Eli Roth's (Hostel, Cabin Fever, The Green Inferno) latest horror movie, Thanksgiving, arrives in theaters today, and the '90s-inspired slasher flick has earned the director some of the best reviews of his career.
With 59 verdicts counted, Thanksgiving currently sits at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Roth has always been a highly divisive filmmaker, and even some of his better-received (by the horror community, at least) efforts such as Hostel and Cabin Fever have a lot of detractors. It seems his "unique" style has finally won the majority of critics over.
Thanksgiving is based on Roth's fake trailer from the Grindhouse Double Feature (2007), and is an expansion of the original premise. In the movie, “After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday.”
If the first film is a success, Roth has plenty of ideas for possible sequels.
"Every shot, we're like, 'Oh, the Thanksgivingverse' – we joke about it," he told SFX in a recent interview. "Look, if you give people a rich mythology, and a great killer, and a great backstory, and a good mask, the story can go in any number of directions. Part of what we spent so long on was coming up with the backstory, the mythology, the reason and the potential suspects for who could be doing this. I have a million different ways I could take the story. I love it. I could spend the rest of my life making Thanksgiving movies."
"We had such high standards and high expectations for the movie," he added. "We wanted to make a great modern slasher film. I remember the first time I saw Scream in the theatre and you just go, ‘Holy shit. That was amazing!’ That’s what I want, to do that for the next generation."
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Thanksgiving is an upcoming American slasher film directed by Eli Roth, from a screenplay written by Jeff Rendell and a story by Roth and Rendell, who produced with Roger Birnbaum. It is based on Roth's mock trailer of the same name from Grindhouse (2007). It is the third feature length film to be adapted from one of the mock trailers in Grindhouse after Robert Rodriguez's Machete (2010) and Jason Eisener's Hobo with a Shotgun (2011).
The film stars Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, and Gina Gershon.
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