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About This Film
A chaotic Black Friday sale in Plymouth, Massachusetts ends in deaths, and one year later a killer dressed as a pilgrim begins targeting people connected to the tragedy. Eli Roth builds an unapologetically literal holiday slasher around Thanksgiving iconography: carved turkeys, parade imagery, pilgrim masks, dinner tables, and the town’s historical association with the holiday. The strongest satirical idea is the connection between gratitude and consumer frenzy. The violence begins not at dinner but in a store opening immediately after Thanksgiving, turning modern retail ritual into the film’s original sin. The later killings then transform familiar holiday objects into grotesque set pieces.
Famous Quote
“Sorry, Jessica! This year, there will be no leftovers!”— John Carver (English)
Vibe
Thanksgiving —
Watch For
- Watch how the opening Black Friday riot reframes consumer behavior as the movie’s foundational horror.
- Notice Plymouth landmarks and Thanksgiving imagery used as local identity rather than generic seasonal decoration.
- Track the killer’s pilgrim costume and table-setting imagery as a parody of ritual hospitality.
- Pay attention to how the mystery uses social-media footage and recorded evidence from the original riot.
Production Notes
Sony’s official synopsis identifies the film’s structure clearly: a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, followed by a Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizing Plymouth. Roth directed from a screenplay by Jeff Rendell, based on a story the two developed from the faux trailer Roth created for Grindhouse in 2007. Sony’s Japanese press materials explicitly describe the feature as the long-delayed expansion of that fake trailer sixteen years later. The production therefore has an unusually long gestation inside holiday-horror fandom.
Trivia
- Eli Roth directed the feature.
- Jeff Rendell wrote the screenplay from a story by Roth and Rendell.
- The feature expands the fake Thanksgiving trailer created for Grindhouse in 2007.
- The story is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
- Sony’s synopsis explicitly describes the killer as Thanksgiving-inspired and the final plan as a twisted holiday dinner.
Legacy
Thanksgiving quickly filled a surprisingly open niche: despite decades of holiday slashers, Thanksgiving had far fewer major theatrical horror titles than Halloween, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day. Roth’s movie leveraged that absence and the cult memory of his Grindhouse trailer. Its Black Friday opening also gives it a contemporary satirical hook beyond seasonal iconography. The film’s success has already made “John Carver” part of the modern holiday-horror vocabulary, giving the collection a recent genre entry whose connection to the holiday is total rather than opportunistic.