In Thanksgiving’s ending, Eli Roth’s festive slasher reveals who is the killer, their twisted motives, and sets up the sequel. Thanksgiving began life as a fake trailer featured in directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ambitious double feature Grindhouse. Grindhouse was intended to be an homage to the exploitation movies of the ‘70s and, to that end, the movie’s double feature of Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror was book-ended by fake movie trailers from the likes of Roth, Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, and Edgar Wright. Sixteen years later, Roth’s Thanksgiving trailer became a real movie.
One of the biggest differences between Thanksgiving’s trailer and the movie is that the 2023 movie is a straightforward slasher. Unlike the fake trailer, Thanksgiving isn’t a period piece, and it has a more subtle humor. However, Thanksgiving’s plot remains extremely tongue-in-cheek. When a Black Friday stampede kills multiple people, seven teens and a local sheriff are lucky to escape with their lives. A year later, a masked murderer, "John Carver," begins hunting down the group of friends and killing off people involved in the stampede in Thanksgiving-inspired fashions, resulting in a race to work out the killer’s shocking identity.
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Sheriff Newlon Is The Killer in Thanksgiving’s Ending
Jessica Realizes Newlon Is The Villain In Thanksgiving's Finale
In Thanksgiving’s ending, it is revealed that Patrick Dempsey’s Sheriff Newlon is the killer. When Thanksgiving’s Final Girl Jessica escapes the killer’s lair, leaving behind her father and her friends Gabby and Scuba, she sees her ex-boyfriend, Bobby, wearing the killer’s mask and calls the police to apprehend him. Newlon credits her with catching the killer, but Jessica then notices that Newlon has stickers on his pants just like the killer did when he was chasing her through the woods. Jessica confronts Newlon, who its that he is the killer and that his murders were motivated by revenge.
The identity of Thanksgiving’s killer is teased in the opening scene, but it is only in the finale that viewers learn Newlon’s plan.
The identity of ’s killer is teased in the opening scene, but it is only in the finale that viewers learn Newlon’s plan. Newlon gloats that he intends to kill Jessica, her father, Scuba, and Gabby, only for Jessica to reveal that she live-streamed his entire confession. An enraged Newlon attacks her, prompting a chase through a warehouse that reunites Jessica with Bobby.
As Newlon chases Bobby and Jessica out of the warehouse, Jessica fires a musket at an inflating parade balloon, igniting the helium inside and presumably killing Newlon. After Jessica is reunited with her friends, she has a nightmare about Newlon attacking her at home — a moment that could possibly be setting up Thanksgiving 2.
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Why Newlon Killed His Victims
Newlon's Quest For Revenge Fueled Thanksgiving's Bloodshed
Newlon’s motives in Thanksgiving are pretty predictable for canny viewers who paid close attention to his first appearance in the movie. He reveals to Jessica that he was having an affair with Amanda, the wife of a store worker named Mitch. Although Mitch was the one who said Jessica’s family needed to pay for his wife’s death, Newlon set out to avenge Amanda.
The ending of Eli Roth’s highly-rated horror movie sees Newlon reveal that Amanda was pregnant with his child in Thanksgiving’s ending
The ending of Eli Roth’s highly-rated horror movie sees Newlon reveal that Amanda was pregnant with his child in Thanksgiving’s ending, which further underscores how serious their affair was and how likely Amanda was to leave Mitch for the sheriff.
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How Jessica Outsmarted Newlon
Jessica Used Newlon's Advice Against Him
Jessica used Newlon’s own advice to take him down in Thanksgiving’s ending since, earlier in the movie, he was the one who told her how to spot the killer. Newlon wanted Jessica to find evidence that her father and stepmother were guilty of causing the stampede, so he encouraged her to watch others carefully and look for the sort of small details that give away the guilty party.
Ironically, it was Newlon’s failure to remove the stickers from his pants leg that allows Jessica to take this advice and guess his guilt, which then prompted her to goad a confession from him while she was secretly live-streaming their conversation.
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Jessica Stays With Ryan In Thanksgiving’s Ending
Thanksgiving's Love Triangle Has A Surprising Twist
Somewhat surprisingly, Jessica does not reunite with her original love interest Bobby by the time the Thanksgiving ending arrives. Unlike Roth’s goofy original Thanksgiving trailer, the movie itself both plays into and subverts the tropes of the slasher subgenre.
Initially, the seemingly sweet Ryan is set up as an obvious candidate for Thanksgiving’s killer.
Initially, the seemingly sweet Ryan is set up as an obvious candidate for Thanksgiving’s killer. He resented Jessica’s boorish ex, Bobby, and only started to date her after Bobby left town, thus benefiting from the stampede. However, Thanksgiving’s ending reveals that Ryan was a more ive boyfriend than Bobby and Jessica chose to stay with him as a result, with the evidence that pointed at him simply being a red herring.
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Thanksgiving’s Ending Heavily Implies That Newlon Survived
Newlon's Body Isn't Found By Thanksgiving's Ending
Not only is Newlon’s dead body never found at the end of Thanksgiving, but the movie heavily implies that he didn’t die in the fire. For one thing, no trace of Newlon's body was uncovered, and, for another, a group of masked firefighters emerged from the building without Jessica getting to check their identities.
Since both 2014’s satirical slasher The Guest and 2009’s gory slasher remake My Bloody Valentine 3D ended with the killer waking up after a blast, killing a firefighter, and taking their place, it is understandable that Thanksgiving didn’t copy this ending beat for beat. However, Newlon’s survival is still likely, and leaves open the possibility for his return in Thanksgiving 2.
