‘Thanksgiving,’ one of the iconic horror films directed by Eli Roth, is getting a sequel. The director talked about the sequel and his thoughts in an interview with IndieWire.
Last November, Eli Roth made his highly anticipated return to the horror genre and delivered a holiday classic. A brutal satire about American consumerism, ‘Thanksgiving’ opens with a Black Friday sale that turns into a deadly stampede. Highlights include a football fan sacrificing his life for a waffle maker and Gina Gershon being scalped by a shopping cart.
“We had to come out with an opening that was so strong and so shocking that it demanded people pay attention,” said Roth. “It needed to say, ‘This is a real slasher. We’re not making a joke. We’re not approaching it like a fake movie. It’ll be fun, but we’re not fucking around.’”
Roth and his ‘Thanksgiving’ screenwriter Jeff Rendell grew up not far from Plymouth, the setting of their eventual feature film. The childhood friends initially produced the concept of a “killer pilgrim slasher” as a fake trailer.
“For years, people were shaming me with it online,” Roth said, describing a social media tradition. Each November, fans reposted the clip, tagged Roth, and demand updates on the full-length movie. “Now, I’m just happy it’s out,” he said. “You can actually eat dinner and stuff your face and crawl over to your couch and pop it on. That’s what I wanted.”
‘Thanksgiving,’ a horror comedy with a sequel coming next year, blends grisly torture scenes with familiar holiday traditions to capture the culture’s conflicted feelings about Thanksgiving.
The director described feeling “burned out” defending gore and violence to critics, which led him to step away for other projects. With the action film ‘Death Wish,’ the family-friendly ‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls,’ and the shark documentary ‘Fin,’ Roth gained new skills and perspectives as a filmmaker.
Speaking with IndieWire, hebriefly touched on the challenges of making ‘Borderlands.’ “That was a whole other story. Making that in COVID was like… I could write a book on that,” he said.
‘Borderlands‘ was a financial failure and one of Lionsgate’s biggest losses. Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said, “nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong: it sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models. Several of our other releases in the quarter, though cushioned by financial models that worked as intended, didn’t live up to either our standards or our projections.”
Roth invited NECA (that’s the National Entertainment Collectibles Association) and the genre-themed apparel company Fright Rags collaborate on ‘Thanksgiving’ while he was still on set.
“When we were shooting the dinner scene, I told Spy Glass and Sony that I wanted to bring them in,” said Roth. “I said, ‘Let’s get in at the start.’ I wanted to show them the real thing.”
Next year, ‘Thanksgiving 2’ promises another creative effort from Roth and Rendell. The producer revealed the sequel is currently in “soft prep” and plans to start shooting at the end of March. There will not be a prequel, several actors are returning, and the script has already been written. The team is now finalizing the budget, which Roth wants to keep low, as with the first film
