The fake horror trailer "Thanksgiving" in the 2007
Executive summary
The “Thanksgiving” trailer was a faux slasher teaser directed by Eli Roth that debuted as one of several fake trailers interspersed within Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 double feature Grindhouse; it presented an over-the-top, holiday-themed horror concept that later became the basis for Roth’s 2023 feature film of the same name [1] [2] [3].
1. Origin: a deliberately fake trailer inside Grindhouse
Grindhouse was packaged as a double-feature homage to exploitation cinema and included short “fake” trailers by various directors; Eli Roth’s contribution, titled Thanksgiving, played as a parody of holiday slasher tropes and was presented not as a standalone short but as a tease for a non-existent film, full of shock beats, gore gags and seventies/ eighties slasher flourishes [1] [4] [5].
2. Tone and content of the 2007 trailer: gleeful excess and parody
The Grindhouse Thanksgiving trailer leaned into gross-out spectacle and dark humor—implied beheadings, a trampoline-girl gag, and an image of a pilgrim-themed killer—designed to feel like an amped-up, sometimes tasteless pastiche of slasher cinema rather than a sober narrative short; fan and catalog descriptions emphasize its montage, fake blood, and lack of a full plot, underscoring its function as a provocative teaser [4] [6] [5].
3. From joke to label: the long road to a feature film
Roth has repeatedly said he always wanted to expand the idea and after creating the Grindhouse trailer he and co-writer Jeff Rendell developed scripts over years; by the 2010s the concept moved toward production and, with the blessings of Tarantino and Rodriguez, Thanksgiving was adapted into a full-length slasher that premiered in 2023—an evolution explicitly acknowledged by outlets covering both the trailer’s origin and the later movie [2] [7] [8].
4. What changed when it became a feature
Turning a rapid-fire faux trailer into a 90-plus-minute film required fleshing out characters, settings (notably Plymouth, Massachusetts and a Black Friday setup) and plot mechanics; critics and reporters note that Roth preserved iconic images from the trailer—trampoline sequence, parade carnage, certain reveal beats—while dropping or altering some elements (including trailer music cues) and adding conventional slasher structure and cast (Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae) to hold a feature-length story [8] [9] [10].
5. Reception and the question of fidelity to the original gag
Reviews and reportage reflect a split: some critics and fans praise Roth’s faithfulness to the Grindhouse spirit and the film’s campy, gross-out pleasures, while others argue the trailer’s shock shorthand loses potency stretched across a feature—indeed a reviewer warned that “if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the film” in tone if not in detail [8] [7] [11]. Industry pieces and festival notes also emphasize that Roth had explicit permission from Tarantino and Rodriguez to expand the trailer into a movie, a sign of authorship continuity even as the piece migrated from a joke into a commercial studio release [2] [3].
6. Why the Grindhouse Thanksgiving trailer still matters
The 2007 teaser remains a concise artifact of Grindhouse’s curatorial gambit: it crystallized a filmmaker’s cheeky pitch in forty-odd seconds and later served as a creative seed for a contemporary genre picture, illustrating how ephemeral stunt material can become intellectual property and cultural shorthand—documented repeatedly in reporting on the feature’s lineage and Roth’s account of developing the project [12] [13] [14].