Entertainment Weekly has revealed that Saw executive producer Peter Block has snapped up the rights to the cult horror franchise Pumpkinhead with a view to relaunching the series with a 2017 reboot.
Released in 1988, Pumpkinhead marked the directorial debut of special effects guru Stan Winston and starred Lance Henriksen as a man who summons the demonic Pumpkinhead in order to extract revenge on a group of teenager’s responsible for the death of his son. It was followed by 1994’s direct-to-video sequel Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, and the TV movies 2006’s Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes and 2007’s Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud.
“Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror films of the late ’80s, early ’90s,” states Block. “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. There is a similarity of theme and a similarity of story [with the original]. 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. ”
“We’re just about to start going out looking for a director for it,” he continues. “[We need] somebody who really understands why the first one is terrific, the emotional beats of ‘Is the revenge you seek worse than whatever befell you in the first place?’ But it’s also somebody that wants to embrace what I think audiences really want these days — a really scary, fun thrill-ride…. I’m looking for a director who has a love for the genre and knows how to get those beats for the audience. 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 toknow it came from the Pumpkinhead family lineage.”
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