“THE NICE THING ABOUT MAKING A holiday movie is you have a very clear deadline,” director Eli Roth jokes as he takes time out from the edit of Thanksgiving, his seasonal slasher. Not that he hasn’t had long to make the movie – it’s actually something he’s been thinking about since he was 13 years old.
“My best friend Jeff Rendell [writer of the film] and I would just ingest every single horror movie we possibly could. We started getting to see R-rated films during the [’80s] golden age of slasher movies and the VHS boom. Every few months you knew that a horror movie was going to come out because a holiday was coming up. We saw Halloween, then Silent Night, Deadly Night and April Fool’s Day, Mother’s Day and My Bloody Valentine… To us the most obvious one was Thanksgiving.
“We kept saying, as if there was this giant committee that decided what movies got made,” he laughs, “‘When
