In one sense, Thanksgiving is a loose continuation of Grindhouse, Eli Roth’s 2007 collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. As part of that project, Roth and Tarantino released four fictional trailers, one of which was for Thanksgiving, a slasher film set during turkey season. While Roth was interested in making Thanksgiving right away, various other endeavours and a series of script revisions got in the way, which may have been for the best, since Roth’s sensibility was more firmly attuned to grindhouse torture horror in the late 2010s and early 2020s. By contrast, Thanksgiving is not only the first true slasher film of his career but it may be the best film of his career too – a combination of all his various horror signatures into an exercise that is at once funny, gory, terrifying and, perhaps most notably, narratively ingenious and unpredictable. In an era where the slasher film seems to have been divested of much of its narrative pull, Roth restores it in what will surely become the start of a brand new franchise.

In part, that restoration stems from Roth’s canny approach to the way in which slasher films deal with pleasure. The original run of slasher films was essentially about the killer stealing the jouissance of his younger victims. In that sense these were essentially generational films, with the slasher representing an older iteration of patriarchy gazing with both horror and envy upon the first wave of young people to come of age as beneficiaries of the sexual revolution. There has been a real interest, in recent years, in periodising this moment, presumably as a way of coming to terms with the conservative older generations who seem set against the queer, trans and intersex revolutions that preoccupy our own time. Ti West’s X trilogy, for example, deals with a seventy-something couple who go on a murderous rampage against a group of twenty-somethings who camp out on their farm to shoot an adult movie in the early 1970s. As much as the older couple might frame their murder in terms of moral outrage, West clearly attributes it to envy of the younger sexually liberated generation. Likewise, Jared Kobek has published an extraordinary pair of books on the Zodiac killer, Motor Spirit and How to Catch Zodiac, in which he departs from Robert Graysmith’s canonical vision of Zodiac as an occult genius to instead position him as a “square longing to be a freak” – that is, a member of the pre-liberated generation motivated by sheer vindictive rage against the post-liberated generation. In doing so, Kobek has identified the most plausible Zodiac so far. 

Texts like West’s X trilogy and Kobek’s studies of Zodiac ask us to recognise that the backlash against queer, trans and intersex lives at the present moment stems above all from a thwarted sense of pleasure from older generations – at pain, fear and anger that the other might enjoy too much. Roth’s film takes place in this milieu which, despite being the target of an older generation’s sense of disenfranchisement from pleasure, has also often struggled to manifest and express its own very real achievements of liberation. In large part, these are two sides of the same coin, since the liberation of younger generations has also produced a fear that desire itself might be inherently problematic, given how radically once normative desires have been revised and in some cases disavowed over the last fifteen years. Combined with the pervasive anhedonic ambience of social media, films about young people often struggle to exude a genuinely visceral sense of pleasure, making for a strangely uneven generational gap in which older conservatives rage against a liberation that is only partly enjoyed, or enjoyed with some suspicion and trepidation, by the subjects of their paranoic projections.

Among other things, this explains the strange limpness of the two recent Scream remakes. Without genuinely leaning into the pleasure principle of young people, the killers in these films also lose their visceral need to steal back that pleasure, which means that the film in turn loses the ambivalent critique typical of the best slashers, which typically ask us to contemplate generational trauma by over-identifying with those slashers disenfranchised by it. In lieu of that critical kernel of the slasher model, the recent Scream films may well include ingenious moments, suspenseful sequences and throwbacks to the visionary register of Wes Craven, but are largely jettisoned amidst a free-floating self-referentiality that feels strangely denuded and dispersed. It’s no surprise that Scream V was forced to fall back rather limply upon the iconic ending of the original film, under the guise of requel revisionism, nor that Scream VI simply amped up the number of killers, from the opening duo to the closing trio, in an impotent effort to re-inject some kind of vitality and intensity back into the slasher mode.

