In theaters since Wednesday, “Thanksgiving: Horror Week” marks Eli Roth’s return to the horror genre. Did you know that this slasher was born from a fake trailer made more than fifteen years ago?
What is it about ? A year after Black Friday turned into chaos, a mysterious killer takes inspiration from the traditional Thanksgiving holiday and terrorizes the town of Plymouth (Massachussetts), birthplace of the famous holiday. As the inhabitants are eliminated one after the other, these murders, which seemed random, reveal a larger and sinister plan. Will the townspeople discover the killer and survive the party…or will they become guests at his twisted Thanksgiving dinner?
A film born from a fake trailer
Before being a film, Thanksgiving: Horror Week was a fake trailer directed by Eli Roth as part of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse double bill, made up of Planet Terror and Boulevard of Death . This project was a tribute to the Grindhouse operating systems, these cinemas which screened crazy double programs, mixing violence and eroticism, interspersed with trailers. Faithful to the concept, the two feature films were therefore accompanied by false trailers, produced by fans of the genre. In addition to Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright also signed fake trailers.
When he was asked, Eli Roth immediately knew what he wanted to do. In his youth and adolescence, he and his friend Jeff Rendell were movie buffs who watched every horror VHS imaginable. And one particular subgenre interested them, as Roth recalls: “We came of age in the early 80s, which was the golden age of holiday slashers. Black Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day Murders, Weekend of terror [qui se déroule le 1er avril, ndlr], New Year’s Evil…When we saw Sweet night, bloody night, we cheered wildly as killer Santa shouted “PUNISH!” (punishment). For us, it was cinema at its peak.”
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A period not exploited by horror cinema
Newton, Massachusetts native Eli Roth realized that Hollywood had never made a horror film set during Thanksgiving: “It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. All school groups travel to Plimoth Patuxet for this holiday [musée qui retrace la vie des colons de Plymouth, qui devinrent par la suite les Pères pèlerins, ndlr].”
With the fake Thanksgiving trailer, the director saw the opportunity to create the horror film that Hollywood forgot to make. He wrote it with his friend Jeff Rendell and was able to take advantage of the actors, sets and makeup from Hostel – Chapter II, which he was then finishing filming, to put together the fake trailer.
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Fans who ask for more
Once the fake Thanksgiving trailer was released, Eli Roth thought he would stop there. This was without counting the enthusiasm of the public, who never stopped talking to him about it and asking for a real Thanksgiving film. But a problem persisted: it had no storyline, the trailer was just a series of murders. “We knew we had to make Thanksgiving a true horror film, one that would exist whether you saw the trailer or not”, confides Roth. It was clear that there was no way to make the iconic sequences from the trailer work in a real film, so a change of approach had to be made.
“We assumed that Thanksgiving 1980 was the film the Grindhouse trailer was based on, and that it had been so shocking that all the copies were destroyed and the only thing that survived was the trailer “explains the director. “The new film we were making would be a reboot of that film, starting from scratch, but selecting elements that we knew would work in the story we were telling today.”
Over the many years of writing and rewriting, Roth says it was the fan sites that kept the project alive: “I have to thank them for that: they kept us going when we were exhausted or couldn’t get by.”
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Harder, Better, Bloodier, Stronger
Eli Roth put pressure on himself to make his film live up to expectations, and surpass the fake original trailer. Early on, he discussed the project with Adrien Morot, a prosthetics specialist who won an Oscar for his work on The Whale. One of the reasons Roth approached Morot was their shared love of practical special effects, done on set and not digitally. “His craftsmanship is second to none. Adrien and his wife Kathy made the most incredibly realistic and beautiful heads and body parts I have ever seen. They were so beautiful! But of course, whatever the beauty of the false head, you have to crush it with a meat tenderizer”jokes the director.
He adds : “Every time you make a horror film, you have a chance to enter the pantheon of horror greats. The opportunity is there if you take it. That’s why we try to make every death a true classic of the genre. […] I have a very, very, very high tolerance for gore in cinema, so if a scene upsets me, I know it will work for general audiences.”
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A TikTok star
Gabby, Jessica’s best friend, is played by Addison Rae, who has become a star across the Atlantic thanks to TikTok, where she is followed by 88 million people. She has more than 120 million followers on her networks. She also appeared in Il est trop bien on Netflix, reboot of the teen movie Elle est trop bien, and launched into singing in 2023 with the release of an EP, which features a duet with singer Charli XCX.