Eli Roth's Thanksgiving Is A Modern Remake Of A Lost Horror Movie That Never Existed
It's been 16 years since "Grindhouse" was released and it's still one of the most fascinating genre movies to ever hit theater screens. Not so much in terms of quality (the movie has its die-hard fans and exasperated critics still to this day), but in just how influential it was, especially for a movie that bombed so spectacularly at the box office.
To brush you up on the movie, it was Robert Rodriguez hot off of "Sin City" and Quentin Tarantino joining forces to pay homage to a particular favorite period of genre filmmaking: the "Grindhouse Era." That's where really gory, sleazy, typically super low-budget horror movies had their place to shine in rundown theaters. It was an era of little to no executive oversight, so anything went in these hyper-violent movies.
In terms of influence, there have been multiple horror movies trying to capture that throwback "grindhouse" aesthetic, usually to even less success than "Grindhouse" itself, but the movie did spawn a few offshoot films. Tarantino didn't go back, but Rodriguez took one of the fake trailers for a Mexican action movie called "Machete" and made two full-on feature films out of it. "Hobo With A Shotgun" was another spinoff, although an indirect one. Jason Eisener submitted the trailer as part of a competition and Rodriguez chose it as the winner, which meant it was added to the fake trailer roster in select theaters. That spawned its own movie with Rutger Hauer as the title character.
Nearly two decades later and we're still seeing the effects of "Grindhouse" as Eli Roth has finally turned back to "Thanksgiving," the feature version of which hits theaters November 17, 2023.
Rebooting a movie that never existed in the first place
The original trailer played like a long-lost early '80s slasher film. We're not talking about big studio slashers, like "Friday the 13th." We're talking more down-and-dirty examples, like "Madman," "The Prowler," and "The Burning." So, is that what the movie's going to be like? Would modern audiences even care about that style?
The answer is ... no, that's not what Roth and his team are doing with the feature version of "Thanksgiving." Speaking with Total Film, Roth said that they cracked the feature in a very weird way ... by pretending the trailer seen in "Grindhouse" was for a movie that was so extreme that it was pulled from theaters and lost to time.
"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."
That's actually a really interesting angle to approach a "Thanksgiving" feature film with. It allows Roth to make a modern film with love for early slashers that won't just feel old and dated for modern audiences. Will that approach work? I guess we'll see next month! But if it does, then Roth has smartly given us a new scary movie to watch every year once it's time to carve some turkeys and avoid your racist uncle at dinner.