Patrick Dempsey is in talks to star in Eli Roth’s slasher horror Thanksgiving, a movie that originated as a fake trailer that appeared 16 years ago in the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez film Grindhouse.
Dempsey — who is best known for his starring role as Dr. Derek Shephard in Grey’s Anatomy — would play the role of the town’s sheriff, according to a recent report from THR. The film will be directed by Roth, with a script written by by Jeff Rendell.
Thanksgiving‘s script has been completed for “over a dozen years” now, but wasn’t set to be made until Spyglass Media Group financed the movie last year. The report mentions that production on the film begins next month in Toronto, with no confirmed release date as of yet.
While no synopsis for the movie is available yet, the original trailer tells the story of a slasher who visits a small town during Thanksgiving and begins attacking people. THR also notes that the film will take place in a “small Massachusetts town,” with the slasher aiming to make “a Thanksgiving carving board out of the town’s inhabitants.”
The original idea for the movie came in the double billing Grindhouse, which featured a variety of fake trailers for movies from other directors. Roth’s was perhaps the most infamous, as it featured some extremely graphic scenes, all of which centered around various Thanksgiving-based things, like a parade, turkey mascots, and of course, Thanksgiving dinner.
Thanksgiving won’t be the first film that has been made into a feature-length project after appearing as a Grindhouse trailer. The first was 2010’s Machete, an exploitation action movie starring Danny Trejo, followed by 2011’s Hobo with a Shotgun, another exploitation black comedy action film.