To think, I haven’t written about a single Stan Winston movie yet, despite his prominence and importance to movie special effects and to movie monsters in particular. Winston and his team are responsible for the effects of some of the biggest movies of the eighties and nineties, but Winston himself only directed a few himself (which includes both A Gnome Named Gnorm and the Michael Jackson “Ghosts” video, and it’s hard to tell which is a more ignoble mark on his record), with Pumpkinhead being his first. Of course, you’d expect a movie directed by a guy who is a specialist in animatronics and detailed monster costumes to mostly be a straightforward vehicle for both (not unlike what Equinox was doing for creature effects in the late sixties/early seventies), but it actually manages to mash together a lot of different ideas, producing something that is never really just one thing. It’s a backwoods supernatural horror story, a melancholy morality play, a killer-chasing-young-people flick—I thought Equinox was a movie that was just looking for the most efficient path to justifying having a bunch of monsters on screen, but Pumpkinhead puts in a surprising amount of work into feeling like some legitimate modern folklore.
The movie takes place in the deepest rural parts of Somewhere, USA, and after the opening credits (which establish this as the only movie I’ve watched for this blog to be “Based on a Poem”) that transitions from more traditional horror music to Southern fried twangy guitar, we get a scene of an old-timey family in their shack refusing to help a man being chased by some unseen something for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and the son catching a glimpse of the demonic entity doing the chasing. That son grows up to be Ed Harley, played by Lance Henriksen (who had previously worked with Winston on Aliens), a guy with a small grocery store and whose own son is apparently the kid from the old McCain’s french fries commercials—the early scenes between the two are so brightly-lit and idyllic, it’s pretty boldly telling you that something tragic is about to happen. We are promptly introduced to the other two groups of supporting characters: a large family of bedraggled hill people (I do like that they establish that there, in fact, multiple strata of redneck) and a half-dozen urban tourists going for a weekend at their cabin in the woods. Harley’s son is killed in horrible dirt bike accident, which then splinters into two surprisingly intense stories—the one responsible for the accident, Joel, essentially locks his friends, his traumatized girlfriend, and his brother in their cabin and cuts the phone line, terrified of what will happen if he gets caught in another bad situation while already on probation; meanwhile, Harley seeks vengeance by going to the local swamp witch (shown there by the son of the hill people clan after their grandfather, played by John Carpenter bit player Buck Flower, refuses to help) and taking part in a ritual to summon the monster he had witnessed as a child, which the kids call Pumpkinhead. He regrets his actions almost immediately, and spends the rest of the film trying to figure out how to stop the creature as it kills off the city folk one by one.
It does feel nice to get a different atmosphere from one of these movies—yes, there’s plenty of hillbilly horror out there, but this one seems to have a surprising amount of respect for rural folk (or, at the very least, they aren’t just a bunch of backwards yokels, no matter how many dirty potato sacks they wear), and presents the spooky woods and weird places found within, whether it be the witch’s cabin or the pumpkin-filled graveyard, in a way that feels otherworldly (often with ghostly blue or balmy orange lighting), but also highly specific to the setting. Most things about the movie feel like they’re trying to be specific to the setting—including the aforementioned score—which makes it a lot more interesting than if it was just another cabin in the woods horror story. I do like the idea of local myths come to life, not just running roughshod over outsiders but also playing an integral role in the lives of the people in the community, which is something Pumpkinhead has and would later be used even more extensively in Candyman. So, yes, what I’m saying is that Pumpkinhead is the hillbilly Candyman.
Despite being there to fill the movie’s body count, too, it was at least a better choice to give the rowdy horror movie teens their own conflict outside of the whole “monster trying to kill them” thing. Before Pumpkinhead shows up, it’s basically about the rest of them angrily trying to deal with the fact that they let themselves hang around a real garbage human—Joel’s brother (and maybe his girlfriend, who spends most of the movie crying), who desperately tries to defuse the situation before being the first one to be iced (showing that the monster doesn’t really discriminate based on varying levels of guilt), at least has an excuse. Except for Joel, these aren’t the dumb, self-serving slasher movie teens that usually inhabit the genre (I noticed very early on how similar the plot of this movie was to MST3K favourite Zombie Nightmare, but this is thankfully a bit more high-minded than that one), and while I can’t say I found any of them particularly endearing (it’s a bunch of young actors vs. Lance Henriksen, so the deck is sort of stacked against them), it does feel a bit refreshing to have a horror movie that isn’t so actively mean-spirited and vindictive. On the other hand, most of those characters are killed off anyway, which I guess is meant to add to the sense of this story as a tragedy, as the whole thing spirals out of control and completely minces any sense of proportional justice.
The morality stuff in this movie is pretty blunt, but also oddly effective at points—Henriksen is really going for it, hammering on the desperate anger and sadness and regret, spending no less than 80% of it looking pained, and not just because he is physically connected to the monster (a revelation that happens pretty early, but it still takes until the end of the movie before Harley figures out the solution that the audience saw coming right from the start—look, he was busy building a home-made flamethrower(!), give him a break.) Pumpkinhead itself is something that seems to straddle the line between something with a darkly ambiguous existence and a monster that exists just to be a big cool monster. They establish it as primarily a projection of human anger and a thirst for “justice” (in the very old-school, non-legally binding sense), but it quickly reveals itself to be more like incoherent rage, rather sadistically attacking whoever the one who summoned it blames for whatever crime, whether they are guilty or not (and the rest of the community reacts by avoiding it at all costs, knowing that what it does isn’t necessarily right, but feeling unable to do anything about it and wanting to protect themselves.) Its method of killing, too, is surprisingly not over-the-top—it smashes people up and drops them from great heights (okay, it also impales someone on a shotgun), and while there’s plenty of bloody bodies, this is not a particularly gory movie. This almost makes the violence feel more visceral, because it’s not as cartoonish as many horror movies get.
Pumpkinhead’s design is very clearly riffing on Winston and Co.’s work on Aliens, but slightly fleshier and less creepily faceless in that HR Giger way—basically, it looks like exactly the kind of monster Stan Winston Studios would design. Like many monster movies, they try to keep it out of direct shots until they absolutely have to—seemingly not because the suit looks fake, but because that’s what you do in these sorts of things (or maybe because they don’t want to overexpose it before the big finale.) You’ll see limbs come from off-screen, you’ll see it through windows, and in a shot that seems like them showing off, you’ll even see it on the topmost branch of a tall tree, so at least they’re trying to be clever with how they frame their creation. Just to show that this ain’t your typical demonic entity, either, they have a first-person scene where Pumpkinhead picks up a wooden cross in a burned-out church and smashes it—so hardcore! The only thing that sort of works against it as a figure of fear are the growly little gremlin noises it makes, which sound kind of wimpy coming from this seven-foot-tall hellbeast.
On paper, Pumpkinhead seems primarily to be another excuse for Stan Winston Studios to use their skill to make a monster-for-the-sake-of-monster movie, especially with Winston at the helm—so the biggest surprise is that he found something with an actual story to tell, rather than just an exercise in rote violence. It is a rather sombre affair for most of its running time, and actually forgoes a lot of the gore and jump scares that fill space in other horror movies (they do a dog fake-out and a “hiding in a closet” scene, but neither feels as generic as they usually do), so clearly Winston had some artistic ambition for this one, wanting it to be more of a character piece or a meditation on the idea of revenge that also happens to have a cool monster in it. It would have been a lot easier to make something purely mindless and cruel, but Pumpkinhead goes for something else entirely, which is appreciated.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 