dinner is served
thoughts on 'Thanksgiving' and how Eli Roth's good time gross-out fetishism made me hungry for seconds
Aughts horror is back.
Thanksgiving is a shot in the arm for a genre sanded down by a decade of chasing the It Follows dragon. A genre wounded by high-profile outrage and actual punitive action during the heyday of ‘torture porn.’ (A nothing term coined by David Edelstein.) Back in his element, Roth draws freely from slasher, giallo, and eroguro alike to create a sumptuous holiday feast of carnal cravings.
It seemed impossible — at the outset of 2023 — that we’d get a picture like this. The box office was grim, and admittedly, it’s not a whole lot better this month. What’s getting made for mass consumption by the major studios is nothing short of atrocious, now more than ever. There’s the encroachment of faith-based swill like Sound of Freedom and After Death, for starters. On top of that, Hollywood has turned to toys after failing to understand the appeal of superheroes for a decade. Meanwhile, seasoned auteurs have turned to the likes of Apple and Netflix for their bloated historical dramas. Grim times.
Yet here — miraculously — is Thanksgiving. A standalone Tristar-released hard-R horror film released during prestige movie season. A breathless and bloody sprint through a lean 106 minute runtime. This is a timeless sort of picture, something that could be made from the ‘80s on (with some concessions) and not lose an ounce of its bite. Indeed, Roth hearkens back to horror one and two generations past — borrowing liberally while never forgetting to add his own touch to the horror canon.
The film opens with a bloodbath of a Black Friday set in a repurposed Wal-Mart — here called RightMart for obvious reasons. A group of Plymouth kids gets into the store ten minutes before the general public, which incites a riot. The throngs of consumers — foaming at the mouth for a free waffle iron — rush the barriers and bust into the store.
People are beaten, trampled, and scalped. Three die.
A year later, RightMart is trying to move past the tragedy. Then the mangled remains of a rioter from the previous year are found hoisted onto the superstore’s front sign. Soon, a craven killer in a John Carver mask begins to taunt the store owners and surviving kids alike via social media. He’s set a table, and they’re on the menu.
Roth is a sharper filmmaker than he often gets credit for. I’ve no love for his past personal conduct, but on the whole, he seems a well-read and well-intentioned creative. His love for horror and knowledge of it is deep, transcending decades and sub-genres. For example, he goes from Japanese exploitation in Hostel to giallo nods in Hostel Part II without either picture feeling at tension with each other. That’s because Roth likely sees the influences and parallels within those two genres and ties them into each other like a seasoned ropemaker.
Thanksgiving is a gleeful takedown of the holiday. While some have scried anti-capitalist intent — and that certainly is here — there’s an equal amount of shrift given to how absurd the holiday is as an enterprise. We can’t lose sight of the fact that the killer is so driven by a hatred of commerce that he takes a hardline traditionalist stance and starts killing to get his point across. As much as Roth is critical of the perennial absurdity around seasonal shopping, he also takes aim at idea of ‘holiday spirit’ and all of its ridiculous trimmings we accept as normal.
To get this granular with a magnifying glass, though, is to lose sight of what makes Thanksgiving work so well. Roth serves up an unrepentant bloodbath, a gravy ladle of plasma to to slather on his perverse feast. It’s unapologetic, staunchly committed to what it is, laser-focused on the same type of grimy thrills achieved by the likes of 2006’s Black Christmas. When done right, this type of horror has the same right to critical legitimacy as ‘elevated horror’ ventures. Serving up something this committed to its own genre, its own spectacle, is commentary in and of itself. A statement piece on the legitimacy of extreme horror. In a year where M3gan saw its gore trimmed because Blumhouse noticed it trending well with teens on TikTok, this kind of unrepetant scuzzfest feels important.
Thanksgiving goes the extra mile with certain kills to indulge in some truly weirdo pervert behavior. Of course, there’s the requisite ‘cheerleader on a trampoline’ scene from the original Grindhouse short. It’s revealed like a surprise cameo, coming when you least expect it, framed front and center. The butchery itself is as campy and cheeky as originally teased, as the cheerleader gets stabbed to death with each bounce.
But it’s the stepmother roasted in an oven — dressed in black with white frills — that takes the cake. (The pie?) She’s slathered in oil and salt in a fetishistic sequence that’s a big win for foot guys everywhere, before she almost escapes in a sequence that’s awfully similar to the climax of Captivity. Alas, she’s captured and roasted — stuck with a thermometer and served on a table with her golden brown thighs splayed out on full display.
As much of the more drawn-out carnage is inflicted on women, the question has to posed: is this craven misogyny or just some devious fun? The line is impossible to draw, especially we’re discussing a creator like Roth. Remember — he’s the guy who famously refused to watch an Eliza Dushku movie because she didn’t show her breasts, hired attractive actresses to motivate his male actors, and has groped women at conventions. Sure, this was all pre-“Me Too”, and by most praxises it seems like Roth has grown as a person in the years since. But the consequence of making a film like this is that we have to wonder — how much of this is just in the spirit of the genre, and how much is weird schoolboy kicks?
Well, that’s the problem — right? That’s always been the problem when it comes to extreme art. Some of the best examples of it come from weirdos and perverts, people you might not want to spend more than a few minutes next to. Yet when exposed to the inside of their whacked-out brain, you’re left in awe. Where do we draw the line, then? When do we stop supporting an artist? Start reading hostile intent into their work? I suppose the answer is, “when they do some truly monstrous”, or for some, “whenever we want to”.
