underground, clutching a trowel in her hands.

Chef uses that trowel to dig her way out. Once above ground, she kills a rabbit. Then she stumbles into the dining room, where all the restaurant patrons are having an awful meal. (The opening night was also a disaster! Lucia wasn’t ready.) Chef, covered in dirt and seemingly unhinged, tells the patrons to save room for more food. Then she goes outside and builds a huge bonfire.

Andres evacuates the restaurant patrons due to a kitchen fire. However, when he sees that Chef intends to cook the rabbit on the fire, he decides to try one more last-ditch effort to salvage his opening night. He tells the workers to set up tables outside, to feed a meal to anyone who wants to stay. Miraculously, the meal is a hit. Chef acts as head chef again, and cooks an entire meal over the fire, using only natural ingredients from the land. Chef realizes that the symbol was not evil, but simply the shape of the fruit when cut. And everyone loves the food! With that, the movie ends.

Look, is it realistic that Ariana DeBose could cook a five-star meal using only a rabbit and some fruit? Of course not. But it’s more about the idea of it all. Chef found a new way to run the restaurant—by embracing femininity, the earth, and yeah, a little bit of blood. God forbid women do anything.