"Hen House” is a surrealist comic horror about diet culture and eating disorders that combines the food world of movies like "Tampopo" with the feminine horror of "Black Swan". “Eggy” is a young woman who, subsisting solely on eggs, is in a never ending war with a hoard of 'Almond Moms' who have infested her apartment, much like mice would, trying to stop her from enjoying her food. Things finally reach a boiling point when Eggy tries to throw a dinner party.

We begin in Eggy’s subconscious wherein she is being tormented by images of chickens and eggs, finding herself in a liminal space, a farm, where she is the mother or owner of these chickens. She wakes from these dreams, unsettled. We sense there is an entity in Eggy’s home, causing these dreams, haunting her, and trying to control her diet and exercise, that she is trying her best to ignore.

She finds herself with the urge to only eat eggs because of it. This is her 'safe food'. She takes solace in this diet, deluding herself to believe that it is "vegan" and that dieting will keep whatever is haunting her at bay. She consumes eggs all day and runs 100 miles a day all over New York City yet she continues to be tormented. All day she hears banging coming from a closet in her room. She gets a shiver down her spine like someone is whispering something right in her ear. When Eggy's roommate reveals to her that eggs come from the very creatures that have been haunting her dreams: Chickens, her safe food no longer feels safe, Eggy must change course. She tries to rebel against the entity's desire to control her; instead of doing as it wishes, she attempts to scare it off by only eating carbs. 

This only makes its desire to haunt her stronger. One night, while Eggy is hanging on by a thread, she invites her friends, Candy and Ziti, over for dinner, thinking if she doesn’t eat alone, then the entity will not come out. However, this is the moment where this entity reveals itself to be a hoard of ALMOND MOMS. Now that they have several young women to feed off of, they’re coming out full force and Eggy can ignore them no longer. 

Eggy, now for both the sake of her friends and herself, must physically fight them off and run them out of the house one by one while confronting the rhetoric of diet culture they've been haunting her with at her all along, bawking it at her like chickens. Candy and Ziti do their best to help in the fight but struggle to do so when they see these creatures look much like their own mothers and grandmothers.

In the end, when all the Almond Moms are all out on the street in the cold, reverting into the chickens that she had only dreamed of having control over, Eggy looks onto them with pity. She realizes that maybe she needs to feed them in order for both them and her to survive.



"Hen House” descends further into absurdity and surrealism as the story goes on. It aims to be funny while as it progresses, and Eggy’s stability and sanity deteriorates, there is a sense of darkness at its core that reflects what it feels like to be trapped in cycles of disordered eating. There is an unexpected gruesomeness in this story that doesn't come from the places you would expect. It is the food, the overwhelming and close up visuals, and scattered soundscape that causes the tension which will make our audience feel as thought they are experiencing the story from Eggy's POV.

The term originated on Tik Tok in the 2020s after the resurfacing of an old clip from ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ of Yolanda Hadid, mother to supermodels, Gigi and Bella Hadid, telling her daughter to eat a few almonds and “chew them really well” in response to Gigi saying she felt weak and hungry. Inspired by Yolanda, ‘Almond Mom’ quickly became an umbrella term to discuss mothers, who most likely have eating disorders themselves, enforcing diet culture and restrictive eating habits on their daughters as they grow up.

What came first the chicken or the egg? What came first the Almond Mom or the Almond Daughter?

The 'Almond Mom' creature is the most central metaphor and image in our story. By the Almond Moms both being the haunting force in Eggy's home and the Chickens themselves, this represents how we are fed diet culture from the get go and how we continue to feed it to each other without really understanding where it comes from. "We are what we eat"!

