| Robert Carlyle | The Killer15 |
PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
THANKSGIVING Eli Roth plans some nasty surprises as he reboots a non-existent classic…
‘I wanted to make a movie that was fun for everybody’
ELI ROTH
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?’
SONY PICTURES
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.’
The thought of Roth returning to horror after a 10-year hiatus with a straight-up slasher film is exciting: few are made these days, and fewer still get a mainstream release in theatres. Roth adores the subgenre – he and pal/co-writer Jeff Rendell have dreamt of making Thanksgiving since they were 13 years old, hiring out The Mutilator, Make Them Die Slowly and Three on a Meathook, and they’ve populated Plymouth with the likes of Patrick Dempsey, Gina Gershon and Rick Hoffman as they paint it red. But will there still be a sexploitation vibe to this post-#MeToo production?
‘You better have a good reason for it, because it’s going to have different connotations in 2023,’ says Roth. ‘Look, I’ve been the guy that made something that was offensive and exploitative for the sake of being shocking. I’ve had that experience. So I wanted to make a movie that was fun for everybody.
‘So the trick, for me, was to come up with: “What is shocking in a different way?” I don’t want anyone to think my work is sanitised, because it’s certainly not. But how can I surprise people, and be distasteful and offensive in a way they don’t see coming? And I think that we did it.’