Review #355: Thanksgiving (2023)

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #28 - Thanksgiving (2023)

[Unfortunately this movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but is included with many subscriptions to various services.]

Thanksgiving is a story about a small town in Massachusetts that takes Thanksgiving very, very seriously. One year, a black Friday sale at the local Walmart stand-in turned fatal as several people were killed by the trampling crowd. A year later, a killer wearing a mask of John Carver, one of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, begins kidnapping and murdering the people responsible for the previous year's tragedy, and our protagonists- a group of high schoolers involved in provoking the incident- find themselves in the center of the killer's view.

I love Thanksgiving (the holiday). It might be my favorite holiday, since I love to cook and I love to eat and I love having people over. This movie may not be perfect but it has a great cozy vibe to it, and I think it does a great job of maintaining the Thanksgiving feel while still being its own thing. Apparently this movie began as a joke- Eli Roth made a fake trailer to be a part of the 2007 movie Grindhouse- and over the years it was refined into the film we have today. And I think they did the trailer justice! This film also has a very similar vibe to another movie I watched this month- My Bloody Valentine- in that it's a small town beset upon by a vengeful masked killer angry over a holiday accident and the main character is involved in a love triangle where one of her suitors unexpectedly left town for a long time. (It might sound like I'm saying this as a bad thing, but I greatly enjoyed both films.)

Now, it is worth mentioning that a lot of this film (mainly the kills) just don't make a lick of sense if you put any thought into them whatsoever. Like, there is a point when two of the protagonists (who are already on high alert to the killer targeting them by this point) are walking down their high school hallway and the killer pops out and then the film cuts away. From this we are supposed to assume the killer somehow (instantly and silently) subdued TWO people, either one of whom could have alerted others by shouting. (Later in the film the killer is seen shooting people with a tranquilizer gun, which could have worked in this case, but we instead see a punch or something fly at the camera before it cuts to black.) There is also a moment when the film tries to cast suspicion on the main character's boyfriend by showing a security camera photo of him shaking hands with one of the security guards that died at the previous year's Black Friday stampede (and a character even brings it up as an accusation, randomly shouting "Why don't you tell us about your friend the security guard") but I have no clue why this piece of information would have been incriminating. He might be the killer because he knew someone who died a year ago? I imagine a lot of people knew that guy, he was a human being living in a small town. But because this is a medium where detail tends to be conserved, the characters see that as suspicious I guess.

Also, one more tiny nitpick: the inciting incident of this movie, the riot at the department store on Black Friday, seems to be heavily motivated by a giveaway of waffle irons. Could they not have come up with something more believable than a waffle iron to spur all of these people to abandon their humanity? Typically the doorbuster giveaways are things like complex electronics- TVs and game consoles and such- that people want because they are expensive and are constantly improving on previous iterations, so the newest model is often perceived as the best. A waffle iron is the same basic device it was thirty years ago, and even a fancy cutting-edge waffle iron can be bought online right now for $30-40. It makes no sense for the people in this town to be so willing to trample their fellow man for something like a waffle iron, unless that's supposed to be satire. But it kind of undercuts the tension of the film if the incident that creates the killer is meant to be a joke, so I am disinclined to assume that.

But really, this is a pretty fun movie. It moves along at a nice clip and even though I saw the movie a couple years ago there were enough misdirects that I was second guessing who the killer was until the last moment. I recommend you roast up a turkey, bake a pumpkin pie, and watch this movie with the family next month.

Overall Rating: 9/10 Surprisingly Helpful Drug Dealers

Turkey Anecdote: I pride myself on my roast turkeys, but a few years back I started making two turkeys every Thanksgiving- one roasted and one smoked. (This year I'm going to trade out the smoked turkey for a deep fried turkey. Wish me luck!) My first year with the smoker, I was trying desperately to find out how long I should expect to smoke a whole turkey for. (It didn't help that the turkeys I had that year were unusually large, so the cooking times were not standard.) None of the websites I read seemed to have instructions on smoking a whole turkey- all recipes I found were for specific parts (legs, thighs, breasts, etc )- as if nobody in the world had ever smoked a whole turkey before. I even asked around on message boards and Reddit, but the answers I got were incredibly unhelpful- "It will be done when it's done" with not even a ballpark of whether I should start it smoking four hours before people arrive, six hours, ten hours, or whatever. Nobody on the entire internet seemed to have an answer, so I called the Butterball Turkey helpline. After waiting forever on hold, I finally got a chance to ask The Turkey Experts how long to smoke a whole turkey. Their answer?

"We don't know, we've never done that before "