Sunday Scaries: ‘Thanksgiving’ is Coming to Finally Carve Up Audiences!

The Sunday Scaries are upon us once again! Yes, as the weekend concludes, most of us feel an oncoming sense of anticipatory dread about the week ahead. Anxiety about work manifests itself into a feeling that’s known as the Sunday Scaries. However, we at Awards Radar are here to combat that, by taking back the name. Now, we want you think about a horror-centric piece on the site when you hear the term. So, let us continue on with another installment of the Awards Radar Sunday Scaries! Today, we’re going to revisit a piece from the past few years, which is a musing about a fake trailer from almost a decade and a half ago, only now it’s come true…

For years, I’ve been writing about how I wanted the feature version of the Thanksgiving trailer that Eli Roth included in Grindhouse. Well, come next weekend, the film is actually coming out. I see the movie on Tuesday, so it’s a moment of pleasing reflection here in the Sunday Scaries. As such, I wanted to post one more time my reasons for wanting the flick to exist in the first place.

This is some of what I wrote here and prior to that:

Remember Grindhouse? I sure do. The double feature from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino was an absolute blast, with the added bonus of a number of fake trailers being contained within. Edgar Wright had one called Don’t, for example, while another one, Machete, has already been adapted into a film. Well, today, I want to pitch that one of the other trailers, Eli Roth‘s Thanksgiving, deserves the feature treatment.

Thanksgiving purports to be a trailer for a slasher flick, one taking place on Turkey Day in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Very little else of it is plot-centric, as it’s mostly just slasher tropes with a slight holiday bent. However, since the day has never been used for a horror film before, it’s long captured my imagination. A scary movie with an original bent to it is always a bonus. Plus, holiday centric horror has led to one of the great franchises of the genre in Halloween.

Why would I want to see this? Well, it just seems like fun. Roth is a filmmaker I find to be very talented and more than a bit underrated. So, if he put his mind to this, I’m sure he would knock it out of the park. He would have to extend the plot, of course, but some of the creepy visuals from the trailer really do suggest a gonzo experience. Take a look at the trailer and see for yourself (here) what has me so interested in the feature film treatment.

So, we’re finally here. Roth has done it, the trailers look pretty fun, and the flick is about to unspool. I’m not sure if this is anything close to what happened with Zack Snyder fans and Justice League (it’s not, actually), but it feels almost like a bigger win. This is smaller scale, involved less toxicity, and comes in a more unique package. As such, color me excited.

Stay tuned for my review of Thanksgiving in a few short days. I’ll be sure to let you all know if it lived up to the hype or not. Either way, the movie is here and that’s pretty exciting. Perhaps we’ll have a new holiday horror classic? Sit tight to find out…

Stay tuned for another Sunday Scaries installment next weekend!