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Newlon’s Revenge Ultimately Failed In Thanksgiving
Newlon Never Got Back At Thanksgiving's Real Villain
What makes Newlon’s survival seem even more likely is the fact that his work is far from finished. Thanksgiving ends with only two of the main friend group’s seven , Yulia and Evan, dead. Not only did Scuba, Ryan, Bobby, Gabby, and Jessica all escape Newlon, but Jessica’s father, Thomas, also avoided a brutal death at the killer’s hands.
This is particularly striking since Thomas was arguably the guiltiest party in the entire stampede incident.
This is particularly striking since Thomas was arguably the guiltiest party in the entire stampede incident. While the teenagers made bad decisions while in the store, it was Thomas’s decision to open the store on Thanksgiving, under-staff it, and save money by hiring irresponsible security guards. Since Thomas is still alive at the end, not to mention Jessica and the rest of the teens, Newlon will likely make another attempt on their lives in Thanksgiving 2 (provided he isn't dead, of course).
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What Thanksgiving’s Ending Really Means
Thanksgiving's Ending Satirizes The Rich
Throughout Thanksgiving, the slasher movie makes dark satirical jabs at consumerism, colonialism, and the holiday’s history. The Eli Roth movie may seem like a simple slasher flick, but it has a strong anti-consumerist message behind it. Newlon dons the face of a historical pilgrim to enact bloody vengeance on wealthy people who never paid for their sins, calling to mind the bloody history of Thanksgiving itself.
Newlon was haunted by the consequences of her father’s greed.
While Jessica escapes Thanksgiving’s final moments with her life, she is still haunted by the image of Newlon, much like Newlon was haunted by the consequences of her father’s greed. In Thanksgiving’s ending, the rich and powerful escape gruesome justice, but the threat of bloody vengeance still lingers in their minds.
How The Thanksgiving Ending Was Received
Just like the rest of Eli Roth's 2023 slasher, the final moments of Thanksgiving were well received, and strong enough that Thanksgiving 2 was greenlit by Trystar Pictures. They satisfyingly wrapped up the narrative, while also leaving leaving the conclusion open enough that a continuation of the story was both possible and in-demand. However, when it comes to the reviews from critic and general viewers online, the final scenes in Thanksgiving don't tend to get specifically flagged up as noteworthy positive or negative.
Thanksgiving sits with an 84% critical score and 79% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, highlighting that it was generally a well-received entry into the range of available holiday-themed slasher movies. When it came to reasons why, the positive reviews mostly cited Eli Roth's skills as a director, and the almost-comical levels of gore and violence that spiritually nods to the horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s.
When it comes to the negative responses, most stem from critics who don't seem to hold the slasher genre in high regard to begin with. There are also many from reviewers at the polar opposite end of the scale and love the horror subgenre, but due to the sheer number they have seen expect more innovation than Thanksgiving delivered. Some of these did cite the ending, in particular that Jessica's nightmare of Newlon felt a little cliché, seeing the moment as ripping off the ending of movies like Friday the 13th (with its surreal sequence of Jason emerging from the waters of Camp Crystal Lake). instead of homaging them.
There were also several critical responses that saw the ending of Thanksgiving predictable for anyone even remotely schooled in the slasher-horror subgenre. This was perhaps unavoidable given Eli Roth's delirberate commitment to building on the legacy of the the history of slaher films. While there were plenty who loved the fact that Thanksgiving was trying to be a masterclass of going through the motions instead a subversion of them, critics like Rolling Stone's David Fear felt the end result was all too predictable:
"What follows [the one year time jump towards the start of Thanksgiving] is one undercooked feast of gruesome kills, final-girl pursuits, a few mild digs at capitalism, red herrings, blood-red interior decorating courtesy of decapitations, the occasional nod to that [original fake Grindhouse trailer for Thanksgiving], and a lot of dead air. If you’re even semi-fluent in Slasher Mysteries 101, you will likely put together the whodunit."
How The Thanksgiving Ending Compares To Other Slashers
The Kills, Final Reveal, & Tech Helps It Differ From Mainstream Slashers
What Thanksgiving has going for it is director Eli Roth. The man knows his horror tropes and has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror cinema. He knows what fans expect in slasher movies, and he worked here to somewhat subvert those expectations in ways that improved the movie experience. One of his biggest choices was to make the kills a little more creative than normal slasher movies. Instead of the killer just hacking and slashing kids in inventive ways, Roth had the killer deliver some gruesome and inventive kills.
With such inventive kills, the ending really sets up more shocking moments, none more so than when Jessica blows Newlan up with the hot air balloon. It was over-the-top, very out of the norm for a slasher movie, and a huge fan-favorite ending. Also, with Jessica using live-streaming to expose the killer, Roth pulls from modern-day tech in a way that mainstream slashers don't. While Thanksgiving shares more in common with slasher movie endings than it differs from them, it is just unique enough to work.
Originally conceived as a parody trailer in 2007's Grindhouse, Thanksgiving is a 2023 horror-slasher film from director Eli Roth. The movie centers around a serial killer who heads to a small town in Massachusetts that creates a huge event out of Thanksgiving each year with the intent of turning the residents into the main course.
- Cast
- Addison Rae, Patrick Dempsey, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Milo Manheim, Gina Gershon
- Runtime
- 106 Minutes
- Director
- Eli Roth
- Writers
- Eli Roth, Jeff Rendell
- Studio(s)
- Spyglass Media Group, Electromagnetic Productions
