5 Thanksgiving kills that bring it to the table

Eli Roth’s slasher flick Thanksgiving sets the table for a feast of blood, guts, gore, with a garnish of grey matter. And if you’re still reading, fasten your dinner napkins, because we’re about to feast. 

The film centres on a killer with a grudge who’s out to take revenge on the people he blames for the Black Friday/Thanksgiving Eve “doorbuster” sales riot at the RightMart in the American town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Wearing a pilgrim hat and a character mask of John Carver, first governor of Plymouth, he sets about slicing and dicing his way through the town’s greedy and guilty, while live-streaming his Thanksgiving table of horrors. 

For a tasting menu, we’ve picked Thanksgiving’s five most deliciously disgusting kills, starting with the appetisers, and working our way to the main course. 

Scream Thanksgiving on Showmax now.

1. Yulia (Jenna Warren)

Yulia is one of the spoiled rich kids whose taunting from inside the store provokes the shoppers outside to riot. As the bodies start to drop, Yulia’s dad orders her to pack so they can flee their house, which is undergoing renovations. There are a couple of sneaky misdirections involving Yulia putting in her contact lenses before John Carver stabs two corn cob-holders into her ears, one on each side, deafening her.

He then livestreams her screaming and writhing on the floor to her friends and fellow rich kids Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Jessica (Nell Verlaque) – whose dad, Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) owns RightMart. After Yulia pulls the corn-cob holders out of her ears and crawls away, Scuba and Jessica burst to find the killer holding her against him with a knife at her throat. When Scuba tries to shoot him, John Carver activates the renovators’ table saw before throwing Yulia onto it, severing her fingers before the blade slices her open from her chest to her stomach. Great buildup and execution with some bite. It’s the garlic bread of the feast. 

2. Amy (Shailyn Griffin)

Cheerleader Amy and her obnoxious boyfriend Lonnie (Mika Amonsen) are two of the feral shoppers who stoke the RightMart riot into a frenzy, and trample over terrified security guard Doug (Chris Sandiford) in their desperation to claim a free waffle iron. A year later, Amy is performing a trampoline striptease for Lonnie when John Carver wrings his neck like a turkey. He then slips under the trampoline and stabs up through it with a dagger blade into Amy’s feet, and her torso as her body bounces its last few bounces.

She is still clinging to life when Carver stuffs her into his fridge. Later, a freshly dead (or catatonic, since her blood still flows) Amy becomes part of Thanksgiving dinner. John Carver jabs a corkscrew into her neck before pulling it out with a comical popping noise and drains her blood into a wine glass. “You might want to let that breathe,” this sadistic sommelier advises. What’s a grand dinner without a glass of red?

3. Amanda (Gina Gershon)

Poor, kind Amanda Collins’ only sin (at least for the purposes of why people die in this film) is packing dinner to bring to her husband when she finds out that he’s been called in to man RightMart’s early Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Eve. She gets trampled to the ground by frenzied shoppers, the dinner goes flying out of her hands, and she takes a kick to the gut while trying to crawl out of the way. Amanda is a panicking wreck by the time crazed shopper Lizzie rams into her with a metal shopping cart while clashing with another shopper, Lionel (Neil Robles).

As Lizzie and Lionel smash their carts together in fury above her body, Amanda’s hair gets caught in the cart wheels and she gets partially scalped before dying of shock in a pool of her own blood. It’s a death that drives home the brutality and callousness of the riot to perfection, the cranberry sauce to this gorefest.

4. Lizzie (Amanda Barker)

Diner waitress Lizzie goes feral during the Black Friday sale stampede at RightMart, yelling, screaming, cursing and scalping Amanda. She’s John Carver’s first victim. Carver plunges Lizzie’s head into the diner’s dish sink, before using the moisture to “stick” her face to the door of the walk-in freezer. A terrified Lizzie tears the skin off one side of her face to escape before he can whack her with his axe. But she’s unable to call for help because her phone’s facial recognition passkey can’t recognise her mangled features.

As Carver gets into his car to run her down, Lizzie tries to leap over a dumpster only to fall halfway into it. And Carver crashes his car into the dumpster, sending the metal lid down on her so hard that it bisects Lizzie at the waist. While her top half will grace his table, Carver displays her lower half prominently on the storefront, mounted on the point of the store’s star logo alongside the advertisement for 50% off. Humour, horror and blood and guts, it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without this scene – it’s the fully loaded mashed potatoes. 

5. Kathleen (Karen Cliche)

The centrepiece of Thanksgiving’s feast of violence is Jessica’s wicked stepmother, Kathleen, the woman who demanded that RightMart be open on Thanksgiving in the first place. After being shot with a tranquiliser dart during the Thanksgiving Day parade, she wakes to find masked gore-met chef John Carver butter-basting her bare toes, feet and legs, before giving her a cooking oil facial and sprinkling coarse ground salt and black pepper over her. He then delicately threads sprigs of parsley between her toes. 

Kathleen manages to slip out of his grip, sending the two on a chase through his house of horrors, before he throws a pitchfork into her back and drags her into his kitchen’s industrial oven. As she screeches and scorches, he opens the oven door again to slam a pop-up meat thermometer into her chest, then leaves her to cook till her skin is golden brown and bubbling and the pop-up goes “poit”. Later he serves her up in front of her family with her arms tucked in, and legs trussed together. For decency’s sake, she’s still in her (now somewhat charred) pilgrim parade outfit, and each of her fingers and toes has been decorated with an elegant little paper ruffle. Five blood-soaked Michelin stars. 

Bon appetit. Scream Thanksgiving on Showmax now.

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