Netflix R-Rated Violent Horror Slasher Is Controversial Director’s Best Movie

What started as a joke trailer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007) eventually became one of the best modern slashers of the last ten or so years. Although to be fair, that’s not saying much. As any horror lover will tell you, the slasher genre has been slim pickings for quite some time.

The last decade of horror has been dominated by moody, cerebral, “elevated horror” movies of the A24 variety. Lots of Babadook‘s and Hereditary‘s with nary a Jason or Freddy in sight. And then, just when slasher fans are ready to call the genre dead out of nowhere, we get the one-two punch of Terrifier 2 (2022) and Thanksgiving.

There was also David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, but that deserves its own article. My point is that a slasher renaissance is upon us, and Thanksgiving is one of the films leading the charge—or should I say, leading the carve?

Thanksgiving is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts the birthplace of the holiday. You might expect a horror movie set around Thanksgiving to be a parody of Halloween, Black Christmas, and other holiday-themed slasher flicks (there are more than you’d think), but you would be wrong.

Despite the ridiculous-sounding concept, Thanksgiving plays it straight for the most part.

The movie is an homage to mystery slashers like My Bloody Valentine. A tragic event kicks off the film and results in a masked killer taking their violent revenge a year later.

In this case, the catalyst for bloody mayhem is a Black Friday riot at a local department store that claims the lives of three people.

The riot is easily the film’s best sequence, as angry shoppers knock each other down and run each other over like crazed maniacs. Roth does a fantastic job of ratcheting up the tension right before all hell breaks loose, so when it finally does, it’s supremely unsettling.

Thanksgiving does for Christmas shopping what Jaws did for going to the beach.

The rest of the movie takes place a year later when a mysterious figure in a pilgrim mask starts methodically murdering the rioters responsible for the three casualties.

Like Scream, Thanksgiving gives us plenty of suspects who could be behind the mask. This is another area where Roth killed it.

I don’t want to over-praise Thanksgiving‘s central mystery—like most slashers with mystery killers, if you’re paying attention, you’ll probably figure it out before the big reveal.

It’s the way Roth attempts to keep viewers guessing that deserves praise. The director had multiple people wear the Pilgrim disguise during kills to throw the audience off until the slasher is finally unmasked.

As I mentioned above, the movie started life as one of several fake trailers created for Grindhouse. Roth’s original concept for Thanksgiving was about a boy who snaps after his father kills his favorite turkey and ends up murdering his whole family.

Years later, the boy would escape from a mental hospital and start murdering people in his hometown on Thanksgiving.

Roth made the right decision to change the movie’s premise. For one thing, the “kid snaps and kills family, escapes hospital a decade later and goes on murder spree” trope will never be done better than the original Halloween, so why even try?

For another, had Roth stuck to his original concept, we would have been robbed of that tense, visceral Black Friday opening.

I find it ironic that Eli Roth, the filmmaker that inspired the phrase “torture porn,” with his Hostel films, made a classic, no-frills slasher, and it ended up being his best film.

Trust me, I am by no means a Roth hater. Cabin Fever is excellent, and even Hostel has some merit despite its gruesome premise. But even the critics agree that Thanksgiving is the director’s most well-rounded and entertaining effort so far.

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What’s even better about Thanksgiving is that it’s completely straight. There is no winking at the camera or meta-commentary on slashers as a genre, like with the Scream movies.

There are no gimmicks, and it’s not a deconstruction of the genre like the recent In a Violent Nature. It’s just a decent, well-made slasher.

For fans of the genre, that’s all we’ve been asking for in the Blumhouse era of high-concept horror movies—just a guy in a mask, carving people up like…well…like a Thanksgiving turkey.

If that sounds like your idea of a good time, you can stream Thanksgiving on Netflix.

3 1/2 out of 4 stars.