John Carver’s Identity in ‘Thanksgiving’ Explained

The slasher film Thanksgiving features a killer, John Carver, wearing a pilgrim costume. Carver was a real person who played a key role in the history of Thanksgiving.

The film is based on a fake trailer that Eli Roth made for Grindhouse, a double feature of two campy movies that were released in 2011. The trailer was so popular that Roth decided to make it into a full-length movie in 2023. The film has all the sex and violence that fans of the trailer love.

The film also portrays the real story of Carver’s history, although a lot is left out. Throughout the film, the killer takes the disguise of John Carver.

John Carver was the first governor of the first permanent English settlement in modern Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony. Carver was one of the Separatists, a group of English Protestants who wanted to break away from the Church of England.

He likely wrote the Mayflower Compact, the first agreement for self-government in America, and also signed it first. Robert Cushman and Carver acted as governors during the voyage of the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Separatists and other settlers to the New World.

After they landed, the settlers chose Carver as the first governor of Plymouth Colony. He helped them build houses and assigned them different tasks for their livelihood. However, the colonizers died during the winter of 1620-21 due to the lack of food and shelter. Various illnesses also took many lives.

Later, the people learned how to monetize the land and signed a peace treaty with Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy. This set the stone for the first Thanksgiving that took place in 1621.

Unfortunately, John Carver did not live long enough to see the celebrations of the first Thanksgiving. A month after the treaty was signed, Carver fell ill and went into a coma. The cause of his demise remains unknown. He was buried in the colony, and many attended his funeral.

During the first Thanksgiving, Carver’s successor, William Bradford, became the leader. He organized a three-day meal celebration to celebrate the success of the harvest’s high crop yield. The meal satisfied over 90 Wampanoag people and around 50 colonizers.

Director Eli Roth explained that the idea to make the killer in ‘Thanksgiving’ take the disguise of John Carver was by Jeff Rendell. Rendell played the pilgrim in the Grindhouse trailer. He realized that the Pilgrim was called John Carver and thought it was a good name for a slasher villain.

Eli Roth later decided to go for Carver as the inspiration behind the killer’s mask. They referred to an existing drawing of Carver.

About Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a 2023 American slasher film directed by Eli Roth and written by Jeff Rendell, based on a story by the pair, who produced with Roger Birnbaum.

Based on Roth’s fictitious trailer of the same name from Grindhouse (2007), it is the third feature-length adaptation of a fictitious Grindhouse trailer after Robert Rodriguez’s Machete (2010) and Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun (2011).

The film stars Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, and Gina Gershon, and follows a small Massachusetts town that is terrorized by a killer in a John Carver mask around the Thanksgiving holiday.

Thanksgiving received a theatrical release in the United States by TriStar Pictures on November 17, 2023. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and has grossed $46 million worldwide. A sequel is in development.