Warning: The following article contains some details about a scene in Thanksgiving, but no outright spoilers.
Us Grindhouse fans have been waiting 17 long years for Eli Roth to bring his near-perfect Thanksgiving slasher short to the big screen in feature form. Not only has that finally happened, but the film was well worth waiting for (read IGN's review here). In my interview with Roth ahead of the film’s release today, he opened up about developing the project from a fake trailer to a feature, working with his best friend Jeff Rendell to craft an exciting script in his signature voice — and we even got into it about everyone’s favorite cringe-inducing segment, the cheerleader scene.
The whole Thanksgiving thing started for Roth and Rendell when they were kids. The pair became best friends in kindergarten and started shooting videos in Roth’s basement in their early teens, according to the Cabin Fever filmmaker. In his words, the dynamic duo were “ingesting movies” by that age, getting their hands on as many tapes as possible for weekend horror marathons and watching as many films as they could in theaters as well. Because their formative years were steeped the genre, Thanksgiving was already more than a twinkle in their eyes when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez asked them to do a fake trailer for the original 2007 Grindhouse release.
“It was like our dream movie to make, so we did all the kills. Jeff plays the pilgrim in it, and then he wrote that narration and then I said it, and then I added [to it], we both wrote it,” Roth explained in our interview. “He had all these great, great things, and I was like, "White meat, dark meat." We had the same sense of humor, our voices are very, very similar.”
So when they started writing the feature version of the script, “we found that we were just sort of connecting the dots between the trailer,” Roth added. “And it wasn't a real movie. We were like, that works because it's a joke. It's fun. It's a parody of those types of movies from 1980. It's supposed to be ridiculous. But the intention was always to make a real slasher film. It was always to make Halloween, Black Christmas, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Mother's Day, and then other slashers that we love, like the Prowler, Prom Night, Pieces, later ones like Scream. Mute Witness was a huge influence. That's what I wanted.”
Filling in the Horror Calendar
For Roth, it was also about filling a much-neglected gap in the holiday calendar. He wanted to extend that Halloween feel through to Thanksgiving before the select few good Christmas horror films take over and push the genre into January.
It’s easy to see how perfectly this film fits into that role when you look into just how well-researched the project was. Roth told IGN that Rendell “was in Boston on the ground doing the research in Plymouth at the Court House Museum, researching the underground tunnels” when he found that the first governor was named John Carver. “We didn't know that,” the Inglorious Basterds star said. “That was the first governor of New Plymouth Colony. He was the governor on the Mayflower. We didn't learn about that in school. Jeff found that in the history book. That's amazing. That's like God giving you a, here you go, here's your slasher name.”
From there, it was about figuring out the plot details that would make this a fully fledged story, not just a parody short. “How would [the killer] hide their signals? And Jeff really knows slasher films. We watched every single movie,” Roth said. “So Jeff figured out the plot mechanics — and then it was really the Black Friday trampling. We started watching those YouTube videos. We're like, that is actually a great inciting incident.”
Ultimately, the film’s successes in its story and script stem from the tight-knit collaboration that comes with working with your best friend.
“Every scene, Jeff's going to work on it and I'm going to work on it too. It's always going to have my voice,” the Hostel director explained. “The writing credit deservedly so goes to Jeff, but I'm always thinking of, when you're there with your best friend and you're thinking of lines and you're adding stuff in, we're just like, 'Oh, that's great.' You rehearse it with the cast, and with me and Jeff and the cast, and [then you’re] writing little lines, and you throw this in. And then once you're shooting a scene, you always come up with more stuff. Jeff is next to me on set every single scene making sure that we didn't misalign or we didn't miss anything. It was really the two of us. This was our baby.”
That Cheerleader Scene
That baby has really grown up since the success of the original short. In fact, the short’s most memorable scene — the graphic cheerleader death moment — has even matured in this new incarnation of Thanksgiving.
“The original moment was so shocking that in the entire three and a half hour Grindhouse experience, people were calling that out as the most shocking thing. And that was a contest to see who could be the most shocking. That was the fun [of it]. I think that moment works in the context of Grindhouse,” Roth mused during our interview. “We, of course, shot it and shot different versions, but in the context of a real movie, there was something about it that, to me, rang false. That is the truth. I was like, 'why would the killer do this? And why is this movie doing that? Am I doing it just because we did it in Grindhouse?' ”
Ultimately, it became a question of doing the scene differently and, as a result, better, and it proved to be a manageable task. According to Roth, some test audiences even liked the new version of the scene more, and the whole experience made him realize that watching the Grindhouse short — and the demented moments therein — is always a just click away.
“It's always there. It's not going anywhere,” Roth told IGN. “But taking that moment and putting it into the context of this movie, it just felt like the 2007 version of me trying to show that I'm still shocking. What if I can be more clever? I honestly, in my mind, as a creative storyteller, couldn't justify it beyond, 'well, I did it in Grindhouse,' which was not a strong enough reason. It just didn't make sense. It just felt like that moment belonged in that experience. We're going to have a crazier, scarier way. And if you want that experience, it's there if you want it.”
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
