Horror Short Review: Thanksgiving (2025)

It’s turkey time, but there’s something else on the menu in Jiya Kapur Films’ horror short, Thanksgiving.

The story is about a young woman who is invited by a new gym friend to a Thanksgiving party at her aunt’s Victorian Manor. It is a large and lavish place, but quiet, so after having a good old nose around, she waits until she finally meets the host. Her ‘gym friend’ and her family have a secret sinister tradition at Thanksgiving, and it turns out that the woman is on the menu.

At over thirteen minutes, the biggest issue with Thanksgiving is its length. It needs to be half that, hell, maybe only a quarter, as a large proportion of it is just the woman walking around an empty looking manor. In a better short, this might have been a way to build tension and clue the viewer into the strange goings on within, but that’s not the case. Instead, it ends up making the short feel drawn out and bores the viewer resulting in the eventual scares being less effective.

When we do finally get to the scares though, the short does improve as the villain proves to be fairly creepy. The acting could do with some work, especially as the reaction to such horror seems understated, but it at least makes the ending notable when nothing else is. Check it out yourself below.