Thanksgiving: Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque to star in Eli Roth horror movie

Gobble, gobble. THR has reported that Jalen Thomas Brooks (Walker) and Nell Verlaque (Big Shot) have signed on to star in Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving originated as a faux trailer in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, but sixteen years later, Eli Roth is ready to give the story the feature-film treatment. Although Jalen Thomas Brooks and Nell Verlaque are being billed as the stars of Thanksgiving, sources tell THR that the film will have quite a large cast, many of whom will likely end up on the Thanksgiving table. Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy) is in final talks to join the cast as the sheriff, with Addison Rae (He’s All That) also joining up in a supporting role.

Plot details are being kept under wraps, but it’s said to concern “a slasher who comes to a small Massachusetts town with the intention of ‘creating a Thanksgiving carving board out of the town’s inhabitants.’” Eli Roth will direct Thanksgiving from a script he co-wrote with Jeff Rendell, who played the killer in the Grindhouse trailer. Production will kick off next month in Toronto.

Thanksgiving isn’t the only movie Eli Roth has in the works. He also helmed the upcoming live-action adaptation of Gearbox Software’s best-selling Borderlands video game franchise. The film stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, an infamous treasure hunter with a mysterious past who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), the universe’s most powerful S.O.B. She forms an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits – Roland (Kevin Hart), once a highly respected soldier, but now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist who’s seen it all; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. Roth actually had to step away from reshoots for Borderlands to start prepping Thanksgiving, but he handed the reins over to Deadpool director Tim Miller.