Thanksgiving is secretly the best Scream movie since Wes Craven’s run

polygon.com:

The list of truly great horror-comedy movies is surprisingly short. Making something funny that’s also convincingly tense and satisfyingly gory takes a delicate touch, which is probably why Wes Craven’s Scream movies are the finest examples we have of hilarious slashers. While the most recent Scream movies have certainly dabbled in bits and pieces of Craven inspiration, they’ve never quite been able to capture the combination of fright and fun that makes the original four movies great. Thankfully, Eli Roth’s goofy, genuinely creepy new slasher Thanksgiving (which originally started as a joke trailer within the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino double featureGrindhouse)is here to give Scream and its immediate sequels the follow-up they truly deserve.

Just as with the original Scream, most of Thanksgiving takes place one year after a deadly tragedy. But in this case, instead of a single murder, it’s a Black Friday stampede that killed three people. Unlike Scream, however, Roth’s movie actually opens with the event, showing us the chaos. The panic begins when a Walmart-like store in Plymouth, Massachusetts, promises that the first 100 shoppers who arrive on Thanksgiving Eve will get a free waffle iron. Droves of people show up, desperate for their prize.

Roth channels his native New Englander in Thanksgiving, giving these throngs of deal-crazed shoppers the thickest accents and most specifically derogatory Massachusetts dialogue since The Departed. The crowd screams at the store’s security guards and jeers at our squad of teenage main characters, who are allowed into the store early because one of their dads owns the place.

Amid the comical insults and the horde losing its collective mind at the thought of fresh