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A Horror Fan's Thanksgiving Table: A Full Feast of Themed Movies

By. Professor Horror

 

 

Thanksgiving is already a strange holiday if you look at it too closely. We gather to eat ourselves into semi-consciousness, watch parades that feel like they escaped from someone’s fever dream, and pretend that family dynamics aren’t quietly unraveling at the seams. But for horror fans, Thanksgiving isn’t just about food and forced togetherness and it’s the perfect excuse to dive into a very specific subgenre: Thanksgiving horror. Each year brings a chance to celebrate the season through slashers, cults, cannibals, killer turkeys, and all the simmering dread the holiday already suggests. So, what should all the creeps and creeplings do this holiday season? Relax, monsters…just help set the table, because I’ve got the menu planned out for you. This cinematic meal offers something for everyone in the family, and going back for seconds is absolutely encouraged. I’ve carefully curated a Thanksgiving spread of horror films, each one paired like a side dish or course of the feast, ensuring there's something on the menu for all tastes and dietary restrictions. This banquet of terror begins, as all proper feasts should, with the sides (because anyone who has survived a family dinner knows the sides are the real reason we show up). Only after honoring those supporting players do we carve into the bird, indulge in a dessert we know will hurt us, and finally collapse into the leftovers of a holiday we both dread and anticipate.

Let the feasting begin!

                                                    

Mashed Potatoes: ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (1993)

Mashed potatoes are the reason many of us sit through the annual holiday chaos. They are comfort in a bowl, a starchy emotional support system. ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES serves the same function. It may not be a traditional horror film, yet it remains essential Thanksgiving viewing for anyone who recognizes the holiday’s troubled mythology. The famous Camp Chippewa pageant, in which Wednesday Addams delivers the most definitive takedown of the colonial fantasy ever allowed in a family-film sequel, has become a seasonal touchstone. The film skewers your aunt’s decorative gratitude signs just as sharply as it skewers the holiday’s revisionist storytelling, and it does it all with theatrical excess and perfect comedic timing. Like mashed potatoes, it is intensely satisfying, familiar in all the right ways, and capable of silencing a table full of tense relatives with remarkable efficiency. Some films confront history. This one lights a match and walks away.

                                                     

 Cranberry Sauce: BLOOD RAGE (1987)

Cranberry sauce is a polarizing substance. Some people refuse to celebrate without it. Others consider it an edible red flag. BLOOD RAGE functions exactly the same way. This deliriously strange Thanksgiving slasher revolves around twin brothers (one a murderer, the other wrongly institutionalized) whose identities collide during the holiday break. The film contains some of the most memorably absurd line deliveries in seasonal horror history, including the immortal declaration, “That’s not cranberry sauce!” There is a tacky charm to its rampages, its bloodied hands, and its unrestrained commitment to chaos. Like the side dish it represents, it may not be elegant, and some viewers will recoil at the texture, but it is undeniably and inescapably part of the Thanksgiving genre tradition. Even if you hate it, you remember it.

                                                                                   

 Stuffing: PILGRIM (2019)

Stuffing is bread forced into a dark place, which already makes it the closest Thanksgiving food to body horror. It belongs with PILGRIM, the Into the Dark installment about a family who invites historical reenactors into their home for what is supposed to be an earnest, educational celebration of gratitude. The reenactors refuse to break character. Things unravel. Rituals escalate. The holiday becomes an exercise in psychological domination. The film critiques curated nostalgia and the modern obsession with “authenticity,” reminding viewers that many attempts to recreate the past are rooted in a refusal to acknowledge what that past actually involved. Like stuffing, the film is divisive. Some find it addictive, others claim it ruins the plate, and still others will swear they tasted raisins when none were listed in the ingredients. It is unsettling in all the right places and a perfect match for a dish no one fully understands but everyone keeps eating.

