Though it took a few years (or 10), Director Eli Roth says he's been wanting to make a Thanksgiving-themed slasher film since he was a kid.
"I think it was one of the things that almost paralyzed me from making the film because I was so happy with the trailer and felt like, you know, we did it. We got the best parts, it was done. I don't have to actually make the movie now," Roth explains to GamesRadar+, talking about the fake trailer the film is based on. "The truth is I've been wanting to do this since I was 12 years old. You know, Jeff Rendell is my best friend and we grew up together and we watched every single slasher movie together and we’d seen that every single holiday had been done, there were no holidays left, but we were in Massachusetts where Thanksgiving's like the biggest deal. So our whole lives we wanted to make a Thanksgiving horror movie."
"The Grindhouse trailer was an opportunity to try out those kills and have fun, but the intent was always to make it like Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Mute Witness, Scream. And we couldn't for a long time figure out what the movie was about, like what is it thematically?" Roth continues. "And then we started seeing those Black Friday videos that were appearing about 10 years ago where the midnight sale had happened and there were these viral videos of people getting trampled and killing each other for flat-screen TVs and Waffle Irons and PlayStations. We thought, this is what we can set it around. It's thematically on point with what we want and it gives us a reason to do the movie. So once we had that, it all kind of clicked into place."
