Pay attention. YouTube is currently much taken up with the trailer for Thanksgiving, Eli Roth’s upcoming slasher film. There is a great deal of seasonal violence. Someone dressed as a turkey gets decapitated. A young woman gets roasted in an oven (with all the trimmings?). Someone else has corn-on-the-cob skewers rammed in either ear. There is a Black Friday riot. Pass the cranberry.
“It’s commenting on what has happened with Thanksgiving, where it’s become this Black Friday rampage,” Roth says. “Suddenly, people were leaving their dinners early to go to a Black Friday sale, right?”
I get that. There is also an older – apparently much older – trailer for another Eli Roth film called Thanksgiving. This one also has a decapitated fake turkey. But it suggests more explicit sexuality. It is shot on grainy, decayed film. “Prepare to have the stuffing scared out of you,” a bass voice rumbles. The faux-vintage trailer was shot as an accompaniment to Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 trash-horror pastiche. It is a promo for a film that doesn’t exist. I do not, however, read Roth’s new film as an attempt to belatedly create the movie first trailed. This feels like (stay with me) a contemporary remake of that earlier, nonexistent Thanksgiving.
“That’s exactly it,” Roth says in his machine-gun delivery. He goes on to explain that, aware of classic seasonal slashers such as Black Christmas and Halloween, he had long planned to bring horror to the fourth Thursday in November.
“So when Quentin and Robert Rodriguez came to me and said, ‘Hey, do you do you want to do a fake trailer for Grindhouse?’ I said, ‘Oh, I already know what that is. It’s Thanksgiving. Let’s do it as a test run.’ Now, that was obviously a joke. But the response was overwhelming. People kept saying, ‘Why don’t you make it a real movie?’ For a long time we were writing connector scenes between the scenes from the trailer. Right? And that’s no way to go about writing a good movie.”
So he and his team eventually decided to construct their own elaborate mythology.
“What if Thanksgiving 1980 – let’s just call it that – was a real movie that came out and, on the first day of release, every print was burned because people were so shocked and horrified by it? The only thing that survived was one trailer. What if some film-makers decided to make a reboot of that?”
Eli Roth is just the fellow to embark on such a metatextual adventure. It is a little over 20 years since he broke through with his allusive horror comedy Cabin Fever. The creatively revolting Hostel franchise helped kick-start the “torture porn” boom of the 2000s. Great pals with Tarantino – he had a strong role in Inglourious Basterds – Roth has a similar devotion to the history of exploitation cinema.
It is interesting to note what has changed. The older Grindhouse trailer points to an era when there was a lot more sex in these things. Directors were required to persuade at least one of the women actors to get her top off.
“Definitely. I think that sexuality in movies has migrated to the telephone,” Roth says. “There’s lot of sexuality on HBO. The cultural norms shift. Back when we were kids the only place to see boobs was in an R-rated movie. That was where you went to see nudity or sex or titillation. Or on late-night cable if you had it. Some Emmanuelle film might come on. That was it. That was your only exposure to it. But now it’s so prevalent you can get anything in any category on your phone in seconds.”
Roth makes a fascinating point. The rules were a bit different over here – even RTÉ showed the raunchy bits in Dennis Potter plays – but X-rated movies were rarely screened on television. Now mainstream cinema is more chaste than what we see on our many smaller screens.
“People are comfortable watching sex on Game of Thrones or Westworld,” he says. “But, culturally right now, sex and horror films do not match in the way they did in the early 1980s.”
The two trailers also point up how this very American holiday has changed over the years. As Roth earlier pointed out, the phenomenon of Black Friday – an orgy of sales on the day after Thanksgiving – has soared since the early 1980s. Over the past decade the bloody thing has even infiltrated Irish supermarkets.
“Seeing all these Black Friday tramplings that were happening, we thought this is a fantastic way to open a horror film. This is a great device. You need that inciting incident. There’s always something that happens in the beginning of a horror movie. Then you cut to a year later – or many years later – and people start getting picked off.”
That can hardly count as a spoiler.
Quentin Tarantino gave me very good advice. He said, ‘Don’t buy a house until you’re ready, because then you become an employee of your house.’ He saw all these directors get their first Hollywood film and buy a house they couldn’t afford. Then every career decision they made was based on, ‘Well, I’ve got to pay my mortgage’
I wonder what Roth’s eminently respectable parents have made of his career. He was raised in a leafy part of Massachusetts by a Harvard-professor dad and a painter mom. He began shooting movies as a kid after seeing Alien and, with a bunch of shorts under his belt, eventually made his way to film school at New York University. Legends gather around him. He was apparently a cybersex operator (don’t ask) for Penthouse magazine. That provided the money for early films. So did Mom and Dad disown him? Would they rather he made stately adaptations of Nathaniel Hawthorne novels?
“They love it!” he says. “They are great parents. They were so supportive. We helped move my parents out of their house in Boston, and they had all these papers and reports on me from when I was five or six years old. And I was, like, ‘Why would you save the stuff?’ They said, ‘We were so proud of you.’ They are loving, supportive parents. But my dad is a Freudian analyst. So you can talk about the imagery in a movie. My mother is a painter. None of it is real. It’s all just imagery. It’s all just a magic trick. You’re just re-creating imagery, and you’re telling a story.”
He laughs.
“Sometimes there is a bit of an eyeroll. They will say, ‘Whatever makes you happy.’ My father said I was always the best-behaved kid. Making horror movies has been my way of misbehaving.”
It has been an interesting career. Roth has worked for the studios, but he has managed to maintain an independent spirit with viscera-drenched slashers such as The Green Inferno, from 2013. In 2018 he released an inexplicable remake of Death Wish and a lavish family film entitled The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Next year, after the cheeky thrills of Thanksgiving, we can see Cate Blanchett and Jack Black in his big-budget take on the video game Borderlands. I get a sense he’s juggling things quite adroitly.
“I always was drawn to doing my own thing and seeing a film I want to see get made,” Roth says. “Sometimes those movies work and you can make money on the back end. Other times you never see a penny from them. But if you keep your costs low enough you can turn a profit for the investors. Then you can keep making movies, and that is my goal.”
A decade older, Tarantino got to that strategy first.
“I remember Quentin gave me very good advice,” he says. “He said, ‘Don’t buy a house until you’re ready, because then you become an employee of your house.’ He saw all these directors of his era make their indie movie, get their first Hollywood film and then buy a house they couldn’t afford. Then every decision they made in their career was based on, ‘Well, I’ve got to pay my mortgage.’ He makes Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and he is still couch surfing. And he can do whatever he wants. Don’t live an ostentatious lifestyle. Try to not live like a monk either.”
For all the recreational depravity in his films, there remains a very ordered mind behind their creation.
“Sometimes the indie movies hit and sometimes you see nothing,” he says. “Every now and then you jump back into a studio movie. But I’ve been very fortunate in my career. What are people going to remember? It’s the work you leave behind.”
Thanksgiving is in cinemas from Friday November 17th
