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MOVIE FEATURE

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TheThanksgiving holiday may be a North American tradition, but that’s no reason for Aussie audiences to miss out on a good feast. Words Gill Pringle ”W eirdly, Thanksgiving was always my favourite holiday,” muses horror director Eli Roth, on the Roth, of course, grew up to become a horror maestro in his own right, making Cabin Fever, Hostel, and The Green Inferno , amongst others. But it was only when ELI ROTH’S THANKSGIVING FEAST

Gina Gershon and Patrick Dempsey

almost trapped us into saying, ’Well, now we have to make a movie out of that trailer’.” Fast forward 16 years, and Roth believes he finally has the answer to the conundrum of how that transformation could happen. ”The Grindhouse trailer was done as a joke,” he says. ”It’s all just fake, with one ridiculous kill after another with no explanation. And we found ourselves writing explanations for the kills, but it ended up just a 90-minute joke, and we don’t want to do that. ”The breakthrough moment was when we said, ’What if we pretend Thanksgiving was a movie from 1980? And the day it was released, people were so outraged and shocked that every print was destroyed... But one person stole a trailer, and it’s lived in the darkest corners of the internet since, and this is the 2023 reboot of that movie?’ ”That allowed us to homage it;

eve of the premiere of his latest gore-fest. The idea for Thanksgiving first took seed during his teenage years growing up in Massachusetts - a state that is probably more obsessed with Thanksgiving than any other, given how the pilgrims first settled there 400 years ago. ”Going to school in the ’80s in Massachusetts, everything is about the pilgrims and Thanksgiving,” Roth explains. ”They’d take you to recreation villages, where you can talk to people dressed as pilgrims and see how they lived. And, every year, there were these holiday slasher films - all the Halloween sequels, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, and Silent Night, Deadly Night . ”I’d watch these horror movies with my best friend [co

use pieces we wanted, and come up with our own story, and write completely new, creative kills,” he concludes enthusiastically. ”A real, scary, holiday slasher!”

he directed and narrated the faux trailer segment Thanksgiving - from Quentin Tarantino and

Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 film Grindhouse - that Roth and Rendell’s idea became viable. ”That trailer was so successful, and really took on a life of its own online after Grindhouse ,” Roth says. ”It

• Thanksgiving is out on Mar 20

ROTH is a man who lives and breathes horror, and his excitement for Thanksgiving is palpable. Having played the slasher horror game only a handful of years longer than James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s entrance into the genre, it’s little surprise that this trio would become fast friends. ”When Leigh made the

short film of Saw , I met him in Los Angeles,” says Roth. ”I’d just seen the film, and he was like, ’That’s my head , in the bear trap!’ And then when James came to the first Screamfest screening, we hung out. ”When they were doing - I think - Saw 3 , and I was doing Hostel 2 , I remember calling them and going, ’OK, what body parts did you do?’

writer] Jeff Rendell, and it was so obvious to us that there needed to be a Thanksgiving slasher film. It was like this huge holiday without a killer! So, our whole lives we’ve been

Eli Roth

They said, ’Well, we ripped out a nipple piercing’. I was like, ’Ah, damn it, I have to take that out of the movie. Do you guys cut off a d***? No? Alright, I’m doing that,’” he laughs.

talking about doing Thanksgiving as a horror movie.”

12 MARCH 2024

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