Eli Roth will expand the spoof trail­er Thanks­giv­ing into a full-length feature

In 2007, Quentin Taran­ti­no and Robert Rodriguez joined forces for the retro throw­back pack­aged as Grind­house, a dou­ble fea­ture (Taran­ti­no direct­ed motor-thriller Death Proof, Rodriguez did the zom­bie freak­show Plan­et Ter­ror) pay­ing homage to the good old days of the ​’70s, when high-grade sleaze filled dingy cin­e­mas. To real­ly immerse audi­ences in the envi­ron­ment of these tem­ples to filth, the Grind­house pre­sen­ta­tion was bro­ken up by a hand­ful of trail­ers for nonex­is­tent movies cov­er­ing a wider spec­trum of exploita­tion film — one of which has improb­a­bly reen­tered the news.

Dead­line has bro­ken the news that Eli Roth will expand his mer­ry blood­bath Thanks­giv­ing from two and a half min­utes to full length, with Grey’s Anato­my alum Patrick Dempsey (the one-time Doc­tor McDreamy) a sur­prise in the lead role. Roth will direct, work­ing from a script by Jeff Ren­dell, cowriter of the orig­i­nal short — and bit play­er, decap­i­tat­ed while wear­ing a turkey cos­tume — more than fif­teen years ago. As the instant­ly immor­tal tagline goes, ​“White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved.”

The short spoofed such hol­i­day-themed stab-a-thons as Black Christ­mas, My Bloody Valen­tine, Hal­loween, and April Fool’s Day, join­ing the cit­i­zens of Ply­mouth, Mass­a­chu­setts as they throw their annu­al parade salut­ing the town’s pil­grim her­itage. But a psy­cho­path­ic killer in the cus­tom­ary buck­led hat and shoes has gris­ly plans of his own, going on a homi­ci­dal spree that most mem­o­rably involves a bounc­ing cheer­leader who does a tram­po­line-assist­ed split right down onto his knife.

Thanks­giv­ing will mark the third of the fake Grind­house sideshows to mutate into its own beast, fol­low­ing the Dan­ny Tre­jo vehi­cle Machete and the shoe­string-bud­get­ed Rut­ger Hauer show­case Hobo With a Shot­gun. That still leaves two oth­ers, tan­ta­liz­ing con­cepts both: Edgar Wright​‘s video nasty par­o­dy Don’t, and Rob Zom­bie​‘s Nic Cage-star­ring Nazi send-up Were­wolf Women of the S.S. Genre enthu­si­ast that he is, it’s still hard to imag­ine Wright spend­ing his indus­try cachet and finite time on this Earth work­ing on such a delib­er­ate­ly Z‑grade project, but schlock­meis­ter Zom­bie could very well keep the streak going. (And Cage is, to put it gen­tly, very get­table these days.)

For Roth and Ren­dell, how­ev­er, trans­lat­ing their mini-mon­stros­i­ty to fea­ture size could present some unique chal­lenges; in 2007, Roth talked about how he was only able to get some of his most graph­ic footage by the MPAA with­out an NC-17 rat­ing by squeez­ing it into mon­tage, rather than hav­ing it all spread out. Giv­en room to breathe, his play­ful sense of extrem­i­ty might seem more obscene. Here’s hop­ing he won’t be made to tone it down.