The first teaser trailer for Eli Roth's holiday slasher film Thanksgiving has hit the internet. The movie, about a serial killer who visits a small town for the holidays to carve up its residents, stars Addison Rae, Patrick Dempsey, Jalen Thomas Brooks, and Gina Gershon.
The idea for Thanksgiving started cooking in 2007 when Roth featured a fake trailer for the horror movie as part of the double feature Grindhouse, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. The voiceover in the new teaser trailer says, “From director Eli Roth: Thanksgiving. You'll come home from the holidays… in a body bag!”
Eli Roth Has Talked About Making Thanksgiving for Years
Roth said to Entertainment Weekly, “Quentin was like, ‘We're doing this thing called Grindhouse. There are going to be two 60-minute movies. We want some fake trailers, and we want you guys to each do one.' We were like, ‘F— yeah!'” In 2010, Roth reportedly said that he was writing a Thanksgiving script with Jeff Rendell, who played “The Pilgrim” in the Grindhouse trailer. Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford joined Roth and Rendell on script duties two years later. Then, in 2016, Roth reported that the script still required tinkering to live up to the fake trailer. In January 2023, Deadline reported that Roth stepped away from Borderlands to finally direct a feature-length Thanksgiving.
Roth is known for directing movies such as Hostel, Cabin Fever, The Green Inferno, and The House with a Clock in Its Walls. He sometimes acts as well, playing Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. In a 2010 interview with this writer for the now-defunct Movies.com, Roth said:
“I always loved acting—it was always really fun to me. But I like doing one scene or one shot. I never considered that real acting. I wanted to do acting like Hitchcock, where you just have a walk-on and people who catch it catch it. Inglourious Basterds was my first real acting challenge and it was Quentin who pushed me to do it. I loved it, but there is nothing as deeply satisfying as scaring and entertaining an audience as a director. There’s nothing like having an idea in your head, taking a blank piece of paper and turning it into a movie that other people now have in their heads and it becomes a part of their lives.”
TriStar Pictures' Thanksgiving arrives in theaters on November 17.