Blood feast
I would say that Thanksgiving is the best version of itself I can imagine, but even that's selling it short: I couldn't even imagine it turning out as well as it did. The film originated as a parody trailer directed by Eli Roth for the 2007 exploitation film homage Grindhouse, written by himself & Jeff Rendell, and while I would have already said that the Thanksgiving trailer was, prior to November 2023, the best thing Roth had ever made, I don't know that I wanted a feature of it. It's basically just a disgusting joke stretched out to two minutes, an exercise in creating a sizzle reel of the most crass possible slasher-movie imagery involving cannibalism, genital mutilation, and the like, extreme content as a parody of extreme content; stretch that out to 90 minutes, and you're looking at something pretty numbing. And the actual feature film version of Thanksgiving isn't even that short; it's 106 minutes, which should be ungodly and murderous for a slasher movie.
In the end, Roth and Rendell (the later now has sole screenwriting credit) dodged the problem through a somewhat cumbersome meta-concept: their 2023 Thanksgiving is in fact a "remake" of the now-lost "original" Thanksgiving from the early 1980s, which had been quickly removed from circulation for its crimes against taste. And that's a good thing to keep in your back pocket if you plan to be disappointed that the 2023 film isn't exactly restaging each and every one of the gory images from the 2007 trailer, though it pays homage to them. Also, I pity you if you plan to be thus disappointed, because the Thanksgiving feature as it actually exists is a real delight, Roth's best film ever while still lying securely in his wheelhouse and showcasing all of his tendencies as a genre film fanboy that have previously annoyed me. Perhaps I am maturing - Roth certainly hasn't, so that can't be it.
The main thing Thanksgiving has going for it is an immaculate purity: it's the most that any slasher movie has been "just a slasher movie" in a really, really long time. There's nothing about that can be really called "ironic", though I do think there's a knowing-ness to it, in that it seems to understand that we're going to be expecting certain moments to develop in a certain way, and it sort of grins at us in a "awwwww yeah, you know what's coming" way before fulfilling our expectations (or, much more rarely, subverting them). And this lack of slick irony already makes it unlike a huge number of all of the slasher films to have come out in the last three decades. It's also not trying to one-up the old '80s slashers, going even harder, grosser, more nihilistic: it's less of all of those things than the 2007 trailer was, and far from being a showpiece for extreme and extremely convincing gore effects, it feels like the film has deliberately kept its bloodlust in check, presumably as insurance against a future unrated cut being put on the market. And this lack of amped-up brutality makes it unlike most of the slasher films that weren't already dealt with in the "no irony" thing. It doesn't even really feel like a slasher throwback, though here we're just getting into vibes and not anything I can quantify. But it feels more like it came from an alternate universe where the slasher films didn't die off in 1989, but just kept puttering along being more or less the same thing for many years after that, and this just happens to be one of the examples of the form made in 2023.
However we want to go about framing it, Thanksgiving is satisfying. Damn satisfying. There's an underrated pleasure to seeing a movie play all of the expected notes extremely well, where what's really exciting isn't that it has some specific, singular triumph, but because it basically doesn't do anything wrong, and this is very much the mode that Thanksgiving operates in. It is unbelievably solid. It has great bones. Pick your favorite way of saying that the movie is persistently and unfailingly effective, doing all the things it needs to do, and doing them with a level of budgetary support that an '80s slasher movie would be delighted to be afforded, so it all feels a bit more polished and confident than the average story of a revenge-seeking psycho. Which is, of course, what we have here: in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in what wouldn't be the United States of America for a century and a half yet, someone is very pissed in the week running up to 23 November, 2023. That's Thanksgiving Day, but more importantly, it's Black Friday Eve, and whoever the killer is (the film provides four relatively obvious candidates), he's very angry about the events of that night last year. For it was on that day, as we see in an extended opening sequence that relays the tragedy to be avenged (it's hitting all the notes of the formula, I told you), that an angry mob burst into Plymouth's RightMart superstore, lured by the promise that the first 100 customers would receive a free waffle iron. At least three people died that night owing in part to RightMart owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) cheaping out on hiring security, and in part because Thomas's daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) let some of her friends into the store ahead of time, where they promptly did the thing teenagers do and jeered at the amassed, and increasingly angry crowd. A year later, over massive protests, Thomas is planning to do another Thursday night Black Friday preview sale, goaded on in part by his incredibly awful new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche, which is just an incredibly on-the-nose name for an actor playing the shrewish, greedy wife of a small business owner). Jessica, to her credit, is horribly distressed by the whole thing and feels extremely guilty, and for this penitent attitude will be our Final Girl for the evening.
