‘The Priest: Thanksgiving Massacre’ DVD Review
Stars: Jo Krayer, Mark Topping, Holly Higbee, Brooklyn Ross, Liz Soutar, Dani Thompson | Written and Directed by Steve Lawson
The Priest: Thanksgiving Massacre is the latest holiday-horror outing from UK genre filmmaker Steve Lawson, a director who has quietly carved out his own niche of low-budget, single-location chillers. This time, he turns his attention to Thanksgiving, an unusual choice for a British production, which immediately gives the film a novelty factor (though I doubt the UK market was even thought of during production; this was aimed squarely at a larger US audience for sure). The setup is classic horror tropes – an estranged family heads to a secluded woodland cabin for the holiday, hoping an enforced getaway might patch up frayed relationships. Naturally, the cabin has a bloody past as they all do – in this case, tied to a long-dead priest whose descent into madness, murder and cannibalism still lingers beneath the floorboards.
What works in the film’s favour is the atmosphere. Lawson makes the most of his limited setting, using tight interior spaces, low lighting and that ominous “something underneath” to create a creeping sense of unease. The prologue hinting at the priest’s origin has a pleasing folk-horror texture, and once the family settles into the cabin, the film does a solid job teasing the threat rather than rushing into full slasher mode. The under-cabin sequences are surprisingly effective—there’s something inherently unnerving about dark crawl spaces, reaching arms, and the idea that the past is literally clawing its way back up to the surface.
The cast is small but capable, with Jo Krayer giving the most grounded performance as Tom, the relative voice of reason as things unravel. Mark Topping, playing the resurrected priest Reverend Fuller, doesn’t get as much screen time as the title might lead you to hope, but when he does appear, he brings a fun, feral energy that helps sell the film’s more outlandish moments. The effects, while very much in the realm of low-budget indie horror, are used sparingly and with enough restraint that they land when needed.
Where The Priest: Thanksgiving Massacre stumbles is in pacing. It takes quite a while for the supernatural element to reveal itself properly, and the slow build occasionally feels more like stalling than tension. With such a small pool of characters, the promised “massacre” never really escalates to anything grand, and viewers expecting a holiday horror splatter-fest may find the scale a little too modest. A few story beats – particularly involving why no one seems to know the cabin’s grisly history – raise more questions than the script is willing to answer.
Still, despite its rough edges, The Priest: Thanksgiving Massacre has a certain charm. It sits comfortably in that familiar space of British micro-budget horror: earnest, atmospheric, occasionally creaky, but made with a clear affection for the genre. If you enjoy cabin-in-the-woods chillers with a supernatural twist and you’re not expecting blockbuster gloss, there’s enough here to make for an enjoyable seasonal watch. It doesn’t reinvent anything, but it delivers just enough mood, menace and holiday-themed carnage to justify its place on the shelf of offbeat genre curios.
**½ 2.5/5
The Priest: Thanksgiving Massacre is out now on DVD and digital from High Fliers.