By contrast, Thanksgiving starts with the premise that not only have millennials been liberated to a point of pleasure unimaginable to previous generations, but that this new outflowing of pleasure, initialised by a wave of queer, trans and intersex movements, has come full circle and provided the status quo with a new libidinal energy and intensity as well. In other words, Thanksgiving suggests that the trauma for older conservatives is that millennials have managed to turn their own moralising tone into a form of perverse pleasure – a paradox that Roth diagnoses and parodies in the most ingeniously comic moment of the film. A side character (appropriately named Chad) gives an impassioned speech about why he won’t be celebrating the problematic dimensions of Thanksgiving and, when his peers applaud, he dries his tears with his shirt in order to strategically reveal his washboard abs. In the next scene, we see him flanked by admiring women, comforting and congratulating him for his moral bravery. The effect is not dissimilar to the comic kernel of Roth’s Knock Knock, which presents us with a normcore suburban world that is itself so insatiable in its desires that it inevitably eclipses the transgressions of the home invasion that supposedly disrupts it.

In other words, Roth suggests that problematic jouissance hasn’t necessarily gone away, or been traversed, but has been redirected into precisely the moralistic pronouncement with which a new generation of influencers claim to distance themselves from it. This premise is neatly encapsulated in the opening scene of the film, a point of view shot approaching a front door that recalls the iconic prelude to John Carpenter’s Halloween. In lieu of Michael Myers’ killing spree, however, we’re presented with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner that plays as an uncanny Norman Rockwell cosplay, performed by a series of older people whose weird heightened body langage imbues the entire scene with an eerie artificiality, a muted yet festive version of the suburban routines that comprise the first act of Knock Knock. The tableau we’re watching can’t be faulted in its particulars but as a whole seems to be harvesting an unwholesome affect from some other space that is not immediately apparent.

Sure enough, we soon shift to this other space, which turns out to be the motor engine of the film more generally. For it turns out that the patriarch of this Thanksgiving household, Thomas Wright, played by Rick Hoffman, also runs a RightMart superstore in downtown Plymouth, where the film is set. Thomas has accrued a sizeable fortune on the basis of his outlet and his wealth trickles down to his daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) and her friends Gabby (Addison Rae), Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and Ryan (Milo Manheim), the core of the slasher’s victim pool. Jessica leaves dinner early to head to the RightMart Black Friday sale but before we even arrive at the store we glimpse the volatility that is about to ensue, as Jessica’s friend group chant “Fuck Hanover,” the name of a rival football team, over and over again, while in her car, shaking and shuddering the framework so dramatically that it feels as if the entire structure of the film, and its carefully appointed Thanksgiving aesthetic, is about to implode.

This is indeed what happens at the RightMart superstore, where, in a update of Dawn of the Dead for the austerity era, a raucous crowd are surging at the picket line that has been erected to keep them out until sales start. As if that weren’t enough, Jessica and her friends head inside, making the most of her privilege as the daughter of the storeowner and mocking both their Hanover nemeses and the general Black Friday crowd through the window. Throwing a football from one side of the store to another, and pretending to bench press electronic goods, they turn their platform into a perverse parody of influencing, trying out one pose suggestive of the good life after another, until the crowd spills over the threshold and barrages their way into the store. All the volatility of these opening sequences now climaxes in the first ultra-violence of the film, as one person after another is killed gruesomely at the nexus between crowd and store, whether it’s a man imploded on a glass shard of the front doors clutching a waffle arm, or a woman who is defacefied by a rapidly moving trolley.

The action then jumps to the following Thanksgiving, drawing upon one the key tropes of both the classic 70s slasher and the 90s slasher – a telescoping timeframe as the action approaches the anniversary of a catastrophic event. In this case, the slasher appears hell bent on both avenging the victims of the RightMart disaster and absorbing the jouissance of the millennial influencers who prompted it, especially since Thomas announces he has no plans of cancelling the Black Friday sale as a gesture of respect. One by one, the killer takes out the key instigators in the crowd before setting his sights upon the staff and teenagers. Unlike many recent slasher films there’s a genuine sense of mystery here along with a truly ingenious incorporation of social media. In his first kill scene, for example, our slasher slams his victim’s head into a deep fryer, partly to debilitate her, but also to prevent her using facial recognition software on her iPhone, creating a darkly comic scene in which she begs it to recognise her. 

