Wicked Horror has just learned that Saw executive producer Peter Block has snatched up the remake rights to Pumpkinhead. According to EW, he is currently in search of a director to helm the redux. Block has plans to produce the project and expects it to go into production next year. He says that the goal is to release the project theatrically. Everything Block says leads me to believe that he is remaking it for the right reasons and wants to cater it to fans of the franchise.
“Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror films of the late ’80s, early ’90s,” Block told the outlet. “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.”
As for how closely it will stick to the original, Block says: “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.”
Fans of practical effects have cause to rejoice as Block plans to employ the use of practical FX. “I am a big proponent of practical effects,” the producer told EW. “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.”
The original film (directed by Stan Winston) tells the story of a grieving father who sets out to take revenge on the teenagers who killed his son by unleashing an ancient demon.
