PILGRIM WAX TERROR.

It probably goes without explaining why the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts is a hotbed of historical activity. This includes, but is not limited to, an annual hometown Thanksgiving Parade, the landmark “Plymouth Rock”, a beautiful recreation of the Mayflower ship and the grandest of them all — Plymouth Plantation, a living history museum at the most authentic setting imaginable, the actual original settlement established in the 17th century by the English colonists who became known as the Pilgrims.

However here at TNUC we’re fascinated with the abandoned and ancient gems of society. The Plymouth National Wax Museum has long been closed down for reasons I will not understand. My only two guesses would be the decaying state of the old wax figures or perhaps some of the displays are seen as offensive towards the indigenous people. It’s a shame because the best wax museums are the old, unchanged ones! Give me a dated and lower-budget wax museum over a state of the art Hollywood display any day.

As seen in the following postcards from the museum is a glimpse at the harsh conditions of pilgrims and the Native Americans. The nightmarish terror really comes into play in the facial expressions and dead-eyes of the wax figures. Just imagine the lights turning off and being locked inside the Plymouth Wax Museum like the plot of 1988’s Waxwork.

If that wasn’t enough, several years following the business closing, an artist named Sam Durant acquired one of the scenes from the defunct museum. He transformed the pieces into a exhibit titled “Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments” which was displayed in a gallery at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006.

Above from Sam Durant’s gallery. They look so happy.

This is all the more reason why I feel so strongly that we need a well done pilgrim and/or Thanksgiving movie. After the dust settled from Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (2023), things just seem very incomplete. His movie was a decent, modern slasher but my problem with it was the killer, “John Carver”, a character who even though borrows from the name of an actual pilgrim who arrived on the Mayflower, has zero connection or ties to anything historical within the storyline. He ended up being (spoiler alert) just a local lunatic cop who thought it would be clever to dress up like a pilgrim and play cell phone tricks on teenagers to kill them one-by-one. An OK slasher plot? I guess so, but it can’t be our only pilgrim/Thanksgiving horror movie. No sir. There is work to be done here.

With all the bloodshed and hard times the Native Americans and early settlers faced, it demands a great story told from someone like Robert Eggers or Quentin Tarantino. There are endless possibilities for depth here and it doesn’t even need to be in the horror genre. A revenge story centered around King Philip, the Wampanoag chief centered of the bloodiest war in American history in 1675, whos wife and son who were captured and sold as slaves, would absolutely rule.