Special Effects guru Stan Winston poured his best efforts into horror flicks ranging from the obscure or ill-regarded (The Bat People, Darkness Falls), to the cherished and influential (The Thing), but he only directed one horror movie during his career. Pumpkinhead is a well-built, country-gothic chiller with a memorable, somewhat laughable title that still makes me wonder if the general dearth of humor in the film is a missed opportunity. Granted, it’s hard to inject humor into a premise that is essentially “What if the father from Pet Sematary couldn’t resurrect his son and resorted to conjuring a vengeance demon instead?”
The original trailer for Pumpkinhead is near perfect. It establishes the stakes, gives you everything you need to know about the story without spoiling much at all, sets the appropriate tone for the grimness of the movie, and gives us teasing glimpses of the creature. It alsod lets us know that it plans to play with where the audience’s sympathy should lie, all in less than 90-seconds. Only at the very end, with the forced, unnatural echo of the old witch saying, “Now it begins” while the shot choppily zooms out does the trailer trip itself up. Although I have to imagine that some audiences in 1988 might have snickered at the reveal of the film’s title after all of the shadowy, muggy, serious hellishness that preceded it.
Interestingly, hearing it spoken aloud by the great Don LaFontaine in the inferior follow-up trailer imbues the name with a befitting balance of gallows amusement. It sounds like some old, absurd-yet-dangerous backwoods cryptid. Something that doesn’t sound so intimidating in the light of day, but if you’re walking alone late at night and sense a creature stalking you, you might think to yourself, “Damn it, I’m going to be so embarrassed if I get killed by something called Pumpkinhead.”