                                                        

 Dinner Rolls: KRISTY (2014)

Dinner rolls rarely get the respect they deserve. They are simple, warm, and often the first thing to disappear from the table. KRISTY is the cinematic equivalent. This tense, sharply crafted survival thriller takes place over Thanksgiving break, when most students have left campus and a young woman finds herself hunted by a traveling network of ritualistic killers who call all their victims “Kristy.” What follows is a clever, physical, and emotionally grounded story about a protagonist who refuses to become disposable. The film is unpretentious, streamlined, and effective, a reminder that horror does not always need to be heavily seasoned or elaborately plated to be deeply satisfying. Like dinner rolls, it is comforting in its simplicity, underrated, and absolutely essential once you know it’s there.

                                       

 Gravy: RAVENOUS (1999)

Gravy is indulgence. It is poured over everything, whether we asked for it or not. RAVENOUS is the same: excessive, sumptuous, and impossible to cleanse from memory. This cannibal Western, set against the frozen isolation of the Sierra Nevada during the Mexican-American War, blends historical violence with supernatural hunger in a way that manages to be both darkly funny and thematically rich. Its performances are feral, its music mischievously discordant, and its vision of manifest destiny grotesquely literal. It is a story about conquest and appetite, about bodies consumed not only for survival but for power. Gravy binds the Thanksgiving plate together and RAVENOUS does the same for horror, stitching cannibalism, nationalism, and moral collapse into a meal that leaves you full and vaguely horrified that you enjoyed it.

                                                               

Turkey: THANKSGIVING (2023)

Turkey is the centerpiece, a symbol of abundance, tradition, and the annual struggle between dry breast meat and well-intentioned gravy. Eli Roth’s THANKSGIVING claims that position within the holiday horror canon. After years of anticipation following the original fake trailer, the full film arrives dripping with retail violence, small-town secrets, and a masked killer whose holiday tablescape is as theatrical as it is fatal. The movie is loud, bloody, and fully aware that the horror of Thanksgiving is often tied to spectacle and consumption. If mashed potatoes provide comfort and stuffing provides chaos, turkey provides the mythology: the notion that this day is meaningful, essential, and worth the trouble. The film carves into that mythology with knives sharpened by Black Friday stampedes and generational resentment. Like the bird itself, it can be too much, but it is impossible to imagine the spread without it.

                                                 

 Dessert: THANKSKILLING (2008)

Dessert is excess, the moment when logic collapses and sugar takes over. THANKSKILLING embodies that collapse. This microbudget shock-comedy about a foul-mouthed, homicidal turkey puppet has no nutritional value and makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. It is crude, chaotic, and unapologetically stupid, a cinematic sugar bomb that some will savor and others will insist should not be served to anyone…ever. Yet every year, someone brings a pie that is too sweet, too processed, too messy, and somehow still gets eaten. So, it is with THANKSKILLING. Just because something is bad for you does not mean it cannot provide a specific and undeniable joy. Think of it as a seasonal dare. 

                                                

Leftovers: BLACK FRIDAY (2021)

Leftovers are the day-after reality check. They are comfort and regret, stacked in plastic containers and reheated while we contemplate our choices. BLACK FRIDAY is the perfect cinematic counterpart, following a group of retail workers who face parasitic, consumer-mutating creatures during the shopping holiday that devours time, energy, and occasionally limbs. The film blends workplace horror with dark comedy and features a cast that understands both the absurdity and the despair of customer service during seasonal sales. The terror of this movie is not only in the monsters but in the recognition that many of us have worked this day, swallowed our dignity, and lived to microwave turkey in silence afterward. Thanksgiving ends when we admit we are exhausted. Black Friday ensures we never forget why.

 

Final Toast

And so the table is full. Whether you choose to indulge in only one of these seasonal offerings or build a sampler plate of cinematic mayhem, consider this your official invitation to make Thanksgiving a horror holiday. The genre is, after all, about survival, appetite, history, regret, and the strange rituals that bind us. Sometimes it is about carving, too.

May your meal be warm, your films unsettling, and your leftovers unspoiled.