Thanksgiving Review

Many holidays have suffered from cinematic slasher villains. Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day are some of the most notable. Eli Roth has added to this seasonal sub-genre with his tongue-in-cheek gore fest Thanksgiving.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Black Friday sales at Right Mart go horribly wrong due to a lack of security, a group of high school students antagonising the crowd, and people being impatient arseholes. A year later a man dressed as John Carver, starts to kill off people involved in the riot and taunts the teenagers through a series of Instagram posts.

Eli Roth has made divisive horror films. He started his career with Cabin Fever which viewers have either loved or hated, two of the Hostel movies that were a part of the torture porn craze of the 2000s, and The Green Inferno where some critics called it racist. His horror films tend to be exceedingly violent and filled with detestable characters. Roth uses his tropes to his advantage and makes a slasher throwback.

Thanksgiving originated as a fake trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s/Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Grindhouse and all the fake trailers were made to be a homage to grindhouse cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Thanksgiving ended up being the third fake trailer to be turned into a film, the first two being Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun. This backstory shows what kind of a film Thanksgiving aimed to be, a throwback to the golden age of slasher films.

Thanksgiving was filled with detestable characters and it was made for gore hounds. I was relishing all the blood and guts characters as people had their heads stamped in, heads chopped off, and internal organs being spilled. There was a level of dark comedy due to the over-the-nature of the violence, the actions of the killer, and best of all, the Thanksgiving dinner. The bit I winced at the most was when a character put in her contact lens and that was due to eye phobia. It was as gleeful as Freaky, another slasher pastiche. John Carver had a great look because of his costume and mask: he looked like V from V for Vendetta.

Roth is a big horror film fan and his latest film is filled with references. The most obvious reference was slasher films like Friday the 13^th and there was quite a bit of Scream in Thanksgiving. This was due to Thanksgiving and Scream both being set in small towns, the slasher villains wanting revenge, and the film centring on likeable teenage girls. Scream and Thanksgiving were structured as whodunit mysteries. Thanksgiving threw up a few red herrings along the way. The parallels between Scream and Thanksgiving did get really detailed because both films showed a variety of people wearing the same mask so that anyone could be the killer. Thanksgiving was a better Scream film than Scream VI.

The final horror reference of Thanksgiving was with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This was due to Thanksgiving having a demented dinner scene and one of the most famous scenes in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the family dinner.

Thanksgiving had a satirical edge to it due to the beginning. Black Friday has been seen as an event that brings out the worst in people. There has been plenty of footage of people scrambling over each other to get the big bargains or fight each other. Thanksgiving takes this behaviour to the extreme by showing people turning into a ravenous mob and showing them willing to kill and steal from each other.

There has been a discussion about the run times of films. Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon have been at the centre of this discussion. However, Thanksgiving ended up being a film that felt like it lasted too long. It was 105 minutes and a runtime of 90 to 95 minutes worked for slashers. After the initial killing by John Carver, Thanksgiving does slow down due to the lack of deaths and the characters trying to find a way to stop the killer. It was one of those films where some trimming could have gone a long way.

Thanksgiving was made for your inner sadist, a film where audiences can enjoy the over-the-top deaths. It was old-school horror fun.