More profoundly, Thanksgiving differs dramatically from recent slasher films such as Bodies Bodies Bodies in that the killer finds it remarkably difficult to match the jouissance of his victims. In their ability to pair the liberatory pleasures of social media with performative moral outrage these millennials are peculiarly immune to the slasher, which of course invests him in turn with the insatiability that propelled Michael, Jason and Freddy through an apparently endless array of sequels. Against that backdrop the slasher takes some time to ramify, since while his first kill scene is hyper-violent, his interactions with victims become more and more elliptical, until we don’t see his actions at all. This climaxes midway through the film when an otherwise brutal kill scene is bookended and utterly eclipsed by two inane tableaux from precisely the nexus between normativity and libidinality the slasher wants to occupy  – a gym instructor amping up his staff and his girlfriend putting on a private cheerleading display for him. Even when the body is discovered, the shock doesn’t match another character’s rage at a football game being cancelled, or yet another character advertising his father’s gun store.

In the process, Thanksgiving confronts its slasher with a world in which the serial killer no longer holds the same power over the collective imagination and has been replaced with the spree killer – the personification of solo shootings, terrorist attacks and moments in which the public sphere distorts into something murderous, as occurs here in the trampling tragedy at RightMart. Indeed, the public sphere barely seems to exist for much of Thanksgiving, except as a collection of anarchic and atavistic energies with no agent of modulation. In one scene, Jessica flees the killer in an empty school, moving from one axial corridor to another, all of which are lit by the silent flickering blue and red lights of the police cars stationed around the perimeter, promising public protection as a service that exists only in fantasy. However, the film’s central experiment in crafting a public sphere lies in its depiction of the actual Thanksgiving parade. No sooner has this started than protestors flood the streets, followed by the killer, whose actions result in a collision of cars and bodies, as people in pilgrim costumes flee in an SUV, and a float driver’s face is bisected by one of the central spectacles.

It feels right then that the film is set in Plymouth, the epicentre of the Thanksgiving myth, since the killer’s ultimate goal seems to be to distil American public space to its formative moment in the effort to build a new kind of commons, one in which members of the older generation can partake in the pleasures of liberation too. Of course, this requires the ritual sacrifice of the old world, endowing the death scenes with a peculiarly Puritan austerity, as the killer works inwards through each successive layer of privilege to Jessica and Rick, the father-and-daughter duo who benefit most dramatically from the store. Significantly, this doesn’t simply involve the store itself but the influencer infrastructure grafted onto it during that fateful Black Friday eve, which the killer acknowledges by creating a live stream of his final set piece: gathering the survivors into a macabre Thanksgiving feast in which he literally serves a meal comprised of his previous victims, promising them all the while that “this will be the most famous Thanksgiving dinner since 1861” and telling the key influencer that “it was your video that inspired me to make my own.” It’s here that Roth’s capacity to deform the iconography of Thanksgiving reaches its brilliant conclusion, culminating with a showdown in a warehouse filled with the parade detritus, including a rapidly inflating turkey that recalls the expanding and contracting pumpkins that dot the various Halloween credits.

By this final sequence, Roth has rejuvenated the slasher for the next era of libidinal liberation as a figure who both fears and envies the expanded bodily lives and moral compasses of the next generations. As in the classic slasher cycle, the very effort to reintroduce law and order reveals the perverse pleasures that were bound up in distributing law and order in the first place, and so the killer here turns out to be a local police officer – indeed, the very officer who is investigating the crime. Disrupting and maintaining millennial pleasure is the paradoxical project of this new iteration of slasher, whose schisms and contradictions set the stage for a terrific franchise – set in the interplay between a new wave of liberated jouissance and a rearguard rage that, try as it might, remains comically unable to ever completely contain it.