Sixteen years after the fake trailer made for the double-bill “Grindhouse”, “Thanksgiving” becomes a horror film by Eli Roth. Who returns to it and his previous opuses of the genre at our microphone.
The origin of Thanksgiving (the movie, not the holiday) is a fake trailer. Directed by Eli Roth for the intermission of Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s homage to the double bill of exploitation cinema released in 2007. Like Machete or Hobo with a Shotgun, which became feature films before it.
“Other holidays had their horror movies but not Thanksgiving”, Eli Roth tells us sixteen years later, when his trailer has finally become a feature film. And this marks his (bloody) return to the genre that revealed him thanks to Cabin Fever and Hostel in the early 2000s.
Fans will recognize some of the deaths from the trailer in Jessica’s (Nell Verlaque) story. A year after a Black Friday which turned into carnage, the heroine and her friends are chased by a killer hidden behind a mask bearing the image of John Carver (organizer of the trip which led the Pilgrim Fathers from England to Massachusetts, and great figure of the Thanksgiving holiday).
Also worn by Patrick Dempsey, Gina Gershon, Addison Rae and Jalen Thomas Brooks, this slasher, prohibited for those under 16, seduces with the inventiveness of its kills, and the infectious joy with which Eli Roth brings this story to life.
At our microphone, the director returns to this new film and his previous forays into horror cinema, while his next opus, the adaptation of the video game Borderlands, will be released in our theaters on August 7, 2024.
Comments collected by Didier Allouch in Los Angeles on November 8, 2023 – Editing: Chanelle Morvan