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After almost two decades as the face of the modern American slasher film, Eli Roth may have finally made his first horror classic. Roth has a reputation for making movies high on graphic content but low on substance, but his newest film, “Thanksgiving,” breaks from that trend.

“Thanksgiving” is one of the best horror movies of the year and earns that title without sacrificing the core principles of Roth’s career: simple, efficient storylines punctuated by grotesque imagery and dark humor.

The film is based on a two-minute fake trailer Roth created for 2007’s anthology film “Grindhouse,” a lovingly over-the-top parody of films like “Halloween” and “Scream.” The new feature-length version still pays respects to those films, but Roth makes sure not to bog himself down completely with nostalgia and camp.

The film is set in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the site of the first Thanksgiving. It begins on Thanksgiving Day of 2022, when entrepreneur Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) decides to open his department store early for Black Friday shopping, offering a sale late on the night of Thanksgiving. The sale devolves into a riot, accidentally instigated by Wright’s daughter (Nell Verlaque) and her high school friends.

A year later, a mysterious killer who lost everything in the riot descends upon the town to take revenge against those who started it. As Thanksgiving season approaches, he starts to murder people involved with the Black Friday disaster one by one, killing them in horrifying ways and posting his work on social media. Amusingly, he terrorizes the town dressed as John Carver, a mustachioed pilgrim and the first governor of Plymouth Colony.

One by one, Carver picks off the high schoolers and others who participated in the Black Friday riot, including a vicious shopper (Amanda Barker) and cowardly security guard (Tim Dillon). In typical Roth style, his methods of vengeance are incredibly and creatively violent.

But this is par for the course for the director’s work. The real surprise of “Thanksgiving” is how much fun its characters are to spend time with. The screenplay, written by Jeff Rendell, provides one of the rarest things in all of Hollywood: well-written Gen Z characters. The central group of high school seniors speak and act like real people, even if that means their dialogue is broad or simple at times.

The cast goes a long way to achieve this realistic effect. TikTok star Addison Rae’s place on the poster might seem like stunt casting designed to bring out young audiences, and there may be some truth to that, but her performance is unexpectedly versatile and down-to-earth. Her co-stars, including Verlaque and fellow relative newcomers Jalen Thomas Brooks, Milo Manheim, Gabriel Davenport and Jenna Warren, all hold their own.

Many of the stars of “Thanksgiving” are universally recognizable to young people, but rarely appear in movies. Even beyond the students, the movie is full of faces that will appeal to a new crop of horror fans. Besides Rae’s social media fame, Hoffman was introduced to a new fanbase of Gen Z viewers after the hugely popular streaming re-release of “Suits” and Milo Manheim starred in a series of Disney Channel Original Movies.

Patrick Dempsey, who plays the detective investigating the crime spree, bridges the gap between the old and new guard. He’s beloved by legacy horror audiences for his role in “Scream 3,” while also appealing to younger fans who fell in love with ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” when it arrived on Netflix.

This tension between the past and future is what defines “Thanksgiving,” and what elevates it above just another Roth bloodfest. The nostalgia that permeates much of the director’s work is fully intact (the film opens with a direct reference to “Halloween,”) but thoughtful writing and casting choices look towards the future.

Just as “Scream” examined the intersection of horror movies and real violence in 1996, Roth’s film examines the intersection of violence and the internet. His film comes at a time when brutal acts are not just recreated on the film screen but can be live streamed and posted in real time. By filtering his on-screen violence through the framing device of social media, he gives a disturbing sense of reality to scenes that might otherwise seem unbelievable.

While this framing device is an inventive way of relating these core themes, it has the side effect of undercutting some of the film’s whodunit mystery. Carver is slightly too brazen about his actions to realistically not be caught, and as he continues to taunt his victims and the police on social media, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that he wouldn’t make a mistake.

Similarly, the whodunit angle is weakened by the huge size of the cast, which is stuffed so full of red herrings that the mystery loses some weight. The hot potato of suspicion passes between so many different characters that it eventually becomes exhausting and easy to disengage from. The final reveal is still juicy enough, but by that point, many in the audience may not care.

Despite these flaws in the mystery of Carver’s identity, they don’t come anywhere near compromising the project as a whole. In the end, “Thanksgiving” only ever needed to deliver two things, violence and jump scares, and it has plenty of both. The fact that there are so many fun performances and interesting characters is a welcome bonus.

In other words, you can quibble with the side dishes, but nobody can accuse Roth of undercooking the protein. This film’s marketing campaign promises a real, back-to-basics slasher, and it delivers on that promise. That’s enough to be thankful for.

Published on November 26, 2023 at 9:58 pm