EXCLUSIVE
THANKSGIVING Eli Roth plans some nasty surprises as he reboots a non-existent classic…
How can you live up to that trailer?’ ponders Eli Roth with a literal stroke of his fetching moustache. ‘It’s just so nuts and so fun and goes so far into the boundaries of bad taste. How do you extend that for 90 minutes, and still make a real movie?’
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He’s talking, of course, about his 2007 Thanksgiving trailer, one of four promos for fake exploitation movies that served as added (coming) attractions in the Grindhouse double bill by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Set in Plymouth, Massachusetts over the titular holiday, slasher film Thanksgiving promised ‘no leftovers’ as masked killer The Pilgrim offed nubile teens. It included a scene in which a topless, trampolining cheerleader does the splits and lands on The Pilgrim’s upturned knife.
Shot for $100,000 in two days at the end of the Hostel: Part II shoot, Roth’s degraded (in every way) trailer delighted horror fans to such an extent that he’s been trying to turn it into a feature ever since. But ‘joining the dots’ of the ‘crazy kills’ proved a thankless task. Then lightning struck…
‘We said, “Let’s pretend Thanksgiving was a movie from 1980 that was so offensive that every print was destroyed. All the scripts were burned. The director disappeared. The crew members changed their names. One person saved the trailer and uploaded it to the darkest corners of 4chan, and now it’s made it out. So this is a 2023 reboot.” And once we said that, it freed us up.’
