HBO Max's New 9/10 Hardcore Thriller Is an Unforgettable Modern Cult Classic
That still ain't cranberry sauce
There are a surprising number of holiday-themed slasher movies, but horror hasn’t treated all holidays equally. Christmas and Halloween are vastly overrepresented, Valentine's Day and New Year's have a couple of dedicated films apiece, and Mexican horror gives the Day of the Dead the love you’d expect, but there aren't as many options for the rest of the calendar.
Specifically, there aren't that many slasher movies with a Thanksgiving theme, whether it's American or Canadian. There are several that happen to take place around Thanksgiving, like Wes Craven's Deadly Friend, but only a couple of horror films really do anything with the holiday proper. For years, the "Thanksgiving slasher" as a category only really had two movies in it: 1987's Blood Rage ("That ain't cranberry sauce!") and 1981's Home Sweet Home. If you were looking to put together a themed holiday horror marathon, which has come up more often than you might think, those were your options.
That was part of the joke behind Eli Roth's Thanksgiving, which debuted as one of the faux trailers shown during Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 double feature Grindhouse. It was goofy as a concept and in execution, featuring a serial killer dressed as a Pilgrim, three separate decapitations, a memorable sequence involving a trampoline, and a real gross-out set at a family's dinner table.
It took Roth 16 years, but like Rodriguez did with Machete, he eventually got around to making Thanksgiving into an actual movie. While it's got every bit of Roth's trademark brutality towards his characters, 2023's Thanksgiving isn't only the new king of Turkey Day slashers, but it's got a real claim to being the best movie Roth has ever made. Thanksgiving hit HBO Max on Aug. 17, so if you're looking to celebrate the holiday a couple of months early, or just to check it out before you inflict it on your horror-loving dinner guests in November, now's a good time for it.
Thanksgiving is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the site of the Pilgrims’ first colony in America, where a big-box store's Black Friday sale turns into a bigger disaster than usual. Jessica (singer Addison Rae) lets four of her friends in early, which triggers a crowd crush from the crazed holiday shoppers. Three people die, and Jessica's boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks, The Pitt) nearly loses his arm.
One year later, a man in a Pilgrim disguise starts killing people who were involved in the Black Friday riot, making sure to tag Jessica and her friends on social media whenever he drops a fresh body. It's up to them and the local sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) to figure out who's behind the Pilgrim mask before he kills them all.
Roth as a filmmaker is probably best known for his vicious streak. The guy who coined the phrase "torture porn," film critic David Edelstein, was specifically talking about Roth's 2006 film Hostel. (We got off light. Edelstein also wanted to call it “gorno.”) Hostel was one of a handful of movies, along with Saw, the early Scream films, and Rob Zombie’s Halloween, that ended up defining 2000s horror.
With that in mind, it's a surprise that it took Roth this long to make a traditional slasher movie, as his particular sensibilities translate well to the format. Thanksgiving plays out at a swift pace, the body count is respectably high, the performances are far better than they needed to be, and it's got some of the most gruesome death scenes of any horror film this decade.
Thanksgiving was a box office success, so naturally, it's getting a sequel. According to Roth earlier this year, however, Thanksgiving 2 is being slowed down by many of the cast members' subsequent success. Roth has the unusual problem that his actors got too famous, partially due to his own hit film, which is making it difficult to get them together to be murdered by Pilgrims. They’ve all got multiple TV commitments or, in Rae’s case, spent the first half of this year on a concert tour.
If the sequel never happens, though, Roth's Thanksgiving can still stand alone as one of the better slasher movies of the 2020s. It can be a hard sell to horror fans who’ve been burned by Roth before, but Thanksgiving is one of his best films, if not the best.
Thanksgiving is now streaming on HBO Max.