Thanksgiving Terror: Eli Roth's Twisted Holiday Horror

Hi, how are you? It's going awesome. So how much does one have to hate Thanksgiving to make a horror movie about it? I feel like when you love something, that's when you make a horror movie about it. And as you may have heard, growing up in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving is such a huge deal. There's school plays, there's two separate pilgrim recreation villages you visit as kids, there's the parade.

So every holiday had a slasher film except Thanksgiving, which was like the most obvious one-dot. So it wasn't even a hatred of the holidays, it's actually my favorite holiday. But the Black Friday sales have completely perverted it. And that's when we thought, okay, now we have an interesting horror movie. It's not just a basic slasher film, you have that theme of the kind of Christmas commercialization that is bled over.

So we're all sitting around and saying how thankful we are and then running out and trampling over each other for waffle irons. That's where when you have that kind of theme, you have fertile ground for a horror film. Absolutely, and you did it very well. But this one is a little campier than some of your other horror movies, why? I really wanted to decapitate someone in a turkey costume at a parade and see if they run around like a turkey with their head cut off.

And you're laughing. You can't just, you can't decapitate a mascot at a parade and not just laugh. It's just like Monty Python ridiculous. So I thought, you know what, for this one, I can make it scary, but I wanna make it fun. It's just the tone of the movie. It's not silly, it's just slightly left of center. It's just crazy enough that it's just unrealistic enough you can enjoy the violence.

I felt like I didn't want a punishing, grueling, I've done the endurance test horror movie. I did it with Hostel. Hostel 2 especially was like, I look at that now and it's a very dark, bleak movie, which I'm very proud of, but I didn't want that. I wanted something that was like Scream or Final Destination where people just go to the theaters and they laugh as much as they're screaming.

Yeah, and we definitely did laugh at a few scenes. But never being a comedy. I always wanted to stay within the confines of we are in a slasher movie, even if the deaths are just a little bit nuts. Well then you'll be happy to know that even though I don't like horror movies and I'm not a big fan of the gore and everything, I have never felt so nauseous in my entire life as when they were carving the turkey.

Oh wow, that's quite the compliment because I always worry I didn't go far enough. I'm like, man, I blew it. I should have made this more gross. I swear, I sit there. And then so hearing you say that you almost, like first of all, the highest compliment you can get making a horror movie is one, I threw up. And the second, the other one is I couldn't watch it.

When people, if I do my job, all the production design, all the beautiful photography, all the gore, the highest compliment is I saw it through the cracks of my fingers. So if you're watching that, it means I've done my job. Yeah, I literally thought I was gonna be ill at that scene. Aw, I wish you had. Because that was social media, you can get viral videos.

So anyone at home, if you throw up, don't waste it, film it, post it. Well, and that's part of this whole film too is because the old trailer that was in Grindhouse was set further back. 1980, yeah. But you really needed that social media element, I think, to really make this a feature film. Yes. Did you feel that way about it? Absolutely. Well, we looked at a lot of horror movies.

We'll set it in the past to not have to deal with cell phones but there's something about these tragedies and trampolines that someone wants to get the YouTube views from it. So incorporating that level of greed and why the kids get punished, there's this trampoline, instead of saving people, the kids are quick, let me post it on my YouTube. So that's the video that goes viral.

So I like incorporating modern technology into a slasher film. And that was Jeff Rendell, my fellow Newton co-writer. He spent 16 years in the script. Spent a long time on the script, working it out. How could we do it? How could it kill a rampage through town? How would you trace the signal? Figuring all of that stuff out. But we did it. I didn't want it to be a lazy slasher film.

I want it to be a well-written movie with really contemporary characters. So how hard did you have to campaign for People magazine to make Patrick Densy the sexiest man alive? I was campaigning for Rick Hoffman to be sexiest man alive. They didn't listen to me. They gave it to my co-star Patrick. There's gonna be such tension on set. My goodness, I can't even imagine if we get to do Thanksgiving II, Black Friday, coming to theaters 2024.

Then what that tension's gonna be like. It's gonna be a lot of heat. It's gonna be like a supernova. Yeah, well. At least you can say the sexiest man alive was in my movie. Very good. Yeah, it's true. He's very, very sexy. Now if he sits in a chair, it'll be the sexiest chair ever. He uses a fork, it'll be, that's the sexiest fork. You need to incorporate that.

I'm gonna direct a bit. Patrick, can you do that again? This just wasn't sexy enough. It just wasn't, make it more sexy, Patrick. Ha ha ha. ♪♪♪