And I want to like Thanksgiving. I do, in fact. It’s the sort of fun-filled gore-stuffed seasonal confection that’s all but dried up post-2010. Beyond that, it’s a knowing concentration of several genres distilled into a stiff cocktail of violence. Roth takes a stock giallo structure — a killer with a salacious secret dons an all-black get-up and does murder — and crashes it into a ‘90s teen peril flick like I Know What You Did Last Summer or Urban Legend. Much like the trans-genre conversation between the two Hostel films, this interplay in Thanksgiving makes for a compelling slice of small town high school paranoia that keeps you guessing until the very end. The script is lousy with red herrings, and at any given point, you could follow certain threads and land on a different character. It speaks to how deft Roth and co-writer Jeff Rendell are at misdirection.
The actual reveal of the killer doesn’t disappoint, either. Their performance is committed and over-the-top, laced with knowing one-liners between gristly kills after mostly staying quiet the whole film. While I was worried John Carver would come across as a prefab wannabe slasher icon — especially with those tie-in toys — he earns his place in the horror pantheon. He’s sold by a committed performance on part of his actor and by a merciful restraint on part of Roth. Carver could’ve been an obnoxious knock-off Krueger — a forced meme, even — and that thankfully isn’t the case. Thanksgiving sticks to its guns and lands a bullseye by consequence.
Roth’s fate as a filmmaker felt uncertain for much of the 2010. After a divisive reaction to both The Green Inferno and Knock Knock — and after his collaborator on both was outed as a sexual predator — he seemed destined for the risk-averse mainstream. The House With A Clock In Its Walls was a charming, inoffensive kiddy romp. After that, he was attached to Borderlands before he departed the project after several years. During that time, he was also attached to The Meg before also exiting that.
Being blunt — that space is not where Roth belongs. Love him or hate him, Roth is a smart cookie when it comes to horror and knows exactly what buttons to push. He’s not going to deliver a palatable picture that’s easy to digest and process. In Hostel, he took aim at frat bro sex tourism; in the follow-up, he poked at institutionalized misogyny. He did this with language that went over most critics’ heads, many of whom were too hung up on reactionary takes to the violence to actually reckon with what was being said. Language that went over the heads, even, of some of the contemporary audiences that ate the first film up. And language that seemed to even contradict some of his own past behavior.
These wrinkles make Roth’s art difficult to assess, but equally difficult to condemn or ignore. He’s a product of the very culture he takes aim at, and on some level, I’m 100% he’s aware of that. That’s why Thanksgiving is such a vital picture. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, something with rotten origins that anybody with an internet connection could lecture you on. Instead of taking part in what Roth himself would call ‘slacktivism’, he smartly picks a bigger target: the country itself. All of the uniquely American ideosyncracies and traditions, all intrinsically connected to one thing: murder. Murder in the same of personal benefit, blood spilled on the altar of some arbitrary morality. Manifest destiny, serial killer manifesto, Black Friday shopping list, call it what you will. These things are all violence, consumption, driven by some sort of personal motive. That’s what Thanksgiving is really poking at — it’s hiding right in plain sight. The interpersonal absurdity and greedy tragedy of lived American reality.
Thanksgiving is a marriage of trash and treasure, woven into the fine line between ‘high art’ and ‘low art.’ Beyond its novelty as a seasonal slasher, it’s a gruesome return to form for a creative who was — at one point — part of a collective known as the ‘Splat Pack.’
The fact that it exists feels like an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix. Something that — surely! — couldn’t have come out in 2023, the year where Spider-Man is at the forefront of artistic achievement in animation. Where a Barbie film is being given actual critical shrift and heralded — clung to — as a pivotal moment for womanhood. Could a movie this unrepentantly unpleasant and thoroughly fucked actually come out from literal Tristar? Not be tied to a brand, or the tenth installment in a series, or a reboot to something?
That’s the true feat of Thanksgiving. It’s Roth firing at all cylinders. Like Argento’s return to giallo after a brief foray into comedy and TV dramas — which yielded his seminal Deep Red — Thanksgiving is the return of a genre maestro to forefront of confrontational gross-out anti-establishment horror. It’s fierce, funny, and full of moments that will live — rent-free — in your brain for years.
For a while, it seemed like Eli Roth was done with the sort of projects that put him on the map. But with Thanksgiving, he’s — thankfully — proven that’s not the case. He delivers the sort of sledgehammer shock picture he knows inside and out, an example of genre expertise and directorial prowess working in tandem. Just when many — myself included — counted Roth out, he comes biting back with what may be his best film since Hostel Part 2. Some of his best work laid dormant for much of one decade, only to roar back with full force in the following one. His latest is ferocious, unwilling to compromise or make concessions for contemporary trends. Fearless in its willingness to push boundaries without an IP or studio horror power player to back it up.
Thanksgiving cooks up a transcendent and strange surprise feast — one you weren’t expecting to be invited to, but feel welcomed by once you settle in. A meal that feels like a familiar cradle in a new room, something nostalgic, something alien. By the end of it — maybe in the middle for some, or at the top for others — you feel a sense of belonging. Purpose. Like anytime you’ve ever thought you didn’t belong, or like you couldn’t go on, was fake. However fleeting it is, that meal gives you the strength to push on. The clarity to see that there are things left to do, to taste, to feel. Life left to live, and people left to love.
This particular meal made me realize that there are things I have left to say about the things I watch and play and read. Things that I care about working on. Thanksgiving made me remember why I love art, why I love writing about it, why I love posting reviews of it on top of making it. I love gathering around the critical table and hashing out our takes. Sharpening our knives in the name of love and togetherness. This table — parasocial though it often is — is important for people to connect, to learn, to grow. How we consume art and how we talk about it is important, and Thanksgiving made me remember why art is worth going to that length for.
This year, Thanksgiving made me thankful for art. Especially gross, weird, pervert art with ladies cooked like turkey. Amen, and blessed be.