Thanksgiving’s brutal kills came from the mind of a 12-year-old

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving has revived slasher horror on the same level as Scream with a pinch of Halloween. The brutality and gore seen in Thanksgiving were first imagined when Roth was 12 years old.

The seemingly normal town of Plymouth, Massachusets is dealing with the repercussions of a Black Friday event the year prior going horribly wrong. With Thanksgiving now approaching, a serial killer rises from the dark wearing a John Carver mask. Jessica (Nell Verlaque) soon realizes John Carvers is after everyone involved in the Back Friday massacre.

As explained in Dexerto’s review, Thanksgiving was a feast of bloody horror that had even the most seasoned fans gasping in shock. After all, Roth is a horror genius with classics like Hostel. The movie was about intestines and nauseating murder galore. It makes anyone look at roasted turkey a bit differently.

How did Roth come up with the various and detailed killings in Thanksgiving? The ideas have been mapped out since before he became a famed horror director.

Eli Roth has been planning Thanksgiving since childhood

The director revealed in an interview that he and Jeff Rendell had all the intense kills planned out since they were 12 years old. They just didn’t have a plot to go with them.

It’s a bit dizzying to believe that Roth has been cooking up grotesque horror ideas at such a young age. In most crime series, it’s a red flag for someone who needs help before growing up to be a serial killer.

Speaking with GamesRadar+, Roth explained, “The truth is I’ve been wanting to do this since I was 12 years old. You know, Jeff Rendell is my best friend and we grew up together and we watched every single slasher movie together and we’d seen that every single holiday had been done, there were no holidays left, but we were in Massachusetts where Thanksgiving’s like the biggest deal. So our whole lives we wanted to make a Thanksgiving horror movie.”

Roth also told Collider that they, “had the kills, but we sort of had no plot.” Ten years ago, Roth and Rendell started watching outrageous Black Friday videos. It became the basis for Thanksgiving that they could revisit later and use as the cataclysm for John Carver’s murders.

“But it’s actually thematically about the consumerism and greed and the panic of not get getting the item before someone else does bleeding over into this holiday that’s all about being thankful for what we have, for our health, for our family. Then, two hours later, you’re trampling over someone for a flat-screen TV,” explained Roth.

When it comes to some of his favorite kills – the corn cob in the ears is a fun one. “I wanted a fun movie. I didn’t want it to be an endurance test and a grueling, punishing movie. I wanted one where the kills were great, and they were scary, and they were gory, and satisfying, but one where people were leaving the theater with a big smile on their face,” said the Thanksgiving director.

Read Dexerto’s review of Thanksgiving here, and why Thanksgiving could bring back Patrick Dempsey to Scream 7 here.