Eli Roth says he's been waiting his whole life to make Thanksgiving: "I've been wanting to do this since I was 12"
Nov. 14, 2023EXCLUSIVE: Eli Roth talks making Thanksgiving and the viral fake trailer that came before it
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Though it took a few years (or 10), Director Eli Roth says he’s been wanting to make a Thanksgiving-themed slasher film since he was a kid.
“I think it was one of the things that almost paralyzed me from making the film because I was so happy with the trailer and felt like, you know, we did it. We got the best parts, it was done. I don’t have to actually make the movie now,” Roth explains to GamesRadar+, talking about the fake trailer the film is based on. “The truth is I’ve been wanting to do this since I was 12 years old. You know, Jeff Rendell is my best friend and we grew up together and we watched every single slasher movie together and we’d seen that every single holiday had been done, there were no holidays left, but we were in Massachusetts where Thanksgiving’s like the biggest deal. So our whole lives we wanted to make a Thanksgiving horror movie.”
“The Grindhouse trailer was an opportunity to try out those kills and have fun, but the intent was always to make it like Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Mute Witness, Scream. And we couldn’t for a long time figure out what the movie was about, like what is it thematically?” Roth continues. “And then we started seeing those Black Friday videos that were appearing about 10 years ago where the midnight sale had happened and there were these viral videos of people getting trampled and killing each other for flat-screen TVs and Waffle Irons and PlayStations. We thought, this is what we can set it around. It’s thematically on point with what we want and it gives us a reason to do the movie. So once we had that, it all kind of clicked into place.”
Taking place in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, the film’s core tragedy is a Black Friday sale gone horribly wrong, with a crowd crush resulting in fatality. One year later, a masked serial killer dubbed John Carver descends on the town to enact his revenge. Jeff Rendell, who penned the screenplay for the feature-length, plays Carver in the fake trailer, with Jordan Ladd, Jay Hernandez, and Roth as the victims, and Michael Biehn as the sheriff. This time around, Patrick Dempsey plays the sheriff, while the killer sets his sights on a group of teenagers. The teens in question include Nell Verlaque, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, and Jalen Thomas Brooks.
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Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent’s Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.
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