Interviews
‘Thanksgiving’ – Eli Roth Talks Extensive Research Put into the Script and How Covid Influenced His Killer’s Design
A new holiday horror classic emerges with the arrival of Eli Roth‘s Thanksgiving in theaters on 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. In part one of our chat, the horror filmmaker reflected on the origins of his slasher and his thoughts on modern horror.
Now, in part two, Roth shares the research put into the contemporary slasher and the design behind his killer, John Carver.
While Roth is a lifelong horror study, filmmaker, and fanatic, Thanksgiving alters the cold open kill that’s tradition for the slasher subgenre. When asked if he felt any pressure expanding the fake Grindhouse trailer and its memorable kills in a contemporary slasher, Roth explains his approach.
He shares, “Well, it starts with the conventional language of a slasher film. I wanted it to start with the POV of the house with the identifying title of where you are and what the date is. Obviously, you love it from Halloween, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, or whether it’s The Prowler that night of the graduation dance, Prom Night. All of these things start like that with POV. Even De Palma, when he’s parodying it in Blowout, starts with the POV of the sorority house. I wanted to tell the audience, ‘You are watching a slasher film.’ I want the heavy breathing Student Bodies breather walking, and then, of course, we switch. You know? ‘Ah, you’re just messing with us.’ But we’re going to get back to that. Don’t worry. I’m saying, ‘Don’t worry. I know why you’re here. Now we’re going to go into holiday film for a little bit.’ And then it just all starts to slowly build. The titles come in at an odd time. I just felt in the rhythm of the movie, that was the place to put the Thanksgiving title card. People go, ‘Whoa, this is way rougher than we thought it was going to be.’
Cheerleader on the trampoline from TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING
“The first couple of kills are fun and a little over the top and a little ridiculous, super gory, more in the Final Destination end of the spectrum. Then they start happening to people we like. When I was doing a death that I had done in the trailer, I did feel the pressure of, ‘This better turnout as good as it did in the trailer, or I’ve really failed.’ You’re just trying to match what you did before or do a better version of it. But when you do a new kill, that’s when it’s most exciting because people aren’t expecting it. Or you’re setting it up for what people think is going to happen, and we do the bait and switch and get people in a completely different way that they weren’t expecting.”
Of course, what’s a slasher without a memorable villain? Thanksgiving introduces its killer, dubbed John Carver, who dons the mask of a historical settler. For Roth and co-writer Jeff Rendell, it was history that made their design process easier.
“Well, the design process it was interesting because you want that silhouette to be great,” Roth explains. “It was Jeff Rendell, my writer, who’s in the pilgrim outfit in the fake trailer. We just called him The Pilgrim. But when Jeff was doing the research, he said, ‘The first governor of New Plymouth Colony was named John Carver. If that’s not a slasher movie killer name, I don’t know what is.’ So when history throws you a softball like that, you better hit it out of the park.
Amanda Barker as Lizzie in TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING
“So, we call them John Carver. Then we started looking at the design, and there is one drawing of John Carver. There’s one image of him. We took that as the basis for the mask. We said, ‘Well, why would there be this mask?’ Well, 2020 would be the 400-year anniversary of the founding of Plymouth. It was a big deal. We actually tried to time the movie for it to come out in 2020, but it fell apart, and COVID happened. So we thought, ‘Well, what if they made all these masks for the quatercentenary,’ which is a word I learned, along with bowsprit, the little pointy thing at the end of a ship, I learned that word too. For the quatercentenary, the 400-year anniversary, the premise is they made all these masks, but the parade would’ve been canceled because of COVID. So they have all these masks left over.
“It’s got to be a mask that was given out that everybody in town has that’s kind of weird and uncanny of this historical figure, but when they’re in your kitchen with an ax, that’s when it’s terrifying. You know? Seeing it out of context. Once they put on the Capotain hat, which is another word we learned for it, the hat with the buckle and the pilgrim outfit. I mean, you think about the Pilgrims murdering the Native Americans. We have a rampaging Pilgrim killing on Thanksgiving. I wanted to make a movie that would be a great fun slasher film, but if some kid wanted to write a paper for high school about the themes in this film, give them a lot to chew on.“
Director Eli Roth on the set of TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group, LLC THANKSGIVING
It turns out that the extensive research put into their killer also extends to just about every facet of the writing process. Roth reveals how much effort was put into nailing the accuracy of both the setting and its adolescent residents.
“Well, it’s two levels of research. You’re doing the research of knowing that there’s the Cordage Museum, that there really are tunnels. Our friends in the Boston Police Department were Detective Pete Chu and Deputy Brett LaBelle, who we named the characters after. Jeff spent a long time with him, going, ‘Okay, take me through this. There’s a killer rampaging through a town. What happens? How do they block the cell? How do they do a live stream? How do they switch phones? What would you do in the tunnels?’ Like really understanding the research from a factual police perspective while I’m writing scenes in dialogue,” Roth tells us.
He continues, “And I’m talking to my friend’s kids, who are 16 and 17 years old now. So I go, ‘Okay, I wrote a scene. I want to know what’s authentic. How would you say this?’ Working, sitting with teenagers, and going through the script so it feels real before I get to the actors. So the actors are going, ‘Well, how do you know what an NPC is? How do you know what this is?’ And saying, ‘Well, what would you do on social media? How would a video go viral?’ The way you write a script so that it doesn’t feel like a middle-aged guy wrote it is you sit down with actual teenagers, and you treat them with respect. You say, ‘Okay, your friend, you know he likes the girl, and you say you got to make him look good, what would you say?’ ‘Oh, I’ll gas him up.’ Okay, I’ll gas him up. I wouldn’t have said that. I wouldn’t have known to say that.
“You sit down with the cast, and then they get it, and there’s another level. That’s the research, and that’s the work; that’s what makes it real. That’s what makes it authentic. It’s that you’re doing the police research, you’re watching every slasher film, so you’re thinking about how to make the best kill possible, but then you’re really doing that strong character dialogue polish with kids that age so it is authentic and true. The intentions stay the same, the objectives stay the same, but the way they express themselves has to feel like modern real dialogue. That was part of the fun of it.”
Thanksgiving is now playing in theaters nationwide.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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