In 2021, a horror-comedy called Black Friday was released to little fanfare. For, while its premise was solid, its execution was decidedly wobbly. When Eli Roth created the fake trailer for a slasher movie called Thanksgiving to be included in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse double feature, released in 2007, perhaps he couldn’t have known that Black Friday would set the stage for the entire premise of the real movie. One that he realized, after seeing how well-received the fake trailer was, needed to be fleshed out and developed. For those few who might have had high hopes for the Devon Sawa-starring Black Friday, Thanksgiving does exactly what it couldn’t manage: makes a commentary on humanity’s capitalistic grotesqueries cresting at the outset of the lump of end-of-year holidays that begins with Thanksgiving (and, to confirm, the American tradition of post-Thanksgiving hyper-consumerism has spread throughout the world ever since the Cold War ended and the statement, “We all live in America now” took hold once capitalism “won” and communism “lost”).
Although Christmas is usually the holiday to get the most attention/play (ergo, an entire film genre centered around it that simply doesn’t exist for Thanksgiving), it is with the phenomenon of Black Friday—its own kind of American holiday—that the “season of giving” truly commences. Even as it ultimately means taking from everyone by plundering Mother Earth of its valuable and increasingly precious resources. And yes, it just so happens that Black Friday has become synonymous with Thanksgiving as the corporate overlords have seen fit to keep their stores open on Thursday night for those feeling ambitious enough after stuffing their faces and entering a tryptophan coma to buy some useless shit to give to their loved ones at Christmas.
Roth saw the empty space where Thanksgiving movies ought to be, lamenting that, after Halloween, it’s all family-oriented Christmas movies that get shoved down your throat. As a year-round horror fan, Roth couldn’t abide seeing this obvious lack in the holiday movie genre, especially with Thanksgiving being the emotionally tense, rife-with-carving-knives day that it is. To Roth, the real question was: how could someone not have seen how perfect it was for a horror movie premise until he came along?
In fact, long before the fake trailer he directed for Grindhouse, the blueprint for the movie was already there. Having grown up in Newton, Massachusetts, just forty-five minutes away from Plymouth, so-called birthplace of Thanksgiving and the location where Roth, naturally, chooses to set his stage (or table, if you prefer), the director was subjected to his fair share of Thanksgiving enthusiasm. So influenced by the holiday was Roth that, at thirteen, he and his friend, Jeff Rendell (the screenwriter of Thanksgiving), would try to come up with the best Thanksgiving-themed kills (some of which would show up in the eventual movie). In interviews about Thanksgiving, Roth stated things like, “[Thanksgiving] was the only major holiday without a killer” and “Growing up, I dreamed of writing a slasher movie like Scream or Halloween” (to be sure, Plymouth has the distinct feel of “small-town America” in the vein of the fictional Woodsboro or Haddonfield). Filling the void for that type of masked killer to suit Thanksgiving specifically was the role Roth was born for. And part of the reason it took him so long to finish Thanksgiving is because he wanted it to live up to the trailer that was so beloved. After all, it’s a lot of pressure to write a movie that was largely intended as a two-minute lark (on that note, Tarantino and Rodriguez do get a special thank you in the credits for allowing Grindhouse to serve as the launching pad for Thanksgiving). But, in his heart, Roth always carried the story of Thanksgiving. With key pieces and phrases from the trailer also materializing in the film (though sadly, “This holiday season, prepare to have the stuffing scared out of you” doesn’t enter the equation). This includes the punny catchphrase, “This year, there will be no leftovers.” And also, “The table is set.” A part of the voiceover in the trailer that reanimates as an Instagram caption warning the killer’s victims that they’ll be sitting at that table, dead or alive, soon enough.
As the voiceover of the fake trailer explains, “In the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, the fourth Thursday of November is the most celebrated day of the year.” So celebrated, it seems, that the town even has special masks modeled after famed pilgrim and former governor of Plymouth Colony, John Carver. Needless to say, Roth was delighted to learn that Rendell had unearthed such a serial killer-y name in his research of Plymouth. How could they not take such a gift from the historical gods and use it to their advantage? Especially since no one gets more ardent about Thanksgiving as an “American institution” than Plymouth, where the “first” Thanksgiving took place among English colonists and the Wampanoag tribe. Or rather, that’s the “first” Thanksgiving that Sarah Josepha Hale chose to center the holiday around when advocating for it to become a national one. Unfortunately, there are no Hale masks to complement a John Carver one—that would perhaps be too “busy.” Because if classic slashers like the aforementioned Halloween and Scream have taught us anything, it’s that only one mask can serve as the iconography for a truly memorable horror movie. To that end, there are few things more horrific in America than insatiable consumerism.
