Thanksgiving featurette: Eli Roth discusses his long-awaited slasher

Sixteen years after making the ’80s slasher faux trailer Thanksgiving for the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, director Eli Roth has finally been able to make a full Thanksgiving feature. The film is set to reach theatres on November 17th – that being the Friday before Thanksgiving this year – and today we’ve gotten our hands on a short featurette in which Roth discusses the film. He even goes so far as to say, “This has to be the movie that if I never make another film, it doesn’t matter. I made this one, that’s enough.” You can watch the featurette, followed by the full trailer, in the embed above.

Roth has been wanting to make a feature version of Thanksgiving ever since he made the faux trailer, and even wrote the screenplay with Jeff Rendell (who played the homicidal pilgrim in the trailer) a dozen years ago. The feature has happened thanks to Spyglass Media stepping in to provide the funding. Roth jumped at the chance to get the movie made, even though it meant having Deadpool‘s Tim Miller take over as director on the reshoots for his video game adaptation Borderlands.

Roth and Rendell are producing the film with Roger Birnbaum. Spyglass chairman and CEO Gary Barber and president of production Peter Oillataguerre serve as executive producers alongside Kate Harrison and Greg Denny of Cream Productions Inc. Oillataguerre and SVP Production & Development Chris Stone are overseeing the project for Spyglass while Caellum Allan and Kelseigh Coombs oversee for TriStar.

If you’ve watched the Thanksgiving trailer, you have a good idea of what this slasher movie is going to be about, but here’s the synopsis: After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday.

The film stars Addison Rae (He’s All That), Jalen Thomas Brooks (Walker), Nell Verlaque (Big Shot), Milo Manheim (Z-O-M-B-I-E-S), Gina Gershon (Bound), comedian Tim Dillon (who was in a TV show called Thanksgiving), Rick Hoffman (Hostel), Gabriel Davenport (Mistletoe Time Machine), Tomaso Sanelli (Titans), Jenna Warren (The Young Arsonists), and Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy). Character details have been kept under wraps so far, but we do know that Patrick Dempsey is playing the town sheriff.

Speaking with Collider, Roth explained that he considers this movie to be a “reboot” of the non-existent one he made the faux trailer for. “We were trying to get the script right. For years, I was just connecting the dots between the trailer, and then I was like, ‘Am I just filming the scenes in between what I already did before?’ The big revelation was, (Jeff Rendell) said, ‘I have to just pretend that Thanksgiving 1980 exists and that it was so offensive that every print was destroyed, and the only thing that survived was the trailer. This is the reboot of what that movie was. Every copy of the script was burned. Every print was burned. The only thing that survived was that one trailer, on the darkest corners of the internet. So, we have to make a movie based on that. This is the reboot of what that was.’ That freed me up creatively to go, ‘I can use a couple of my favorite things in the trailer, but I don’t have to worry about recreating the trailer.’ That trailer was for a movie where every print was destroyed. Now, this is gonna be its own thing.“

What did you think of the Thanksgiving featurette? Will you be watching this movie on the big screen next month? Let us know by leaving a comment below.