Although Stan Winston's PUMPKINHEAD has gained an appreciative audience over the years, it never really joined the ranks of the most popular horror movies to emerge from the 1980's. After losing his son in a tragic accident, Ed Harley (Lance Henricksen) seeks the assistance of a witch who brings forth Pumpkinhead, a vengeance demon who immediately sets out to kill those responsible for the death of Harley's son. Written and directed by the late Stan Winston, PUMPKINHEAD was a fun and imaginative horror flick which is definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.
Talk of resurrecting the franchise has popped up every now and then, but now Entertainment Weekly reports that SAW franchise executive producer Peter Block has picked up the rights to PUMPKINHEAD with the intention of shooting a reboot in 2017.
Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror films of the late ’80s, early ’90s. Stan Winston sits on that Mount Rushmore of iconic filmmakers because of his creature designs, and that was his first directing effort. The creature’s great but the emotional story is wonderful as well. I got the rights to Pumpkinhead, and hooked up with a great young writer called Nate Atkins, and we developed our script, which is really solid.
The proposed reboot will have a lot in common with Winston's original but will also go down its own path.
There is a similarity of theme and a similarity of story. There’s a lot of Easter eggs for people who know the original — iconic shots and iconic lines that we’re going to use. But we’ve enhanced the setting, and we’ve expanded the characters somewhat, to give it a different kind of experience.
Block hopes to give his PUMPKINHEAD reboot a theatrical release but is currently searching for a suitable director to take on the project. One of the great things about Winston's original was the practical effects, obviously, which is something Peter Block wants to preserve for the reboot.
I am a big proponent of practical effects. That was the great thing about the original. A lot of the films I still respond to most today, it’s because of the practical effects. We think that it’s going to be a nice slow reveal, lots of scares and lots of action in the beginning, and a great creature in the end, which everybody should be able to look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s Pumpkinhead!’ It’s not like you’re all of a sudden going to find that it’s some amorphous, nebulous, CGI wispy thing. You’re going to know it came from the Pumpkinhead family lineage.
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