Director/Writer - Kay Scinto



Kay is a production freelancer, writer, and filmmaker based out of Brooklyn, NY.  Kay has just released a 5 part web series, “Just Be Nice” and is developing a feature screenplay, “People with Flowers”, which received Honorable Mention at San Francisco Indie Fest 2024 and Fusion Film Festival 2023. They also co-wrote and starred in the short "Mae at the Funeral" directed by Sophie Bennett. Kay graduated from NYU in 2020 with a BFA in Film and TV and have since worked in production on TV shows and movies like Game Theory with Bomani Jones, Harlem, How To with John Wilson, The MTV Video Music Awards, Reality (2023), Susie Searches (2022) and more.

Producer - Ava Butler

Ava is a development assistant and freelance producer working out of New York City. Originally from Los Angeles, she grew up on film and television sets and very quickly fell in love with the camaraderie and collaboration born out of production. After graduating with a BA from The New School she’s gained diverse experience in both film and television production, working on projects such as The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, Scenes from a Marriage (2021), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2022), Not Okay (2022), and more. Since starting her recent development role in kid’s programming, she’s gained a new understanding of the ways in which art shapes the world around us and is so excited to help make space for underrepresented stories.

Producer - Mariana Anell

Born and raised in Miami, FL, Mariana is a Latinx writer and producer living in Queens, NY. With a background in film and theatre, Mariana thrives in creating stories about the trials and tribulations of being a hot Latina in the United States. Her current screenplay focuses on the absurdities of growing up in a Catholic-Latin environment. Previous projects include: The Fabelmans (2022), Caroline, or Change (2021), and West Side Story (2020). She is currently an assistant to a Pulitzer Prize, Emmy, and Tony Award winning writer and will continue her work in the production and development of underrepresented stories.

Why this story?

Many movies and tv shows that attempt to tackle discussions of eating disorders portray them in ways that are unrealistic, difficult to digest and even triggering. These works portray a very singular image of EDs and don’t show the wide span of who they affect. 

In opposition to this, we aim to be funny, entertaining, and inventive in concept while being honest about the topic in order to make the way into the conversation more accessible and relatable. We hope to use surrealism to our advantage to help us represent the abstract feelings of EDs that are hard to communicate. We aim to do this through the physical imagery that comes with this absurd idea.

This is a vital story to tell now because of how universal and widespread these experience of struggle with EDs has become and how many people are moving through the experience in silence. We want to use this story to shine a light on the internal experience of EDs and the absurdity of diet culture in a way that we believe it hasn't been before!

Director's Statement: Why do I want to be the one to make it?

My goal in making this is to merge the genres of cooking movies with films that have attempted to portray struggles with disordered eating.  I want to show what it feels like to have a deep love for food, while at the same time have a bad relationship with it, and what it feels like to live inside of that contradiction and overcome it.

As a plus sized person, I believe I bring a unique perspective to this story. It's so important to me to be apart of creating positive fat representation in film. I want to present fat characters to the world that are dynamic, unique, three dimensional and human, as fat people so often are not on screen. I hope that casting diverse body types in our film expands the conversation and perception around EDs and that they affect everyone. It's important to us in telling this story that we are infusing the perspective of fat women into the conversation, because of how often they are left out or when included done so in ways that can be detrimental.

Budget: Money, Money, Money!

Our goal for this project is to raise 8,500 dollars to cover production and post production costs including equipment rentals, production design, hiring and feeding our crew, and the editing, coloring, sound design, and music for the film in post.

and of course our exorbitant egg budget....

Production Timeline: What's Next for Hen House?

Our shooting process will take place over the course of this coming summer in a total of four shoot days. We will begin shooting by starting with two separate days in June and July where we film with our stars, the chickens (yes we are filming with real live chickens!) and then shooting exteriors all around the great city of New York! After that, the bulk of our shoot will be occurring in August over the course of two days in a single location apartment which we have already secured!

After that, we will quickly head into our post production process where will begin editing, coloring, sound design, and music for the film. We have a very specific vision for the high intensity sound scape we'd like to utilize to help create tension in the film and will be aiming to work with drummers and jazz musicians to help create this scape! After this we will be submitting our film widely to different festivals!

We are so, so excited to make this project! Thank you so much for reading, and if you can't donate, please feel free to share! <3