Thanksgiving Director Eli Roth Says He’s ‘Lost Track’ of How Much Blood He Uses in His Horror Movies (Exclusive)

Eli Roth spills a lot of blood. Fake blood, that is.

PEOPLE recently spoke with Roth, 51, about his new horror movie Thanksgiving, a holiday-themed slasher that follows a mysterious serial killer dressed as a pilgrim who descends upon Plymouth, Massachusetts in November to commit a number of murders in the annual holiday’s hometown.

“I used to do that,” Roth says, when asked if he tracks how much fake blood and guts he uses in his movies. “I used to count by gallons, but I’ve lost track at this point.”

Roth burst onto the horror scene with his 2003 movie Cabin Fever and has since directed a number of films in the genre, including 2005’s Hostel and 2013’s The Green Inferno.

For Thanksgiving, he recruited makeup artist Adrien Morot, who won an Academy Award in March for his work on The Whale, and Morot’s wife Kathy Tse (who also worked on The Whale).

“The heads, the bodies were so realistic,” Roth says. “You’re looking at this head that you can’t believe it’s fake looking at it so close in broad daylight.”

Thanksgiving is filled with murder scenes that grimly fit the holiday’s spirit, as the film’s killer (dressed like a 17th century Pilgrim) sits his victims at a dinner table and prepares the group for a gruesome Thanksgiving dinner. In one moment teased in the film’s trailers, a character is stabbed in the ears with two corn cob holders — a scene that Roth describes as “such a cheap gag.”

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“I love, love, love cheap tricks. I love doing something I could have pulled off when I was 10 years old and getting away with it in a major motion picture,” he says of the scene, which he filmed safely by having actor Jenna Warren act out the sequence in reverse and then reversing the footage for the film. “It’s so mischievous and deeply satisfying, that corn holder in the ear.”

“I remember the people from the studio were like, ‘We’re going into overtime. What’s going on? Is this going to work?’ ” Roth recalls. “And then finally by take six or something, we reversed it and it looked perfect and everybody screamed and we showed it to an audience and everyone jumped out of their seats.”

“Now it’s in the trailer. It’s become one of the signature kills, but it was the cheapest, stupidest gag,” he adds. “It was so satisfying.”

Roth tells PEOPLE that the concept for Thanksgiving has been on his mind since he was growing up a major horror fan in Massachusetts. In 2007, Roth and cowriter Jeff Rendell created a faux trailer  for the movie that ran in theaters during the Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse and spent the years between developing it into a feature-length film.

“It was really a pleasure not just to make a Thanksgiving movie, but to fill the November horror movie void,” Roth tells PEOPLE. “I felt like the calendar has been missing a November horror movie. It’s been my life’s mission to bring Halloween into November.”

Thanksgiving slashes into theaters Friday.