Thanksgiving Serves Up American Trauma

How can you make a horror movie when hatred has become the primary motivating factor in our social institutions that uphold lying and treachery and that pit citizens against one another, openly celebrating political persecution, remorseless greed, and media complicity with tyranny? Eli Roth faces that challenge in Thanksgiving, a satirical American gore fest for a society in chaos.

In the pre-credit opening scene, Roth reimagines the famous Norman Rockwell painting of an American holiday tableside gathering, except family, friends and the local sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) withdraw from the festivities: Everyone is preoccupied with Black Friday sales and other signs of social competition and dystopia. After witnessing the inevitable shopping-center riot, New England high-schooler Jessica (Nell Verlaque) cries, “What’s wrong with me? I feel like I can’t trust anybody.” It’s the movie confession of the year.

Roth’s specialty is horror films, a genre I don’t generally like, but sometimes I can’t help liking his, especially when he departs from Hollywood’s lockstep politics. Roth’s Thanksgiving brings home the climate-activist parody of The Green Inferno just in time for the Black Friday sales rout, in which materialistic hedonism replaces the religious piety of the Pilgrim ancestors of 1621. In Thanksgiving, restless, vicious crowds stampede anyone blocking the free giveaway of pizza/toaster ovens; they recall the consumerist nightmares of George Romero’s Day of the Dead and Stephen King’s The Mist. But Roth’s hair-raising pandemonium has a political resonance. It evokes those controversial images of violent swarms on January 6, 2021 — images curated and sold to us as the official explanation for the “insurrection,” though the contrivance is falling apart since the recent release of previously withheld Capitol surveillance tapes, contradicting the Pelosi-regime narrative that was highly publicized during the J6 Committee’s televised show trials.

We have no documentarians who are honestly or wittily attuned to this subversive zeitgeist, so give thanks that Roth’s dark humor corrects the J6 phenomenon.

Thanksgiving makes Roth the first filmmaker to ridicule the pundit cliché “existential crisis” by turning the “insurrection” narrative into farcical horror-movie formula. (The ending will not be a spoiler for those already skeptical of the corporate media’s angle.) A serial killer exacts irrational vengeance against Jessica, her schoolmates, and “deplorable” townsfolk, while he’s disguised as Plymouth Colony governor John Carver. His mask and buckled pilgrim hat resemble both the Guy Fawkes anarchist in V for Vendetta and the shrieking ghost-face mask of the Scream movies.

Everything ghastly in Thanksgiving — a throat slashed by a store’s broken glass door, a stabbing with an electric turkey-carver, a timer that pops up when a human body is roasted — comports with the no-less-hideous transgressions recently made against the Constitution and American life. When security-camera footage of the riot at the big-box outlet is found “not working,” Jessica discovers a back-up system to restore the erased tapes: “I want to see for myself!” The truth gets revealed, and Roth’s Grand Guignol set-pieces work as allegories for today’s paranoid sense of a country founded by pilgrims that now either can’t — or won’t — save itself.

This terrible truth distinguishes Thanksgiving from the recent zombie trend (TV’s The Walking Dead, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead), which indulges what one character calls the Millennium’s capitulation to “brain-eating, post-apocalyptic America.” The genre is like a psychological tattoo on a culture that has lost faith in itself — like the bourgeois self-reproach in Yazmina Reza’s puerile God of Carnage that Roman Polanski filmed. Roth’s political satire merely lacks Reza’s prestige. It’s as naughty as Alain Guiraudie’s Nobody’s Hero or Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians and derives from similar cultural disenchantment: Note how Roth (and screenwriter Jeff Rendell) find shocking humor in disabling a cellphone’s facial-recognition technology and brilliant insight in a Ukrainian immigrant’s commanding his all-American daughter to “Get in the Mercedes!” And a parade to boycott the Right Mart store as “Reichmart” mocks the lunacy of the Boston Marathon bomber and of recent terrorist-protests. In defense, Roth revives our Second Amendment rights with a perfect riff on the gun-dealer scene in Taxi Driver. Its jab at the dealer’s outdated love of the band Black Sabbath is exactly the kind of joke I like; it bests Tarantino’s pop-culture fanaticism.

Thanksgiving originated as Roth’s mock trailer insert in Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse (2007), but it evolved into a Biden-era political spoof. Roth’s timing becomes discomforting in the climactic holiday-dinner scene that pushes past Norman Rockwell convention into monstrous surrealism (a human centerpiece worthy of Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built). There’s no way Roth could predict Hamas putting babies in ovens (a barbaric Holocaust replay), yet this timely horror is part of what makes Thanksgiving fascinating; it is more attuned to contemporary trauma than any other movie. This horror flick about modern obscenity helps us see it for ourselves.