Thanksgiving has plenty of sturdy slasher movie pleasures, but that opening sequence is one of the best; it really is the perfect backstory for a Thanksgiving-themed slasher movie, and the sequence is beautifully executed. It is, in the first place, constructed very neatly out of two cross-cutting Thanksgiving dinners, one being the very rich Wright family soirée where everyone but Jessica is cheering about the genius of ruining Thanksgiving night by giving into the pressures of consumer culture, the other is a crowded, homey dinner where RightMart manager Mitch Collins (Ty Victor Olsson) is miserably rushing through dinner so he can go do his terrible job at the behest of his asshole boss. It's a great way of giving us clear-cut good guys and bad guys right away, while playing the trick that any good horror movie should be able to play, pretending that the story has some kind of social resonance. And if nothing else, it seems genuinely clear that the people making the movie do earnestly hate the idea of doorbuster sales starting up on Thursday night, when it is every American's patriotic duty to be drowsily sleeping off a rich, heavy meal. This cross-cutting then leads to the RightMart itself, where the cross-cutting shifts to the outside of the store, where the mob is getting cold and angry, the front of the story, where Mitch is himself being pretty angry, but trying to make the best of it with his wife Amanda (Gina Gershon), who has shown up to give him some Thanksgiving leftovers, and the rear of the store, where Jessica's friends are being jerks. And all of this cross-cutting serves to wind the film up tighter and tighter, so when the crowd finally goes wild and smashes through the glass doors of the store, the movie itself has gotten so maddeningly tense that it's almost a relief when the explosion of violence finally comes. Though when it does, it's shown with lots of quick cuts and jarring handheld camerawork, so the relief is short-lived.
Very little in Thanksgiving actually resembles this opening, either in its style or its nods towards even the shallowest of social commentary, but it's still a good, energetic prologue that kicks the film into high gear right from the start. And after that, it's just riding along as the story plays out with its friendly inevitability: Jessica and her friends receive some threatening Instagram notifications from someone called "thejohncarver" - John Carver being the first governor of Plymouth Colony in the 1620s, who did not actually survive until the first Thanksgiving feast in November 1621, but it would be awfully petty to harp on that. And these threats dovetail with a murder spree that has quite suddenly started up, with a very obvious pattern: somebody is targeting the people who were responsible for the RightMart disaster, or who were notably violent and vicious in their behavior during the riot. Whoever could the killer be? Mitch, who has lead the protests against Thomas Wright, in retaliation for Amanda's death (the film's biggest mistake is making such little use of Gershon)? Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Jessica's ex-boyfriend, a star football player whose arm was mangled in the riot, ending his career and sending him into seclusion such that none of his friends have seen him in a year? Ryan (Milo Manheim), her new boyfriend, who has some connection with a security guard who died that Black Friday, which he lied about to the police? Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey), close friend of Amanda's who was in the literal center of the rioting, has unique access to all of the information the killer would need, and most damningly, is played by the most famous member of the cast?* A random other character who is only introduced seconds before the killer reveal, just to make sure there's some kind of "twist"?
Doesn't really matter, and I think any weathered fan of the genre is going to guess correctly, but not in the "I got ahead of the movie" sense. In the "this movie is as comfortable and familiar as a pair of beloved slippers" sense. Because that really is what the entire post-prologue stretch of Thanksgiving is all about: performing the requisite duties of a slasher film with the most sincerity and highest level of quality it can manage. And it's honestly pretty high. Roth is pretty great at staging suspense scenes, stretching out all of the plot points beyond what I would have considered reasonable in order to make sure that we're able to feel the crawling presence of doom before each and every single one of the murder scenes. These are themselves staged with a combination of eagerness to show off gory makeup effects, and a clear understanding that this needs to be frivolous fun, so there's no room here for the leering at torn and bleeding flesh of e.g. his Hostel movies, which are much more authentically nasty than this. Thanksgiving just wants to go for "ewwww, gross, hahaha", and it's consistently successful at getting there in all of its squishy and squelchy but almost never upsetting gore sequences (though there's one, fairly late, that's pushing extremely hard to be so gross it's disturbing). But the point is, the film is a good enough gore picture, but it's a genuinely strong thriller, which for me is one of the big distinctions between "I like this slasher because junk food is tasty" and "I like this slasher because it's actually good". Thanksgiving is actually good. It controls our sympathies beautifully, making sure the characters who die are the ones we like the least, but also sketching out even the most expendable figures with enough detail that they never feel like cannon fodder. It benefits greatly from Verlaque's performance as Jessica, not written to be a particularly distinctive Final Girl, but who receives a considerable amount of grounded presence from the actor, who persuasively portrays the character as exhausted and ready to give up from all of her guilt and confusion over the last year, an enjoyable low-key approach for a slasher character. It has a great costume for its killer (played by multiple actors, the better to keep us guessing), a stereotypical costume-shop Pilgrim with a plastic John Carver mask. The whole thing is just satisfying, nothing new or groundbreaking, but good enough at fulfilling all of its promises in an unfussy, entertaining way that it doesn't need to be any more than what it is.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Or, at least, the second-most famous. The most famous is probably objectively Addison Rae, a person I had never heard of before, who is as of this writing the fifth-most-followed personality on TikTok, and has the second-most likes on that platform. But she's not "actor famous", and anyway her extremely unmemorable character is in no conceivable way a possible suspect.
