I saw Grindhouse in a crowded theater in 2007, and let me tell you: that shit played. It didn’t make a lot of money, but the pulpy Rodriguez-Tarantino double feature invited a nearly constant clamor from the audience—and this was no less true during the film’s handful of riotous spoof trailers. Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is now the third of those trailers to be fleshed out into a feature film (following Machete Kills and Hobo with a Shotgun), and it has enjoyed a surprisingly warm reception from both audiences and critics.
I’ve offered this disclaimer before and I will probably continue to do so: in general I am more interested in amplifying good and moving art than I am in negative reviews and takedowns. Many people work on a single movie, and movies are notoriously difficult to create. Making a good one is even harder, and the glee that some critics and audiences get from eviscerating a movie or artist is usually, in my humble opinion, cringe.
That said: I did not like Thanksgiving, and I do not like Eli Roth—as a director or, from what I can tell, as a person. My little review is not going to damage him (or subtract from the $30 million the movie has made so far), and if anything it will serve as a tiny little counterbalance to the film’s success, and the moderate praise it has won from critics and the horror community at large. So yes, I am going to dunk on Thanksgiving, because it is bad and because Roth gives me bad vibes.
The film begins with a farcically chaotic Black Friday at a Plymouth, MA superstore (the kind of outrageous set piece that Roth lives for), which serves as both over-the-top satire and villain-making moment for the mysterious killer that will tear the town apart one year later—donning a creepy John Carver mask and making good on the promise of all those gory kills.
Thanksgiving is ostensibly a throwback to high concept ‘70s exploitation films, but it feels more indebted to ‘90s slasher mysteries like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The scratchy film grain of the joke trailer is replaced with a much glossier finish, and the movie consciously attempts to position itself as a modern slasher. We see this in the dialogue and setting, as well as the heavy-handed stabs at social satire—or what little there is of it.
As someone hungry for political horror films (subtextual or otherwise), thanksgiving as a cultural event holds so much promise. This is, after all, a holiday founded on a creationist myth of manifest destiny and blatant historical fantasy. I am deeply and morbidly fascinated by the lore of the United States, created quite necessarily to conceal and whitewash the evils of settler colonialism, and the acts of displacement and genocide that make it possible. If the horror genre is so favorably positioned to cast back on us our own culture and history (I think it has proven that it is), then this trojan horse holiday holds so much gooey and transgressive potential.
Now, I am not so naive to think that Eli Roth is (or ever will be) the one to make good on this kind of promise. Roth’s films, from Hostel to Green Inferno, show a disquieting pattern of misogyny, xenophobia, and exploitative male gaze. His filmmaking has matured somewhat (and Thanksgiving is not exploitative in these same ways), but his films tend to fixate on the spectacle of violence, while failing to coherently reckon with the politics they stir up.
Critics generally hated his early films, but for all the wrong reasons. The collective hand-wringing over violence in media is something we see in various forms over the decades, right up to a recent Fox News bit that hypocritically (and hilariously) chides—wouldn’t ya know it—Thanksgiving and holiday slashers like it. What their performative outrage willfully misunderstands is that violence in movies is not the problem; it is the context of the violence, the gender roles it frequently exploits, and a film industry (indeed, a world) with systemic sexism and racism problems.
Roth’s respectability, and the cultural impact of his filmography, is certainly up for debate, but I have trouble seeing his movies as a whole lot more than unfunny and mean-spirited sleaze. It’s not wholly unentertaining, but it’s also not the kind of horror storytelling I feel any urge to amplify. To be clear I’m not siding with the pearl-clutching moralists (I ingest lots of media violence, with relish), but I am saying that Roth’s movies tend to rip off better pictures, while practicing a clumsy and often damaging form of identity politics. Roth clearly loves the genre (and seems to think of himself as a boundary-pushing auteur), but he is very much a producer of derivative schlock, and he has never made a movie that I enjoyed.
Setting aside for a moment the film’s utter lack of interest in substantive political satire (the Wampanoag natives serve as a fleeting punchline and nothing else), the movie works only well enough to serve as low-functioning entertainment for 106 passable minutes. The inciting Black Friday massacre is fun enough, but it feels stuck in the mid-aughts (the capitalist “holiday” has declined since then for a number of reasons). The script, written by Jeff Rendell, struggles to capture the voice of modern teens (there is a distinctly how-do-you-do-fellow-kids quality to the dialogue and depiction of social media), and the whodunit slasher structure was done more deftly by Williamson and Craven in 1996. By the time the killer reveal comes around, it feels like the movie itself has lost interest.
If I have to say something nice (or maybe just passive aggressive), it is this: if you unfocus your eyes a bit and disengage large portions of your brain, this movie is fine. It passes the time, and there are some gory and entertaining set pieces. It goes out of its way to spare the cat, and that was a nice moment. It made me chuckle once. If you want to watch this every year around this time, be my guest. But the way some of you throw around the word “classic” is rhetorically erosive and downright silly, especially when applied to a decidedly mediocre-to-bad slasher that felt dated the moment it arrived in theaters.
Eli Roth recently posted an impassioned Zionist rant to his Instagram, and I am not feeling generous. If so many horror fans can rally around Melissa Barrera after her unjust firing by Spyglass (following pro-Palestine social media posts), then why can’t those same fans make some noise about Roth’s ahistorical diatribe that angrily parrots genocidal talking points from Israeli media? It does not sit well with me that Barrera loses her job, while Roth gets patted on the back (and financially enriched) for a mediocre slasher that exploits a settler holiday. As a director and storyteller, Roth thinks small, and makes small movies. You could feed a small country on the amount of potential left on the table.