For director Eli Roth, his trip for the Thanksgiving movie started in 2006, when his musketeers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were working on their double point Grindhouse. To add to the double– point experience, Tarantino asked his musketeers – including Roth – to produce fake campers that would appeal to the Grindhouse crowd. And Roth knew exactly what he wanted to do.
In his youth and teenage times, Roth and his friend Jeff Rendell, who wouldco-write Thanksgiving, took in a steady diet of horror flicks, consuming VHS after VHS of holocaust, chaos, and spear. And one special subgenre kept them busy. “ We came of age in the early ’80s, the golden period of the vacation slasher movie, ” he recalls. “ Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, New Year’s wrong When we saw Silent Night, Deadly Night, we cheered the mayhem while the Santa Claus killer yelled, ‘ discipline! ’ This, to us, was cinema at its peak. ”
For the fake caravan requested by Tarantino, Roth saw the perfect occasion to produce a caravan for an American vacation that Hollywood horror pictures had yet to celebrate Thanksgiving. Rendell and Roth wrote it, and as Roth was completing rephotographing on Hostel Part II, he’d access to locales, actors, indeed fake heads from that film to perpetuate it. When Grindhouse promised Thanksgiving as a exercise of coming lodestones , cult loved it.
For 17 times, Roth would hear from suckers wondering if he’d ever make the movie for real. Roth was game, but there was just one problem “ We did n’t have a plot, ” he says, noting that the fake caravan is simply a threading together of stabbings, beheadings, and mayhem, themed to the vacation. But a caravan doesn’t a movie make, and Roth and Rendell kept looking for ways to make it real. “ We were so thrilled with how the caravan turned out, we continually set up ourselves reverse negotiating the story to fit in the knaveries. How would we guillotine a lemon at the cortege ? How can we rally a mortal lemon? ” he notes. “ We knew we had to make Thanksgiving a real slasher film, one that could live whether you had seen the caravan or not. ”
With that in mind, they concentrated on the gestalt of the fake caravan, rather than the individual sequences themselves. “ We began with the working premise that Thanksgiving 1980 was the film the Grindhouse caravan was made from, and it was so shocking that every print was destroyed, and the only element that survived was the one caravan, ” he says. “ The new film we were making would be the reboot of that movie, starting again from scrape, but cherry picking rudiments we knew would work in the story we were telling moment. ”
During the numerous times of jotting, rewriting, and getting it right, Roth says it’s the addict spots who kept the Thanksgiving dream alive. “ Each time the horror spots would gallop it out and lament that we noway made it, ” says Roth. “ I must thank them for this – it kept us going when we were burned out on the idea or could n’t figure out how to make it great. Eventually, after a many story improvements, the idea really began to click, and we worked it out. ”
This November, a new horror legend will emerge. Thanksgiving, starring Patrick Dempsey, opens in cinemas November 22.
After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday. Picking off residents one by one, what begins as random revenge killings are soon revealed to be part of a larger, sinister holiday plan. Will the town uncover the killer and survive the holidays…or become guests at his twisted holiday dinner table?
Directed by Eli Roth, and written by Roth and Jeff Rendell. Produced by Roth, Roger Birnbaum and Rendell.
Starring Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman and Gina Gershon.
