This film was 40 (!) years in development: We talk to ‘Hostel’ creator Eli Roth about his new shocker ‘Thanksgiving’

Today, November 16, 2023, ‘Thanksgiving’, the new film from ‘Hostel’ director Eli Roth, was released in our cinemas. Although new should actually be put in brackets, because the first trailer for the film was shown 16 years ago as part of the Tarantino-Rodriguez double feature ‘Grindhouse’. At the time, viewers with knowledge of B-movies could watch “Death Proof” and “Planet Terror” back-to-back. And as is typical of such a true cinema experience, some trashy trailers completed the movie experience.

These special fake trailers were created by famous filmmakers such as Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie and others Eli Roth staged – and two of the fake trailers, ‘Machete’ and ‘Hobo With A Shotgun’, have already been made into feature films. Eli Roth has now joined this group and sends the pilgrim father John Carver on a bloody revenge tour through a sleepy town in “Thanksgiving”.

FILMSTARTS editor Stefan Geisler had the chance to talk to the cult director about his cinematic role models, the Black Friday craze and the fear of animal murders in horror films. But the first thing the filmmaker told us was that the film has not only been in development for sixteen years, but has been in development for an incredibly long time. 40 years is under development…

Eli Roth: It actually took much longer. My best friend Jeff Randell and I came up with this idea when we were eleven and twelve years old. We grew up in Massachusetts, the birthplace of Thanksgiving and it is the biggest holiday there. The holiday is covered in school and there are plays, historic resorts and a parade.

At that point, every other holiday already had a horror movie except Thanksgiving! And when the double feature Grindhouse was planned and Quentin [Tarantino] and Robert [Rodriguez] When we asked if we had any ideas for fake trailers, we already had all the murders ready: the decapitated turkey that walks around during the parade like a bird with its head cut off, or someone roasted in an oven and served on a table as one human turkey. And after we made the trailer, we thought, “Great, now we don’t have to make the movie anymore, because we’ve already done the best part of it.”

But for years, fans kept posting the trailer and asking why I didn’t make the movie. And at some point I asked myself the same question. Jeff and I then tried to develop a story around the fake trailer. Finally, we saw the viral Black Friday videos of people nearly kicking each other to death and that was our “aha” moment. It’s about the Christmas greed that is already spilling over into this holiday, which should actually be about gratitude, health and family. But instead, people are killing each other because of flat screen TVs. We then developed a story from this.

Eli Roth: I love the ‘Scream’ movies. Another film I really love is Silent Witness by Anthony Waller, which had a huge influence on me. We saw it on 35mm before we shot Thanksgiving. We watched other classics: Lucio Fulci’s “The House on the Cemetery Wall,” a small-town New England horror film, Joseph Zito’s “The Fork of Death,” basically anything that feels like a small town.

And of course the classics: “Halloween” and “Black Christmas”. I wanted to use the language of slasher films, but at the same time make the film feel like a holiday movie. So I watched Bob Clark’s “Merry Christmas.” Or “Porky’s,” a colorful, bright high school movie. I wanted the dinner to be reminiscent of “Five Easy Pieces.” I was inspired by Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” [Anm. d. Red.: Kurzfilm von Fellini] inspired and showed the actors “Betty Blue – 37.2 degrees in the morning” and “Breathless with Fear”. You can see that many influences and ideas are mixed together. I didn’t want Thanksgiving to look like a dirty horror movie, but rather a beautiful, crazy holiday movie, despite all the horrible things that happen in the movie.

Eli Roth: I love “Bloody Valentine’s Day,” but I actually love “Mother’s Day” – even though it’s not actually set on Mother’s Day. Jeff and I were completely obsessed with the movie and have probably seen it hundreds of times. He definitely influenced all my films.

Eli Roth: [lacht] Yes, that’s really terrible. That’s why I wanted to make a November horror movie, because horror movies always end after Halloween. When I was young, November 1 was the saddest day of the year for me because horror films disappeared from the cinemas and the rest of the year there were only family and Christmas films in the cinemas. I couldn’t wait to get back to January or February when the movies started getting good again and you could finally see blood and guts again. I believe that if you love your family, you can have a great time at Thanksgiving with them – and if you hate them, you can watch the movie, work out your frustration, and scream your heart out.

Eli Roth: Yep, that’s all it takes, and if you watch Black Friday videos on YouTube you’ll notice exactly that. We studied all these videos and tried to present them as truthfully as possible and include some funny and entertaining deaths from horror movies.

But there’s a dark truth: It’s not the waffle maker that awakens the monster in people, even though I think sometimes it does. It’s more that people need the waffle maker because the greed of the top earners is so great that they keep wages low. But at the same time we have inflation, the Black Friday sale is the only way for many people to get everything they need for their children at Christmas. If they don’t get it that day, they simply can’t afford it. The people at the top have successfully eliminated the middle class.

The reason Black Friday sales are so sick and disturbing is because people aren’t making enough money. If people made more money, you wouldn’t need these sales. Then people wouldn’t suddenly go crazy that day. But it’s a few rich people at the top who make sure we have gladiator fights in front of televisions and waffle makers. I think it’s not so much the greed that makes it so disturbing, but that we are all being manipulated. We are made to believe that we need that product now or that we absolutely must buy that gift for our children, even though we don’t actually earn enough.

This theme can also be found in ‘Thanksgiving’: the greedy people at the top sitting in their mansion and eating good food while everyone else fights and fights over waffle makers. They are clearly the ones benefiting from this fight.

Eli Roth: Yes. I always worry when someone who has a pet is killed in a movie. I can’t sit back and watch until I know who is going to feed the pet. This question drives me crazy, even though I know it’s just a movie. And every time I see someone kill an animal in a movie, I get angry. Characters have to have a very strong reason to justify this because as a viewer you end up hating the person and wondering what the poor animal did. When I watch Alien I don’t care about the crew, I care about Jones the cat. I want to make sure the cat survives.

Yes, that’s what I wanted to address in this film. Sociopaths usually start by killing animals. I made a commercial for PETA about how serial killers often start with animals. I made the documentary ‘Fin’, which is about the slaughter of sharks and how these animals are killed unnecessarily. We all need to start protecting our sharks because they keep the ocean and our oxygen clean for us. They were made into villains by society. But sharks are not monsters. We are the monsters and we have to stop killing them.