Review: Thanksgiving

Whenever a new movie comes out, I always try to walk into the theatre with as little context as possible, especially when it comes to horror. In the case of Thanksgiving (2023), I saw the trailer, found the whole idea of a slasher about the American holiday absolutely hilarious, and decided to go watch it. It wasn’t until almost the end, when the killer’s identity was revealed and they chased the main character shouting ‘there will be no leftovers!’, that I realised: this whole film is a joke.

The murders are so gruesome and visually horrific that you will probably be tempted to look away from the screen multiple times

The plot is simple: on the day of Thanksgiving, in Plymouth (Massachusetts), a crowd is gathering in front of the RightMart superstore, in preparation for the Black Friday sale. Jessica Wright (Nell Verlaque), the daughter of the store’s owner (Rick Hoffman), lets her friends in before the opening, causing the rage of the crowd waiting outside. The situation escalates, the crowd breaks into the store and the violence of the moment results in the deaths of multiple people. One year later, despite the discontent of many of the victims’ families, the store organises another Thanksgiving sale. That’s when a serial killer – dressed in a pilgrim costume and wearing a John Carver mask – starts brutally murdering the people involved in the massacre of the previous year, targeting Jessica’s friend group specifically.

Director Eli Roth (whom you might know from 2005’s Hostel) is a master of gore, and the scenes of the murders are so gruesome and visually horrific that you will probably be tempted to look away from the screen multiple times. Not only because of the violent nature of the killings themselves, but also because of the constant revolting allusions to food and sex that accompany most of them.

However, since the beginning of the movie, I couldn’t help but feel like there was something slightly off with the whole production. The writing, in particular, seemed at times weak and predictable. Many of the characters were only there to either try to offer the audience possible alternative suspects until the – unfortunately – obvious final reveal, or to create unnecessary sub-plotlines that didn’t impact the general flow of the movie. Did we really need to see Jessica’s boyfriend (Milo Manheim) bicker with her ex (Jalen Thomas Brooks) every other scene?

However, as I stated at the beginning, it wasn’t until that memorable line – ‘there will be no leftovers!’ – that I realised that the absolute unseriousness of this movie could not be unintentional. Every one of its elements contributed to making Thanksgiving the campiest product I’ve encountered this year. Note its opening scene (a grotesque, exaggerated and over-the-top satire of over-consumerism), the killer’s pilgrim costume, the extremeness of the murders and those cute sweetcorn holders being turned into weapons. Even the casting of TikToker Addison Rae, while also making the dangers of posting on the internet one of the minor themes of the movie. As a result, the movie almost results in a parody of the Holiday slasher genre it belongs to. And it’s hilarious.

It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s just so wrong and sick that it’s right

This is where the context around the creation of the movie comes in handy. In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez co-directed the movie Grindhouse, presented as a double feature combining Rodriguez’s horror comedy Planet Terror and Tarantino’s action thriller Death Proof. The movie also featured a series of fictitious trailers; ‘Thanksgiving’, directed by Eli Roth himself, was one of them. When discussing the process behind the realisation of the trailer with Rolling Stone, Roth stated: ‘Shooting the trailer was so much fun, because every shot is a money shot. Every shot is decapitation or nudity. It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s just so wrong and sick that it’s right.’ When asked about what the inspiration behind it was, he responded: ‘My friend Jeff, who plays the killer pilgrim — we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey and then his father killed it and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town. I called Jeff and said, “Dude, guess what, we don’t have to make the movie, we can just shoot the best parts”’.

Sixteen years later, Roth brings to completion the project with the same spirit with which he first directed it in 2007: for fun, for himself, for everyone who loved Grindhouse and for the fans of pure over-the-top slashers.

Verdict:

Despite some uncertainties in the writing, Roth delivers a fun, revolting and intentionally campy slasher that will forever change the way you see turkey. I’m not sure I would define it as a ‘good film’, but Thanksgiving is undoubtedly fun, entertaining and memorable.