House of Spoils and its unique ending, explained

House of Spoils, the latest from Blumhouse, ambles toward its ending without much flair. After spending the entire film with Ariana DeBose's character, Chef, as she fine-tunes her new restaurant establishment and immerses herself in the world of its former owner via the wild garden out back, Chef is tossed out of her own restaurant, literally left clawing her way to the surface to reclaim her kitchen. Major spoilers ahead for the House of Spoils ending.

After the debacle at the friends and family dinner, Chef's investor fears she might be unraveling just like her predecessor, a man who got so swept up in the "haunted" house of the establishment he's denigrated to a transient living in the woods and gnawing off his own finger.

Andres reacts by kicking Chef out of her kitchen, locking her in the wine cellar, and foisting the evening into Lucia's (Barbie Ferreira) hands. Chef digs her way out of the cellar after connecting with the former homeowner's ghost (and dead body), emerges into the moonlight, kills a rabbit, and makes a big show out of cooking the "real" dinner outdoors. The one the disappointed diners end up loving.

What causes Chef's transformation in the end of the movie?

Down in the cellar, Chef is left with nothing but her own two hands and the ghostly presence of the previous owner to escape the cellar and return to the kitchen to get her meal back on track. When she climbs into the hand-dug tunnel, she comes face-to-face with the woman's dead body. Through flashback, we learn that this woman who had been labeled a witch and vilified for it, to the point a mob came to burn her, was just trying to help people in need with various herbs and poultices.

Maybe she was a witch, but her practice wasn't evil. By eating the food from her garden and accessing this woman's home, Chef has formed a connection, one that drives Magnus insane but allows Chef to flourish once she realizes the truth. People fear the unknown. The following scene, where Chef breaks through the earth to emerge topside, is quite powerful, as she's literally bursting out of the ground like something growing in the dirt. She emerges very renewed and confident in what she needs to do next. That's when she kills a rabbit with her bare hands and

There's something beautiful about the parallel between Chef cooking her meal outdoors in nature and all of the diners enjoying it and accepting her versus what happened to the previous woman who was trying to share something similar and getting shunned for it. Chef is like a fulcrum for this inter-generational connection between two powerful women, something Magnus could never have carried.

For a supernatural horror movie, the ending of House of Spoils is surprisingly uplifting. We don't know what's going to happen next for Chef, but it seems like Andres sorely regrets putting her in the cellar and the visiting investor, Toli, appeared very impressed with the food, as did Chef's former boss Marcello.

House of Spoils is now streaming on Amazon.