In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, perhaps your mind strays toward violent-enough thoughts about your own family, and you’re not feeling the need to see a new horror film using the holiday as a theme. But if your familial exasperation tends to transition to puritanical comments about consumerism, Thanksgiving, the movie, might just be your piece of pie.
The official website for Eli Roth’s slasher movie summarizes the plot: “After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Mass. — the birthplace of the holiday.”
But beware: the top fell off the shaker when the filmmakers were adding the gore to this one. Because Thanksgiving is set at a time when we are seeing the brute demise of countless organisms to be feasted on around a table, the film has ample material to take advantage of. The burlesque choices entertain quite well, too.
The film’s setting in Plymouth provides a smattering of historical references and semilocal shoutouts. There is even a correct reference to the first Thanksgiving being in 1621 (not 1620). On the other hand, the killer dons a Halloween mask portraying a Pilgrim who died before that inaugural feast. Still, the screenplay by Jeff Rendell gets it right better than most Floridian classrooms do: the Pilgrims often acted with murderous aggression against ways of life they didn’t approve.
And in that lies Thanksgiving’s glimmer of a deeper message. It appears in the strident bludgeoning of the audience with the promising pan of a corporate chain store scene into which is dashed glimpses of social media madness, workers’ rights violations, and unjust resource distribution. If the film had not undercooked these themes, Thanksgiving might have found itself on many more people’s holiday menus.
It would have been quite the twist of cultural history for a slasher movie to revive a stiff holiday and become a true Thanksgiving classic, but this viewer was the only moviegoer present for a Saturday night screening at the Wellfleet Cinemas. Perhaps everyone has reached a compromise in the age-old argument and decided that the 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Thanksgiving movie.
Brent Thomas gives walking tours of Provincetown as the historical figure Anne Hutchinson.
