Thanksgiving

Film history doesn’t have much to offer by way of Thanksgiving movies, certainly not compared to those about Halloween or Christmas. For every Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Home for the Holidays (1995), or The Ice Storm (1997), there are dozens, if not hundreds, of movies devoted to the other holidays. Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving probably won’t become a perennial classic in most households, unless it’s your family’s tradition to digest while viewing the Thanksgiving day mental patient mayhem of Blood Rage (1987) or the killer turkey horror-comedy ThanksKilling (2009). If so, then Roth’s latest is actually a perfect holiday gift. With a well-balanced blend of grisly horror and acerbic comedy, the movie follows the slasher movie whodunit template to the letter. Yet, no matter how predictable or formulaic the outcome may be, Roth’s execution is sharp and effective, delivering everything a horror fan could want from a holiday-themed slasher. What’s shocking is that it’s good, and unironically so. No matter how silly its concept—about a masked killer dressed in a John Carver pilgrim mask—the scares are scary, and the story is credibly compelling.  

If I sound surprised, it’s because I’ve never cared much for Roth’s movies. Although each one is technically well made, there’s a mean-spiritedness in his work—from Hostel (2005) to The Green Inferno (2013) to Death Wish (2018)—that I find disagreeable. His characters seldom have redeemable qualities, and one gets the feeling that the filmmaker delights too much in putting them through the wringer. It’s as though he concocts each scenario not to tell a story or impart a lesson but rather to create torturous screen moments for his own pleasure, leaving the viewer with a sour aftertaste. The same description could be applied to many filmmakers, but few leave the impression that they were directed with the anger of a petulant teen with something to prove, as is the case with the Massechusssets-born Roth. So I entered into Thanksgiving with low expectations, hoping to be engaged, as always, but trepidatious given my track record with his output. Stunningly, the outcome is smartly written and bloody-as-hell holiday horror, critiquing the extent to which America has warped the titular tradition from a gracious harvest festival into a capitalist nightmare of consumerist assholes who would sooner step on you than miss out on a bargain deal. 

Thanksgiving’s impetus goes back to 2007, when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez developed a movie to replicate the grindhouse theatergoing experience. A commercial gamble that never paid off due to Dimension Films’ poor marketing of an obscure concept, Grindhouse was a three-hour extravaganza of intentional bad taste. Stacked with two 90-minute movies, starting with Rodriguez’s gooey zombie lark Planet Terror and ending with Tarantino’s vehicular slasher riff Death Proof, both entries featured intentionally bad exhibition, with visible damage to the celluloid prints and even missing scenes to reproduce what it was like watching genre B-movies in a rundown 1970s theater. Often considered a commercial and creative disaster—I contend that Planet Terror is a blast, Death Proof is a masterwork, and together, they made one of my favorite moviegoing experiences of all time—Grindhouse also boasted several mock trailers crammed between the two features, such as Don’t by Edgar Wright and Werewolf Women of the SS by Rob Zombie. Roth supplied a trailer for Thanksgiving, a cheap-looking slasher trailer that, similar to Rodriguez’s short Machete, finally earned a feature-length take on the concept. 

Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the movie opens on Thanksgiving in 2022. Businessman Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) usually closes his department store Right Mart on the holiday, but his new fiancée Kathleen (Karen Cliche) has convinced him to open Thursday evening to earn big from early Black Friday sales. Maniacal consumers crowd around the store, desperate for a waffle iron doorbuster. But when a group of teens, including Wright’s daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque), sneak into the store before the official opening, the crowd loses its collective mind and stampedes inside, breaking the doors down for a piranha-like frenzy that leaves several dead, many injured, and the town traumatized. Drawing obvious influence from the Scream franchise, Roth conceived the story alongside screenwriter Jeff Rendell, his collaborator since his 2002 debut, Cabin Fever. Similar to the original Scream from 1996, the killing starts a year later, and each victim is one of the rioters who contributed to the Right Mart disaster. The killer, donning a popular John Carver mask and black pilgrim getup and wielding an axe, dispenses with victims in particularly nasty ways. 

While Jessica and her teen friends receive threatening Instagram messages from the killer, Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) attempts to identify the culprit. He has plenty of red herrings to choose from, such as the axe-throwing sporto (Tomaso Sanelli), the towering new deputy (Jeff Teravainen), the former Right Mart employee (Ty Olsson) with a grudge, and Jessica’s ex-boyfriend (Jalen Thomas Brooks) who disappeared after last year’s debacle but recently returned. Then again, everyone in Plymouth has a John Carver mask around Thanksgiving, so everyone’s a suspect. And since most of the town participated in last year’s riot, everyone’s a potential victim, too. Although Roth’s tendency to make his future victims abrasive and awful applies to a few of Jessica’s friends, many of the characters prove likable and relatable. Verlaque is a sympathetic screen presence, and Dempsey’s wholesome cop routine works. In a different way, the killer even earns our admiration in literal Save the Cat logic. After dispensing with a Right Mart security guard in his apartment, the Carver (get it?) killer stops to feed his victim’s feline friend. So he can’t be all that evil. 

When someone dies in Thanksgiving, they get it bad. Roth’s movie replicates many of the deaths glimpsed in his Grindhouse short, such as the beheaded parade performer, the cheerleader who lands the splits on a trampoline onto a knife, or the woman who’s basted and cooked for dinner. Roth adds killings with corn cob holders and some gruesome business involving a circular saw, plus many more. The production’s use of practical effects is admirably gross, albeit with the occasional splash of CGI blood. Roth and cinematographer Milan Chadima, who shot the original short and both Hostel installments for the director, exchange the washed-out, rough-looking production values of the short for a more straightforward aesthetic. If it’s a throwback at all, it harkens to the early 2000s era of horror, when torture porn and slasher remakes were particularly caustic. Roth made a number of those, but there’s mordant humor at play in Thanksgiving that draws from the admittedly goofy setup. However, it’s not an extended cheese-fest or wink at the audience, as the short was. 

Granted, I wrote down my guess for the killer before the first scene was through, and I was right. It’s not difficult to figure out based on the law of conspicuous casting, and the Scooby Doo finale plays out just as you suspect. But Thanksgiving is so well put together—the characters so solidly written, the thrills so gasp-inducing, the kills so jaw-droppingly gory—that it plays better than the last couple of Scream movies. Slasher fans will be delighted. I was pleased not only to discover a holiday movie that I intend to revisit again during the season but also one that shares my cynicism toward shopping on Thanksgiving night. Above all, it feels good to watch Roth live up to his potential, arguably for the first time, which I’ve been waiting for more than twenty years to see—ever since his concept for Cabin Fever intrigued me but his execution left me cold. Thanksgiving is Roth’s best movie. It’s fun and disgusting in all the right ways. And if nothing else, maybe it will inspire a few budding cinephiles to check out Grindhouse. 

(Note: This review was originally posted to Patreon on November 23, 2023.)

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