‘Thanksgiving’ – Eli Roth Reveals How Covid Influenced His Killer’s Design and the Research Put Into the Script

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.’

“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. 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.

“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.“

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. 

“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.”

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