In the end, Roth and Rendell (the later now has sole screenwriting credit) dodged the problem through a somewhat cumbersome meta-concept: their 2023 Thanksgiving is in fact a "remake" of the now-lost "original" Thanksgiving from the early 1980s, which had been quickly removed from circulation for its crimes against taste. And that's a good thing to keep in your back pocket if you plan to be disappointed that the 2023 film isn't exactly restaging each and every one of the gory images from the 2007 trailer, though it pays homage to them. Also, I pity you if you plan to be thus disappointed, because the Thanksgiving feature as it actually exists is a real delight, Roth's best film ever while still lying securely in his wheelhouse and showcasing all of his tendencies as a genre film fanboy that have previously annoyed me. Perhaps I am maturing - Roth certainly hasn't, so that can't be it.
The main thing Thanksgiving has going for it is an immaculate purity: it's the most that any slasher movie has been "just a slasher movie" in a really, really long time. There's nothing about that can be really called "ironic", though I do think there's a knowing-ness to it, in that it seems to understand that we're going to be expecting certain moments to develop in a certain way, and it sort of grins at us in a "awwwww yeah, you know what's coming" way before fulfilling our expectations (or, much more rarely, subverting them). And this lack of slick irony already makes it unlike a huge number of all of the slasher films to have come out in the last three decades. It's also not trying to one-up the old '80s slashers, going even harder, grosser, more nihilistic: it's less of all of those things than the 2007 trailer was, and far from being a showpiece for extreme and extremely convincing gore effects, it feels like the film has deliberately kept its bloodlust in check, presumably as insurance against a future unrated cut being put on the market. And this lack of amped-up brutality makes it unlike most of the slasher films that weren't already dealt with in the "no irony" thing. It doesn't even really feel like a slasher throwback, though here we're just getting into vibes and not anything I can quantify. But it feels more like it came from an alternate universe where the slasher films didn't die off in 1989, but just kept puttering along being more or less the same thing for many years after that, and this just happens to be one of the examples of the form made in 2023.
However we want to go about framing it, Thanksgiving is satisfying. Damn satisfying. There's an underrated pleasure to seeing a movie play all of the expected notes extremely well, where what's really exciting isn't that it has some specific, singular triumph, but because it basically doesn't do anything wrong, and this is very much the mode that Thanksgiving operates in. It is unbelievably solid. It has great bones. Pick your favorite way of saying that the movie is persistently and unfailingly effective, doing all the things it needs to do, and doing them with a level of budgetary support that an '80s slasher movie would be delighted to be afforded, so it all feels a bit more polished and confident than the average story of a revenge-seeking psycho. Which is, of course, what we have here: in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in what wouldn't be the United States of America for a century and a half yet, someone is very pissed in the week running up to 23 November, 2023. That's Thanksgiving Day, but more importantly, it's Black Friday Eve, and whoever the killer is (the film provides four relatively obvious candidates), he's very angry about the events of that night last year. For it was on that day, as we see in an extended opening sequence that relays the tragedy to be avenged (it's hitting all the notes of the formula, I told you), that an angry mob burst into Plymouth's RightMart superstore, lured by the promise that the first 100 customers would receive a free waffle iron. At least three people died that night owing in part to RightMart owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) cheaping out on hiring security, and in part because Thomas's daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) let some of her friends into the store ahead of time, where they promptly did the thing teenagers do and jeered at the amassed, and increasingly angry crowd. A year later, over massive protests, Thomas is planning to do another Thursday night Black Friday preview sale, goaded on in part by his incredibly awful new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche, which is just an incredibly on-the-nose name for an actor playing the shrewish, greedy wife of a small business owner). Jessica, to her credit, is horribly distressed by the whole thing and feels extremely guilty, and for this penitent attitude will be our Final Girl for the evening.
