This holiday season. Prepare to have the stuffing scared out of you.
Horror flicks and holidays. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter, like cake and ice cream, like…well, you get the point. We’ve had terrifying tales set on just about every holiday. April Fool’s Day. Mother’s Day. Black Christmas. Valentine. New Year’s Evil. Friday the 13th. Halloween. And dozens more. But what about America’s most forgotten holiday? A day where we stuff ourselves to the point of exploding and then pass out watching yet another crappy Detroit Lions game. A day where an electric knife plays a prominent role in the day’s events. A day that we routinely look past, as if we go straight from Halloween to Christmas. I’m talking about Arbor Day. No, not really. I’m referring, of course, to Thanksgiving.
This year, there will be no leftovers.
There have been slashers set on Thanksgiving. Blood Rage. Home Sweet Home. Thankskilling. That’s about it. In 2007, Thanksgiving horror hit the big time. Well, sort of. Directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez hatched the idea after one of Tarantino’s famed double feature screenings at his house. These events would also feature film trailers from the time period before and in between the films. The two filmmakers decided to make their own double feature, with each director helming one of the feature films, while fake movie trailers would be used to bridge the two movies. The ambitious project would be titled Grindhouse, in the mold of the type of theaters from the 1970s that would screen exploitation cinema. Rodriguez would go on to direct the first half of the double feature, a zombie pic titled Planet Terror, while Tarantino would helm the second half, a twist on the slasher genre titled Death Proof.
White meat. Dark Meat. All will be carved.
Various directors would tackle the faux movie trailers that made up the middle portion between the films. Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses) directed the trailer for the nazi flick Werewolf Women of the SS (starring Nic Cage as Fu Manchu); Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) helmed the trailer for the ’70s British horror film Don’t; and Rodriguez himself contributed the trailer for the revenge pic Machete (starring Danny Trejo as the titular character).
The one that appealed most to me, though, was Eli Roth’s (Hostel, Cabin Fever) gory slasher Thanksgiving. Tarantino and Rodriguez had approached Roth about tackling one of the fake trailers for Grindhouse, and he leapt at the chance. Set on the tastiest of holidays, the voice-over (provided by Roth), music (featuring excerpts from the Creepshow score), and grainy film quality brought back memories of late ’70s/early ’80s slasher trailers found on many of the VHS movies my parents would rent for me. Films such as My Bloody Valentine, Alone in the Dark, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Terror Train were a clear inspiration for the type of film trailer Roth had crafted. It’s also pretty clearly patterned after the trailer for the holiday horror film that launched the whole sub-genre, Halloween. It looked awesome!
So why Thanksgiving? In the “Making of” featurette on the Grindhouse Blu-Ray, Roth explained “You can think through almost every holiday, except maybe Rosh Hashana, and Thanksgiving is the only major holiday not done.” The premise of the film is that a killer dressed as a pilgrim is killing people in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts on Thanksgiving. It was shot in two days in Prague while Roth was filming Hostel: Part II and featured actors Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens), Jay Hernandez, Jordan Ladd, and Roth himself. The idea, according to Roth in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview: “My friend Jeff, who plays the killer pilgrim — we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey and then his father killed it and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town.”
You’ll come home for the holidays…in a body bag.
Since Thanksgiving was included in Grindhouse in 2007, ten (now eleven) actual Thanksgivings have passed. Roth has gone on to direct a number of films and shorts since then, including The Green Inferno, Knock, Knock, Death Wish, and this year’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls. But will we ever see a feature-length version of his slasher opus, Thanksgiving? After all, Rodriguez turned his Machete trailer into an actual film (along with a sequel, Machete Kills). Hobo With a Shotgun, a fifth fake trailer not included in the US theatrical release, was also made into a feature film in 2011. There seemed to be a lot of positive traction on the film’s progress following the release of Grindhouse, but nothing ever materialized. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, Roth updated his fans on the status of a Thanksgiving film. “Have a draft (I’m) not totally happy with,” Roth explained. “I want to put some more work into it so the film lives up to the trailer. We have the story and mythology cracked so now it’s about getting the kills right.”
I’d venture to guess that, given the success of low-budget horror films in the past few years, as well as the massive success of the recently released Halloween sequel, coupled with the fact that streaming services such as Netflix and Shudder are always looking for new content, chances are pretty good that we will eventually see a Thanksgiving film from Roth. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome is the success and legendary status of the faux trailer itself. Over the years, the trailer has gained that all-important of statuses, the cult variety. For many, viewing Thanksgiving every November has become a Thanksgiving tradition. Fan-made art and posters are abundant on the internet. Did Roth expect this kind of reception for his fake slasher flick? Way back in 2007, he actually predicted this very scenario! “No matter how many movies I make my whole life, that two-and-a-half minute trailer is what I’ll be remembered for: ‘Eli Roth — he had a guy fucking a turkey with a decapitated head on it.’”
