‘Thanksgiving’ Has the Best Slasher Opening in Years
Chad Collins
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Note: This piece contains spoilers for Thanksgiving. Proceed with caution!
Much has been made of the so-called slasher renaissance. But barring a few indie darlings, the trend has been almost exclusively of the legacy variety as long-dormant killers rising up for one final scare (with dollar signs in their eyes). It’s been a while since there’s been a true successor to the ensemble slash and sleuth formula audiences saw so regularly in the 1990s, and with Thanksgiving, Eli Roth—perhaps the most unconventional person of all—has successfully delivered. It’s a feast worth diving into, and in its first moments, Thanksgiving delivers the best slasher opening in years.
The slasher opening itself is a lost art. Scream (2022) from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett perhaps comes closest with its clever subversion of Wes Craven’s classic. Bonus points for introducing final girl, Tara (Jenna Ortega), and letting her live, flipping the script on Scream’s penchant for offing high-profile starlets before the credits are slashed across the screen. Otherwise, slashers have tried and failed to capture the pre-credits slaughter that defined an entire era of slasher movies. Urban Legend features an infamous decapitation set to Bonnie Tyler. Valentine has Katherine Heigl speed-dating her way toward death. And Scream… well, it’s Scream.
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Other legacy sequels have floundered in the gore and the grime. Understandably constrained, Halloween‘s (2018) opening is as perfunctory a reintroduction as they come, opening with two bit players who barely register. Scream VI plays around with a cool role reversal too gutless to carry through in any meaningful way. What would Ghostface have to say? Not much, and as the genre has evolved and iterated upon itself, there’s been less need to open with a colloquial bang. What was once cool is now uncool; what was once fresh is now stale.
Luckily, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving appetizer is anything but. He channels his grindhouse roots for a frenzied shopping riot that tonally strikes an almost impossible-to-achieve balance of black comedy and outright horror. The marketing had me worried. For years, I’ve conceptualized Black Friday brawls as a spectacle for the rich to laugh at the expense of the poor. The pernicious capitalistic roots are distressing, yes, but I take no pleasure in watching others jeer at those less fortunate than them. That’s by design, of course. In its heyday, Black Friday brawls were regularly shown on the local news, bookended, of course, by advertisements for Black Friday brawls.
Roth at his core is more edge lord than scholar. His inceptive riot broadly gestures at the perils of unchecked capitalism (even if it arrives a little too late, with most holiday shopping shifting online in recent years). But it’s never the full point. While I’ve never been Roth’s biggest fan as a filmmaker, he grounds his opening massacre in something considerably more familiar to him—privilege.
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After a brief Halloween homage where an unknown POV approaches a door on Thanksgiving 2022, Roth reveals that it was Sexiest Man Alive Patrick Dempsey as Sheriff Eric Newlon the entire time. There’s nothing to worry about. He’s joining friends for Thanksgiving dinner, a ritual marred by Thomas (Rick Hoffman) and Kathleen Wright’s (Karen Cliché) insistence that Right Mart (both Wal-Mart homage and store they own) open for sales on Thanksgiving. Casey Tebo’s 2021 creature feature Black Friday already covered this, and Roth quickly (and wisely) moves on from the “It’s Thanksgiving, it’s not about sales, it’s about family” schtick.
Thomas’ daughter and Kathleen’s stepdaughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) can’t wait to get out of there. With boyfriend, Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), she absconds with friends Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Gabby (Addison Rae), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport), and Yulia (Jenna Warren). They’re little more than a body count for later, though they’re a surprisingly sympathetic lot, especially considering the all-too-rare impression that the five of them are actually friends.
Evan’s phone is busted, so he corrals the group into visiting Right Mart, certain Jessica can get them in before the doors open. The exterior is a caricature of capitalistic competition as hordes of heavily accented New Englanders gather behind a security gate, shoving and elbowing their way to the front to ensure first dibs on the goodies inside.
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Where Roth seems to draw most of his inspiration is, interestingly enough, Piranha 3D. Fans of Alexandre Aja’s remake likely remember the spectacle of the Lake Havasu bloodbath that capstones the second act. It’s a gruesome frenzy as the fish feed on unsuspecting tourists, and Aja, for all the humor, manages to maintain a thrumming level of tension and genuine terror. I’d be remiss not to note that Roth himself cameos as a shock jock in the scene.
Cut back to Right Mart. The crowd is growing antsy. Sheriff Eric has arrived with his friend Amanda (Gina Gershon) to bring Amanda’s husband, the manager of the store, some leftovers. At this stage, it’s Rube Goldberg, Eli Roth style. Tensions swell outside, the scale grows larger and larger, and the quintet of friends, sneaking in via an employee entrance, can’t help but antagonize the droves of consumers beyond the glass.
The aforementioned privilege is seeped over the genuinely unbearable suspense. It’s less a matter of money and class, and more public versus private lives and the gnawing need to make even the minutiae of one’s life as visible as possible. Evan taunts impatient shoppers, employees groan that someone else should be there instead of them, and the line outside—more a mob at this point—sees several hundred shoppers weighing their entitlement against the others.
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This is an Eli Roth movie—and, well, a horror movie—so clearly this powder keg is going to explode ala I Know What You Did Last Summer, another teen sleuth slasher Roth culls from with abandon in the best possible way. The tension finally boils over when, armed with a megaphone, one douche prematurely announces the store is open. Only, it isn’t. As the crowd races, the store security guard is compelled to lock the interior doors before the fervent mob can breach them.
It’s not enough. Soon, the glass shatters, the poor guy is gruesomely trampled to death, and Roth engages in a protracted beat of carnage as shoppers bite, punch, kick, and rip their way to good savings. In most movies, that would have been enough, though, like a Black Friday sale itself, Roth is insistent on giving his audience a BOGO for carnage.
Necks are slit on broken glass. Bobby’s hand is violently trampled and broken. In a standout scene, Gina Gershon fulfills her genre duty as an A-lister who doesn’t make it until the credits. As she crawls toward safety, having been previously thrown down by riotous shoppers, two carts careen into her skull. Her hair is caught in the wheel of one, and as the cart is pulled away, she’s graphically scalped.
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All the while, Gabby fights off shoppers, Evan live-streams it, and Jessica—feeling responsible for bringing them there in the first place—sits stunned. The entire sequence lasts almost fifteen minutes and ends only with Sheriff Evan’s gunshot in the air. It’s a silly scene, sure, but the horrific gore is affecting, both satisfying the carnage and pathos quotient.
From there, Thanksgiving never loses steam, balancing both the scares and laughs the best a slasher movie has since Scream. It’s the best slasher opening in years, an earnest reminder that not everything needs to be reinvented. With a little throwback charm (and buckets of yucks), Thanksgiving’s opening proved decisively that slashers could matter again.
What did you think of Thanksgiving’s opening? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
Categorized:Editorials
