[Commissioned by @mr-w-rambles. Pumpkinhead is not a movie I’ve seen, but after doing this research now I want to. It appears to me to be a path not taken in the history of the slasher subgenre of horror movies. By the late 80s, when Pumpkinhead came out, most slasher movies were basically just violent comedies, which expanded to be much of the horror landscape by the 1990s. Pumpkinhead, on the other hand, takes slasher movie staples like the unstoppable killer, the extended stalking sequences, the “deserving” teen victims and the Final Girl and plays them all straight while delving into their subtext. These teen victims are arguably more deserving of death than the usual–vehicular manslaughter is way worse than smoking weed and premarital sex–but the movie’s main point is to stress how self-destructive revenge is. Plus, the monster costume is cool. Although I do wish it looked less like a xenomorph…]
Pumpkinhead CR 11 LE Fey This creature resembles a large
humanoid, painfully gaunt, with projecting bones growing from its shoulders and
ankles. It walks on its toes, and its hands and feet are large and tipped with
claws. Its head is swollen and elongated, like a rotting gourd, and it has blank
eyes and sharp canine teeth. The thing has a long tail, ending in a barbed
blade.
A pumpkinhead is a fey spirit of vengeance, called from the First World
in order to exact bloody retribution for wrongdoings. Unlike many other
extraplanar creatures, a pumpkinhead wants to be called to the Material Plane,
for it enjoys its violent work. A pumpkinhead seeds the Material Plane with
corpse shells, deformed and shrunken mummies that are buried in pumpkin
patches, moors and the convergent points of ley lines. A pumpkinhead can be
called to inhabit one of its shells by as little as a few drops of blood, a few
magic words and genuine hatred in a mortal heart. A pumpkinhead may be called to
avenge any crime or slight, but a murder or accidental death is the most
common.
Although the mortal decides the crime to be avenged, the pumpkinhead
determines who is to pay for it with death, a choice that often includes
extensive collateral damage. It can magically sense the locations of its
targets of ire, and will stalk them across continents if it has to. A
pumpkinhead enjoys inflicting drawn out and sadistic tortures rather than
simply a quick death, and often uses the corpses of its victims as props to
intimidate its next targets. Although their natural weapons are deadly enough,
pumpkinheads enjoy using improvised weapons, up to and including beating one
victim with another.
The pumpkinhead is linked to the creature who summoned it—every time
the pumpkinhead kills, the summoner receives a supernatural echo of the victim’s
agony. A pumpkinhead’s link to its summoner runs two ways. If the summoner is
killed, the pumpkinhead is sent back to the First World, and the summoner’s
body becomes a new corpse shell for a future pumpkinhead to inhabit. If a
pumpkinhead succeeds in killing all of its targets, it breaks the link to its
summoner and becomes a free agent. They still act as murderous vigilantes in
this case, but their attacks are less focused and more random, and they have
lost a powerful weakness.
A pumpkinhead is large for a Medium-sized creature, about seven feet
tall and three hundred pounds.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
