Thanksgiving: Eli Roth and cast members build up the legend of John Carver in new trailer

The killer in director Eli Roth‘s long-awaited slasher movie Thanksgiving, which is set to reach theatres on November 17th (that being the Friday before Thanksgiving this year), wears a mask inspired by John Carver, the first governor of the Plymouth colony. In a newly released trailer, Roth and cast members Nell Verlaque (Big Shot) and Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy) build up the legend of this new John Carver in quick interview snippets that are intercut with new footage from the film. You can check it out in the embed above.

Thanksgiving is a feature expansion of the faux trailer Roth made for the Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse sixteen years ago. 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 original 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.

Verlaque and Dempsey are joined in the cast by Addison Rae (He’s All That), Jalen Thomas Brooks (Walker), 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), and Jenna Warren (The Young Arsonists). 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.“

Are you looking forward to Thanksgiving? What did you think of the new “The Legend of John Carver” trailer? Let us know by leaving a comment below.