Thanksgiving has plenty of sturdy slasher movie pleasures, but that opening sequence is one of the best; it really is the perfect backstory for a Thanksgiving-themed slasher movie, and the sequence is beautifully executed. It is, in the first place, constructed very neatly out of two cross-cutting Thanksgiving dinners, one being the very rich Wright family soirée where everyone but Jessica is cheering about the genius of ruining Thanksgiving night by giving into the pressures of consumer culture, the other is a crowded, homey dinner where RightMart manager Mitch Collins (Ty Victor Olsson) is miserably rushing through dinner so he can go do his terrible job at the behest of his asshole boss. It's a great way of giving us clear-cut good guys and bad guys right away, while playing the trick that any good horror movie should be able to play, pretending that the story has some kind of social resonance. And if nothing else, it seems genuinely clear that the people making the movie do earnestly hate the idea of doorbuster sales starting up on Thursday night, when it is every American's patriotic duty to be drowsily sleeping off a rich, heavy meal. This cross-cutting then leads to the RightMart itself, where the cross-cutting shifts to the outside of the store, where the mob is getting cold and angry, the front of the story, where Mitch is himself being pretty angry, but trying to make the best of it with his wife Amanda (Gina Gershon), who has shown up to give him some Thanksgiving leftovers, and the rear of the store, where Jessica's friends are being jerks. And all of this cross-cutting serves to wind the film up tighter and tighter, so when the crowd finally goes wild and smashes through the glass doors of the store, the movie itself has gotten so maddeningly tense that it's almost a relief when the explosion of violence finally comes. Though when it does, it's shown with lots of quick cuts and jarring handheld camerawork, so the relief is short-lived.
Very little in Thanksgiving actually resembles this opening, either in its style or its nods towards even the shallowest of social commentary, but it's still a good, energetic prologue that kicks the film into high gear right from the start. And after that, it's just riding along as the story plays out with its friendly inevitability: Jessica and her friends receive some threatening Instagram notifications from someone called "thejohncarver" - John Carver being the first governor of Plymouth Colony in the 1620s, who did not actually survive until the first Thanksgiving feast in November 1621, but it would be awfully petty to harp on that. And these threats dovetail with a murder spree that has quite suddenly started up, with a very obvious pattern: somebody is targeting the people who were responsible for the RightMart disaster, or who were notably violent and vicious in their behavior during the riot. Whoever could the killer be? Mitch, who has lead the protests against Thomas Wright, in retaliation for Amanda's death (the film's biggest mistake is making such little use of Gershon)? Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Jessica's ex-boyfriend, a star football player whose arm was mangled in the riot, ending his career and sending him into seclusion such that none of his friends have seen him in a year? Ryan (Milo Manheim), her new boyfriend, who has some connection with a security guard who died that Black Friday, which he lied about to the police? Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey), close friend of Amanda's who was in the literal center of the rioting, has unique access to all of the information the killer would need, and most damningly, is played by the most famous member of the cast?* A random other character who is only introduced seconds before the killer reveal, just to make sure there's some kind of "twist"?
Doesn't really matter, and I think any weathered fan of the genre is going to guess correctly, but not in the "I got ahead of the movie" sense. In the "this movie is as comfortable and familiar as a pair of beloved slippers" sense. Because that really is what the entire post-prologue stretch of Thanksgiving is all about: performing the requisite duties of a slasher film with the most sincerity and highest level of quality it can manage. And it's honestly pretty high. Roth is pretty great at staging suspense scenes, stretching out all of the plot points beyond what I would have considered reasonable in order to make sure that we're able to feel the crawling presence of doom before each and every single one of the murder scenes. These are themselves staged with a combination of eagerness to show off gory makeup effects, and a clear understanding that this needs to be frivolous fun, so there's no room here for the leering at torn and bleeding flesh of e.g. his Hostel movies, which are much more authentically nasty than this. Thanksgiving just wants to go for "ewwww, gross, hahaha", and it's consistently successful at getting there in all of its squishy and squelchy but almost never upsetting gore sequences (though there's one, fairly late, that's pushing extremely hard to be so gross it's disturbing). But the point is, the film is a good enough gore picture, but it's a genuinely strong thriller, which for me is one of the big distinctions between "I like this slasher because junk food is tasty" and "I like this slasher because it's actually good". Thanksgiving is actually good. It controls our sympathies beautifully, making sure the characters who die are the ones we like the least, but also sketching out even the most expendable figures with enough detail that they never feel like cannon fodder. It benefits greatly from Verlaque's performance as Jessica, not written to be a particularly distinctive Final Girl, but who receives a considerable amount of grounded presence from the actor, who persuasively portrays the character as exhausted and ready to give up from all of her guilt and confusion over the last year, an enjoyable low-key approach for a slasher character. It has a great costume for its killer (played by multiple actors, the better to keep us guessing), a stereotypical costume-shop Pilgrim with a plastic John Carver mask. The whole thing is just satisfying, nothing new or groundbreaking, but good enough at fulfilling all of its promises in an unfussy, entertaining way that it doesn't need to be any more than what it is.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Or, at least, the second-most famous. The most famous is probably objectively Addison Rae, a person I had never heard of before, who is as of this writing the fifth-most-followed personality on TikTok, and has the second-most likes on that platform. But she's not "actor famous", and anyway her extremely unmemorable character is in no conceivable way a possible suspect.
Categories: horror, mysteries, slashers, thrillers, violence and gore
