Interviews
‘Thanksgiving’ – Eli Roth on the Importance of Original Horror and Evolving His ‘Grindhouse’ Trailer [Interview]
Based on his fake trailer from the Grindhouse Double Feature (2007), Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is finally a full-feature movie, and it’s arriving in theaters this Friday, November 17.
In Thanksgiving, “After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday.”
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Roth, who wrote the script with Jeff Rendell, about his gory slasher and how it’s evolved since its faux trailer origins.
Roth tells us about how the original concept that began it all started with his childhood and a noticeable void in the slasher space.
“The original concept of Thanksgiving came from Jeff Rendell, my best friend, and I growing up in Massachusetts watching every holiday slasher film,” Roth explains. “In Massachusetts, Thanksgiving is the biggest deal. There’s the parade. There are school plays. There are two Pilgrim recreation villages you go to where they’re like, ‘What’s a television? And we churn the butter.’ You know? It’s a part of growing up. So, for us, every year was like, where is the Thanksgiving horror film? It felt like on November 1, horror was over. It was done. For the rest of the year, it was holiday movies, Christmas movies, and family movies. I’m Jewish, so Christmas movies meant nothing to me. It meant I had to wait for two months, until January or February, for horror to start back up again.”
Director Eli Roth on the set of TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING. Photo by Pief Weyman.
Gone is the grainy film grit and ’70s vibe from the initial Grindhouse trailer, replaced instead with a modern polish and contemporary style. When asked what surprised the filmmaker most about Thanksgiving’s evolution from faux trailer to feature film, well, it turns out it was society.
“What evolved were the Black Friday tramplings,” he explains. “That wasn’t a thing back in 2006 when we shot it. It was the viral videos. These viral videos of midnight Black Friday where everyone is so thankful and say, ‘We’re so happy. We don’t need anything, just our health.’ And then it’s like waffle irons and they kill each other for a big screen TV or a PlayStation or a waffle iron. Once we had that, we thought, ‘This is the great inciting incident.’ Because all those movies, whether it’s Prom Night or anything, always start with a tragedy. Then, it’s a certain amount of time later, and all the people connected to the tragedy are being killed.
“But it also not only gives a tragedy, it gave me a theme. It’s the commercialization of Christmas that has bled over into this holiday about being thankful, while at the same time, there’s a real consciousness that Thanksgiving is about colonialism. There’s a real backlash to the holiday, and people are going, ‘Why are we calling this Thanksgiving and being thankful when we massacred all the Native Americans and took their land?’ You have the perversion of the holiday from Christmas, but also this sort of awareness, which is something that we address in the movie.”
Roth continues, “It feels like Thanksgiving was this pure Charlie Brown Thanksgiving when I was a kid, and now it’s got this kind of Black Friday tramplings and this tinge of colonialism, too, that it’s not the same. For me, that’s where it’s rich, fertile territory to make a great slasher film. Let’s use that as the ground for which we can grow this movie.“
Nell Verlaque stars in TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING. Courtesy of Tristar Pictures.
Thanks to its commitment to gore and a mean streak, Roth’s slasher taps into the cynical spirit of early aughts horror that seems to go against the grain of cathartic, fun escapism horror that’s emerged recently. Roth weighs in on his slasher’s place in modern horror.
“A lot of gore is on television, and that’s okay. I think there’s a lot of gory horror on TV, so people aren’t putting it into movies,” he notes. “But I do miss those good old-fashioned meat and potato slasher movies where there are brutal kills and people are getting killed violently. I mean, people love it. Look. We’ve seen the Scream sequels and the Halloween reboots, and it’s always about who is the killer and what happens. In Scream, you’re guessing to see who the killer is. In Halloween, it’s just Michael Myers again. So those movies are done very well, but it’s really time for new blood. I really missed a new slasher language, a new town, new characters, and new mythology. We can’t just keep rebooting everything forever. It’s much better when you can give people an original.
“I think the audience is hungry for an original, and I want to deliver. It’s not just that, ‘It’s original, go see it.’ I want to give people the best night of their lives at the movies. I still have people come up to me and say, ‘Hostel was the best night I’ve ever had at the movies. Cabin Fever was the most fun I’ve ever had at a movie. I saw Green Inferno opening Weekend. I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never been with a crowd like that.’ It’s like going to see a concert.”
Karen Cliche in TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING. Courtesy of Tristar Pictures.
With that in mind, Roth sought to deliver a slasher with the audience experience at the forefront of his mind, and he’s spent quite a bit of time developing that.
“These movies don’t come along very often. I’ve been working on this movie since that trailer; it’s been 16 years. It’s been a long time planning this movie. So, when you go see it in the theater with a crowd, I guarantee you’ll never have another experience like that,” Roth promises. “Horror movies are best the very first time you see them. It will never scare you like the first time. It’s like when you have perfume or cologne; you open that bottle the first time, it’s so potent, but every time you open it, it loses its potency just a little bit until eventually it’s just water. I wanted to create that communal experience where everyone would have a great horror movie to go to in November and not have to wait until January.“
Stay tuned for more from our chat.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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