The Big Picture

Eli Roth’s new holiday-themed slasher, Thanksgiving, promises a blood-soaked horror experience that combines elements of Cabin Fever and Hostel. It’s a mainstream R-rated movie with a “totally bonkers” twist. Drawing inspiration from previous holiday-themed horror films, Roth aims to create a new mythology and slasher film set in the birthplace of Thanksgiving — Plymouth, Massachusetts. The cast of Thanksgiving includes Patrick Dempsey as the local sheriff, along with a talented ensemble of actors. The identity of the depraved antagonist remains a mystery, building anticipation for the movie’s premiere on November 17.

Holidays are meant to be enjoyed and shared with family and friends. We return to where we most feel safe, and commune with those dearest to us. However, this Thanksgiving, Eli Roth has something sinister baking in the oven. A new red band trailer for the horror aficionado’s latest offering, Thanksgiving has been released and it comes with an abundance of bloody kills.

Based on a mock trailer Roth created for 2007’s Grindhouse, Thanksgiving is a new holiday-themed slasher, and it will follow a sick serial killer named John Carver. The trailer promises from the get-go that the slasher will be blood-soaked. It introduces audiences to Plymouth, Massachusetts where in the aftermath of a Black Friday riot where a handful of townsfolk die, a masked pilgrim named Carver sets off to punish the town for their misdeeds. Roth’s works are usually known to be quite a bloody spectacle, and while Thanksgiving does possess this to a degree, the trailer affirms what the filmmaker had said — slightly less gory. “I wouldn’t say it’s as far as Terrifier 2. It’s much more in the Cabin Fever and Hostel vein, where it’s an R-rated movie that’s being released in movie theaters by a mainstream studio, but it’s still totally bonkers,”

When it comes to the horror genre, there is an appeal that exists when it comes to holiday-themed horror stories that can’t quite be explained. Halloween and My Bloody Valentine are some of the works that come to mind. Roth recently told Collider that he’s been waiting until the story was just right to turn Thanksgiving into a fully-fledged feature film. He explained that he didn’t want to simply follow the same beats as that original trailer saying:

“‘I have to just pretend that Thanksgiving 1980 exists and that it was so offensive that every print was destroyed, and the only thing that survived was the trailer. This is the reboot of what that movie was. Every copy of the script was burned. Every print was burned. The only thing that survived was that one trailer, on the darkest corners of the internet. So, we have to make a movie based on that. This is the reboot of what that was.’ That freed me up creatively to go, ‘I can use a couple of my favorite things in the trailer, but I don’t have to worry about recreating the trailer.’ That trailer was for a movie where every print was destroyed. Now, this is gonna be its own thing.”

Who’s in the Cast for ‘Thanksgiving’?
Image via Sony Pictures

Thanksgiving will return us to the birthplace of the titular holiday and there will be no leftovers. The slasher’s call sheet includes Patrick Dempsey as the local sheriff, alongside Rick Hoffman, Gina Gershon, Milo Manheim, Addison Rae, Karen Cliche, Shailyn Griffin, Nell Verlaque, Chris Sandiford, and Tim Dillon, among others. The identity of the depraved antagonist is not known.

You can check out the trailer for Thanksgiving below, before the movie premieres in theaters on November 17: