Pumpkinhead is finally getting remade it seems, according to Entertainment Weekly. Producer Peter Block secured the rights to the project and is seeking out the perfect director to help get his vision made. The original film is, if you can’t tell by the name, an iconic cult horror classic. It also features some of the best practical effects in the genre.
“Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror films of the late ’80s, early ’90s,” says 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.”
He also explains that:
“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.”
The plan is to start shooting early 2017:
“We’re just about to start going out looking for a director for it,” he says. “[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. You get a lot of people who want to be in this genre because they see the commercial opportunities. I’m looking for a director who has a love for the genre and knows how to get those beats for the audience.”
And, as something many fans will be happy to hear, the film will have an emphasis on practical effects:
“I am a big proponent of practical effects,” he enthuses.
“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.”
Hopefully this means we’ll get a respectful, practical effect-using reboot of the original into theaters by late 2017.
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Source: EW