We first told you here about NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN, a new Halloween horror short about a demonically possessed jack-o’lantern. Fango will be bringing you the exclusive premiere of PUMPKIN this coming week, and we also visited the set, from which we brought back exclusive photos and comments from the creators.

NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN was directed by BLOOD NIGHT: THE LEGEND OF MARY HATCHET’s Frank Sabatella (pictured in 2nd photo below at left with FX artist Jeremy Selenfriend) for Sideshow Pictures, and he tells us, “What inspired the flick was Halloween itself; we just wanted to make a cool seasonal short for the fans this year. Normally, Sideshow Pictures would produce short content and ID spots for the New York City Horror Film Festival, but this year, due to the untimely passing of the festival’s founder and our good friend Michael Hein, there is no fest. Which totally blows, but in the spirit of the fest and of the season, we still wanted to put something together!”

When Fango stops by the Sideshow facility, there’s a homage to Hein on one wall in the form of a “Wanted” poster, part of the decor in an office that has been turned into a police-station set. Two Halloween-costumed teens, played by a bloody-faced Matt Watson and BLOOD NIGHT’s Samantha Hahn (3rd photo), are trying to convince the cop on duty that there’s a rampaging orange menace on the loose, but he’s having none of it. Meanwhile, in the Sideshow green room (literally—the walls are painted to serve as a greenscreen stage), a large group of young extras are decked out in assorted Halloween costumes (provided by another SWEATSHOP alumnus, John Torrani) awaiting their call to film, while Selenfriend, assisted by Lisa Forst, helps them get their game faces on—and also shows off two different versions of the evil pumpkin and a tub of guts to be employed later (4th and 5th photos).

It’s evident that NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN is going to go way over the top in its terrors, and Sabatella notes, “Anyone who knows me knows what a huge fan I am of the 1980s horrors, and NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN is exactly that, even more so then BLOOD NIGHT. I wanted the camp factor to be really high, and the premise absurd. I wanted it to have an ultra-Halloween atmosphere as well, and figured, what better way to achieve both those objectives than to have a killer jack-o’lantern eating people on Halloween night? Campy, gory, ridiculous—the trifecta!”

He found a kindred spirit in Geoghegan, whose SWEATSHOP script also fondly echoed the fright flicks of the ’80s. “Having previously co-written a feature screenplay with Frank, I felt like we were very much in the same mindset for this project,” says Geoghegan, who scripted PUMPKIN from a story Sabatella cooked up with Michael Gruosso and George Taramas of Dirty Shed Pictures. “We both grew up on trashy, fun horror films that were just as sexy and funny as they were scary. While the concept echoes the outright comedic tone of ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES, I feel the film is far more in line with Brian Trenchard-Smith or Kevin Tenney’s mid-to-late-’80s direct-to-video stuff. The script is played straight, even though the concept is totally hilarious. I felt that if I was going to have a killer pumpkin chomping down on trick-or-treaters, the humor was going to come from deadpan dialogue and the audacious concept itself, not from slapstick.”

One of Geoghegan’s favorite shockers of the era, Tenney’s NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, is explicitly echoed when Fango checks out another part of the Sideshow HQ, where visual FX artist and animator John Moreno is working on PUMPKIN’s opening title sequence (6th photo). He shows Fango a rough animatic of the sequence, in which the malevolent jack-o’lantern rises from a graveyard, temp-scored with the opening theme from DEMONS. It’s pretty atmospheric even in this early form, and promises to be quite eye-catching in its final realized version.

Then it’s time to head outside, into the chilly night, where Sabatella and co. stage a series of horrific pumpkin attacks on the surrounding streets. In one scene, a boy who delights in smashing Halloween decorations gets a big surprise when he tries to take out one particular jack-o’lantern; in another, a whole group of kids flee screaming from a now-huge pumpkin to be digitally inserted later, running past the prone, bloodied bodies of their dead friends. Later, the costumed Watson and Hahn are filmed dashing through the chaos and coming upon a dying, gutted scientist who knows how to stop the menace. (Fango doesn’t catch this actor’s name, but he’s a dead ringer for Richard O’Brien circa SHOCK TREATMENT.)

NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN is shooting close enough to the real Halloween for a few decorations in the neighborhood to be authentic. “What my partners and I didn’t realize when we started was how ambitious this project actually is,” Sabatella says following the wrap on PUMPKIN. “In order to have it out in time for Halloween, we had about two weeks of preproduction and two days and nights to shoot it, and we have three weeks to score it, edit it and everything else that goes into post, including some killer visual effects and animated titles by John Moreno.

“Shooting this thing in two days on practically no budget has been the biggest challenge,” he continues. “My producing partner Frank Mosca and I put together a great crew willing to do anything to get this thing done. And we sure put them through hell! We shot two 20-hour days overnight and back to back. The crew was tired, hungry and bloody, and yet somehow everyone had a blast and we finished strong. The final product is going to look awesome, and we are all a little bit in shock at how high the production value actually is. The cinematography by Stephen Franciosa is really sharp and on point, and we had my longtime collaborator Jeremy Selenfriend doing the practical effects—really, what more could I ask for? I think the fans are going to eat NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN up; it’s like we crammed a creature feature/disaster movie into about 10 minutes of awesome!”

Geoghegan is equally stoked about the project: “Frank is one of the most talented young directors working in independent horror today, and I was overjoyed to have the opportunity to work with him on this project,” he says. “With any luck, it will become an annual tradition—and he’ll keep me along for the ride!”

Keep your eyes on this site for NIGHT OF THE PUMPKIN’s premiere, and learn more about the movie at its Kickstarter page and Sideshow’s Facebook page. 

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features