Eli Roth is one of the best-known horror directors out there, which is perhaps surprising, given his relatively small body of work: some of that body of work has been pretty divisive, too. But his love of genre film has never been in question, he’s a horror guy, and his feature-length take on Thanksgiving is very much him at his best: having fun, blending comedy with horror and crafting a defiantly decent modern-day slasher with a back story which has enough depth to keep things together. It’s set in Plymouth, Massachusetts and makes good use of the city’s historical links to the Thanksgiving holiday, right down to the historical names and faces used in the film. But out of all this, it weaves something which feels very up-to-date, with plenty of ideas. You’d be hard-pressed to be bored, genuinely bored, even though the film runs to around one hour forty-five minutes.
We start with a Thanksgiving dinner, and this recurs as a theme throughout: single cop Eric (it’s only Patrick Dempsey!) joins a family group for the meal, which includes local RightMart manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) with his wife Amanda (Gina Gerschon) and the owner of the store, local bigwig Thomas Wright (elite hunter Rick Hoffman) and his new, arm candy wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche). But proceedings are broken up when Mitch gets called into work; the big Black Friday sale is, apparently, beginning on Thanksgiving evening, and the hordes are gathering (if you’re an American and you think that’s consumerism gone mad, then consider the fact that we get that in the UK and Europe now, too, despite not celebrating Thanksgiving – for obvious reasons). The group begins to peel off – pun not intended, now that it’s been noted – and call in to the store themselves, including Wright family heir Jessica (Nell Verlaque) and her high school age friends. That they jump the sizeable queue and get inside ahead of everyone else adds outrage to the already simmering, please-part-me-with-my-money crowd, not helped by how they mock the waiting shoppers through the plate glass windows. As this unfolds, we get a few glimpses of local rivalries, issues and double-crosses. Remember them: they might come in for something later. You never know. (You know.)
But for now, it’s enough to know this: things are about to get retail ugly. Collapsed entry doors, tramplings, rioting, fleeing, screaming people: the only person not terrified seems to be Jessica’s jock friend Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), who livecasts the melee on his phone. Interestingly, this sequence happens before the film’s title even appears on screen: this zombie-adjacent horde descending on a mall (okay, a mart, but there’s little difference) calls to mind Romero’s seminal Dead films, right down to the sense of fun he hung onto in Dawn, and the grisly, scalp-ripping riot that happens once the windows come down is definitely nasty, even if just a hectic prelude to the main event. Because, after this, we skip ahead by one year. In that interim, Plymouth has mourned its dead, the teen friendship group has been disrupted by the disappearance of Jessica’s boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and some of the townspeople are protesting any return of the early Black Friday event taking place this year. Wright is keen for it to go ahead anyway – those profits! – but it seems someone might be about to take things further than a placard and a slogan. The historic Cutter house, linked to pilgrim figure John Cutter, has been trashed and graffitied. Oh, and a large display axe stolen. Oh, and someone has set up social media accounts under the name of ‘John Cutter’, threatening vengeance on a selection of the people of the town, including Jessica and her friends.
Slasher incoming! Whilst this genre is, by some margin, not one of my favourites, Thanksgiving strikes a great balance between reverence for the classic slashers (which were themselves inspiration for the faux Thanksgiving trailer directed by Roth for Grindhouse, way back in 2007) and enough fresh ideas to hook jaded modern audiences who may feel they’ve ‘seen it all’. There’s a lot of flair here for pitch black humour, right down to some ingenious splatstick, and a sense that every kill needs to be an OTT, memorable set piece. It’s fast paced and always feels fast paced somehow, despite the runtime, never taking itself terribly seriously for too long (as this would probably be the weak spot which unravelled that pace altogether). Similarly, the characters walk a decent line between archetype (jock, boss, geek) and greater depth which only develops over time, and only as much as is needed for the story at hand. So, as we see the plot move forward with a grisly plan starting to come together, it’s Jessica who becomes our common denominator, with access all areas and enough about her to hold our interest. Hey, if some of her lines are very heavily meant to foreshadow later events, it’s all good – it’s all in the spirit of the thing, character, plot, pace and all. It works.
Sure, there’s nothing super-subtle here about how Thanksgiving handles its big themes of corporate greed, consumer culture or social media, but it really doesn’t need to be: it has a lot of fun, successful set pieces, confidence in its approach and a seamless blend of comedy and tragedy. This is a colourful, gruesome horror comic which pokes fun at/holes in an array of culpable characters. What’s not to love? Add to that the fact that it doesn’t scrimp on the final act in any way, shape or form and you’ve got a winner, even for this miserable anti-slashers reviewer right here, who wound up totally on board. If this ends up being the last horror movie I watch in 2023 – as it well might – then it’s a great way to close the year.
Thanksgiving (2023) will be released on VOD January 1st 2024.