Prime Video’s House of Spoils presented a significant challenge for its production designer Alexandra Schaller. Starring Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose as a chef looking to start her own destination dining restaurant (that’s an actual thing) in a haunted house, the film is set in rural upstate New York, but due to the increasingly international film production business, it was filmed in Hungary. Naturally, Schaller needed to find architecture in the filming locations that would, with the help of crew modifications, resemble upstate New York architecture.
Fortunately, Schaller found a house that could be transformed to fit the needs of the film.
“It’s very, very difficult. Now, productions are taking us all over the world, and we very rarely shoot where the project is set. We did a lot of work to the house that we found to make it feel more American. It was a full transformation. It was a yellow, typically European style,” Schaller explained. “I was looking at a lot architecture here, knowing what we would or would not be able to find in Hungary. I found the Washington Irving house in Tarrytown, New York. The architecture of the house that we found lent itself to being transformed into a house similar to the Washington Irving house.”
Schaller and team painted the yellow house to resemble stone and covered much of it with vines — satisfying not only the practical need to obscure some of the European architecture but also visualized the aging, abandoned nature of the house. Since the production team wanted to film within the house, Schaller rebuilt much of the interior. A bedroom and ensuite bathroom became a chef’s kitchen and a walk-in freezer. An in-house office became DeBose’s bedroom. The grand living room became a formal dining room. All of these rooms were covered with custom-made artifacts such as demonic or bug-infested wallpaper, windows with rabbits etched in (echoing a pesky rabbit who destroys the chef’s garden), and second-hand kitchen appliances.
Leveraging these existing spaces within the house proved cost-effective while also giving the house a sense of interconnectedness with its environment.
“We did discuss filming on a soundstage, but I just felt that it would be better for the image, for the storytelling, for the camera work to have an interplay between the inside and outside,” Schaller said.
As DeBose’s chef begins to acclimate to her environment, she leverages ingredients originating from a secret garden planted by the house’s previous owner (and potential current resident). Schaller worked with House of Spoils food stylist Zoe Hegedus to identify and position appropriate herbs, vegetables, and fruits within the garden. The script only called for the garden to offer an “lush and otherworldly” presence, so the two artists had freedom to craft a menu with ingredients that would reasonably stem from the garden.
When the film reaches its climax, Schaller’s set needed to feature a cavernous basement / wine cellar that holds many secrets. The production design team took existing an existing basement space, added vines and a gate, and walled off a portion of it to create the secret location DeBose’s chef discovers. For specific reasons I won’t go into here, they also needed to create a very tight, claustrophobic tunnel through which DeBose’s chef must crawl.
That was done on a soundstage, but the recreated space required DeBose to navigate a very tight squeeze.
“The tunnel that I built was a teeny tiny tunnel. We had pieces that could come off for the camera, but she was actually crawling through a tiny space. She was really game,” Schaller admired.
Perhaps that dedication stemmed from the strong female power on-set. Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, House of Spoils leverage much female-influenced talent in its construction. Schaller, herself, relished the opportunity to fill her sets with paintings of women along with pictures of rotten fruits and vegetables — most of the art created by women.
It all tied into the female-centered theming of the spooky thriller.
“That feels nice, and it infused the house with a really strong female energy, which fits the film perfectly.”
House of Spoils premieres on Prime Video tomorrow, Friday, October 4.