However, as much as Thanksgiving is a story about the havoc gross consumerism causes, it’s also a story about the rage invoked among the hoi polloi when they see the flagrant privilege of others. For it’s not only bad enough to have privilege, but it’s even worse to flaunt it in front of the rabble. Which is exactly what Jessica Wright’s (Nell Verlaque) friends, Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Gabby (Addison Rae), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Yulia (Jenna Warren), do when they decide to go on a (not so) “stealth mission” to get Evan a new phone from RightMart, the store Jessica father, Thomas (Rick Hoffman), owns. Because it’s the type of uniquely American “one-stop shop” where you can buy, apparently, lipstick, a phone and a waffle iron. Indeed, the security guard tries to placate the evermore ravenous crowd by shouting, “The store opens in ten minutes, you’ll get your waffle iron!” And it’s true, the first one hundred customers to enter the store are promised a free waffle iron. The kind of promotion that corporate management never seems to understand will backfire spectacularly.
Thomas, the “big man in charge,” certainly doesn’t seem to, explaining to his family, “You know, we always do the, uh, midnight Black Friday, but people were showing up at six p.m. anyway, so…” When he’s complimented for his business acumen, Thomas insists, “Yeah well credit my beautiful finacée over there, it was her idea.” The “beautiful fiancée” in question is Kathleen (Karen Cliche…quite a name, by the way), the Meredith Blake-esque figure in Jessica’s life. And, from the moment we see their first exchange together, it’s clear they have a contentious rapport, with Kathleen criticizing Jessica’s sartorial choice and Jessica reminding her that she’s in her own house. “Don’t you mean ‘our house’ now?” Kathleen ripostes. But no, Jessica does not mean that, and it makes Kathleen’s fate all the more apropos (particularly as she was also the credited “brainchild” for opening the store on Thanksgiving instead of waiting until actual Black Friday. But, as RightMart employee Mitch Collins [Ty Olsson] puts it, “Let’s face it, Black Friday starts on a Thursday now. Even in Plymouth.”). Kathleen’s fate, as a matter of fact, was one foretold in the fake trailer from Grindhouse. Along with the shudder-inducing memory of the trampoline scene that also reappears in Thanksgiving. So, too, does a bloody parade scene—this one, of course, being much more polished.
It is during the Thanksgiving Parade that one might be the most convinced they know who the killer is. And throughout the tale, Roth and Rendell do manage to keep viewers guessing about who “John Carver” might be, just as it is the case in Scream with Ghostface. Though, the specific motive behind it isn’t as exciting as the general reason for why “John Carver” would go to all this trouble to, let’s say, set such an elaborate table. For when he finally gathers them all together, he explains why he only left this sect of his targets alive, shaming, “It wasn’t enough to get in the store early. You had to taunt everyone outside to show them how special you were.” Now, he plans to show the rest of the world just how special they truly are by livestreaming their murders (something about that smacking of Spree starring Joe Keery). Thus, insisting, “Every year, people will watch this video and think of your greed, and the people who died from it.” Of course, that’s a fitting “double meaning” kind of statement for a holiday that still largely ignores the greed of the colonizers who pillaged Native Americans’ land and killed them for it. All neatly repositioned and marketed as a day of coming together and forgetting about “differences” (caused by the bloodlusting avarice of “mild-mannered” pilgrims).
What the killer seems to underestimate is the collective short-term memory of the masses, which will soon allow them to go back to their regularly-scheduled, violent Black Friday competing next year (for online shopping hasn’t eradicated the physical contact sport that this “holiday” continues to invoke). Thus, his revenge, served too hot, as it were, proves to be rather unsatisfying for him on multiple levels by Thanksgiving’s conclusion. Because, once Gordon Gekko verbalized what Americans had been thinking all along—“Greed is good”—there was never going to be any unteaching of that message.
