ArkaEvren

FILM · 1988 · USA

Pumpkinhead

23 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026

23 Interesting Facts About Pumpkinhead

Interesting Facts (17)

  1. #001

    Lance Henriksen had false teeth made to give himself a more rural look, and he gathered his own props and wardrobe, including a World War II-era pump shotgun, the hat he wears throughout and the silver dollars he gives Haggis.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  2. #002

    Lance Henriksen collected all the silver dollars himself, scouring several pawn shops. He says most of them fell through the floorboards of Haggis's shack and may still be lying there.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  3. #003

    Florence Schauffler's Haggis costume weighed about 65 pounds.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  4. #004

    Producers at DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) first sent the script to Stan Winston hoping to hire his studio to build the Pumpkinhead demon, but Winston immediately saw it as the perfect film for his directing debut: "It was a small film, I thought I could handle it as a director, and I felt I had a lot to bring to the story. So I told the producers, 'Yes, I'll do the creature, but only if I can direct the film.'"

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  5. #005

    Left orphaned when De Laurentiis Entertainment Group went bankrupt, the film finally got a patchy release after United Artists bought it, testing it under the alternate title Vengeance - The Demon.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  6. #006

    Pumpkinhead doesn't actually look like a pumpkin; the name comes from the fact that summoning it means digging up a corpse buried in a pumpkin patch.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  7. #007

    The rhyme Bunt and his brothers use to scare their little brother outside the store is Ed Justin's original poem "Pumpkinhead," which inspired the story.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  8. #008

    An opening scene introducing the town's young adults at a diner was shot but cut from the final film.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  9. #009

    The FX team built the monster, but Stan Winston was so busy directing that he couldn't supervise their work directly.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  10. #010

    Stan Winston and the producers were clear that they didn't want a creature with an actual pumpkin for a head.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  11. #011

    Watching the finished film, Shane Mahan was struck by how the witch looks in her cabin: "In the first shot her face is away from the camera and turned toward the fire. That backlights her. She has a shapeless skull, shapeless ears and wispy hair. It really sets the mood and the light is quite harsh. So I thought all of that was fun. And I was very pleased with it."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  12. #012

    Legendary "That Guy" Buck Flower once called working with Stan Winston on this film a "pleasant experience." He played Mr. Wallace, a change from his usual drunks and bums.

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  13. #013

    Once in makeup, Florence Schauffler stayed in character even between takes and answered only to Haggis. "She was never Florence. She was always the witch. I never got a giggle out of her. After a while I gave up," Mahan laughed. "But she was wonderful."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  14. #014

    Shane Mahan remembers Florence struggling a bit to find a prop when Ed Harley brings the body to Haggis for the ritual: "You see her standing, gesturing with her hand. Because she had a lens in her eye, she was looking for something on the table and trying to reach it, but it looked as if she were waving her hands, doing mystical things, conjuring something. But that was because of the big contact lens in her eye."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  15. #015

    Shane Mahan drew on old paintings, engravings and fairy tales for Haggis's design: "The thing about the witch in horror films is that she's a kind of creature. She resembles a zombie, a vampire or a werewolf. The witch has a lot of history in terms of artwork going back centuries." He was also inspired by Roman Polanski's Macbeth: "The film opens with three witches on the beach. There was one in particular, a blind woman. She had no eyes at all. But overall the feeling she gave was very real. You also look at old people who have had really hard lives, because their faces are just shadowed with the marks of all kinds of things, so you combine fantasy with reality and then create your own character. I didn't want her to be cartoonish, I didn't want the big witch nose and wart."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  16. #016

    For Haggis's deformed eye, they had a ceramic contact lens made. Shane Mahan explained: "It was a very big eye. I mean, it was somewhat bulging. It was an idea I took from the Christopher Lee Frankenstein lens, because the lens he wore was bigger than his real eye. So it made his eye look bigger. And I thought that was a fun thing. Having a bad eye is almost a cliché but it's cool. It's nicely creepy. I did a lot of research into what kinds of disorders could lead to blindness, and she had a star in the eye, which meant the eye was cloudy, but there was another fluid that formed an almost star-shaped haze over the cloudy iris, and I thought that was a bit mystical and strange. So, a big sclera with a hazel-colored star pattern."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  17. #017

    Shane Mahan, who made nine sets of prosthetics for Haggis, explained why he painted them in advance: "If they're going to shoot for six or seven days, give yourself a few extras in case you have to make up for it and for some reason they can't get to it or they extend a scene. I just wanted everything ready."

    INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

    ShareReport

Production Story (1)

  1. #018

    Since Stan Winston was busy developing the story, he handed the design reins to Alec Gillis, Shane Mahan, John Rosengrant and Tom Woodruff, Jr., who also wore the Pumpkinhead suit. Winston's creature experience kept the effects from overrunning the tight $3 million budget.

    PRODUCTION STORY · SOURCED

    ShareReport

Behind the Scenes (4)

  1. #019

    Mushroom, the canine actor, did his own stunts, just as he had in Gremlins four years earlier.

    BEHIND THE SCENES · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  2. #020

    The studio's artists and technicians built a suit and head from a sculpture, worn on set by Pumpkinhead performer Tom Woodruff Jr. To keep the suit from wearing out, Woodruff was glued into it at the start of each shooting day and stayed inside the foam rubber for up to eight hours at a stretch.

    BEHIND THE SCENES · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  3. #021

    Once Florence Schauffler was cast, Shane Mahan designed Haggis in layers: "I took photographs and made overlays to design her look. In those days we used to stack clear sheets on top of each other. So first you get the prosthetic makeup layer, then the wig layer, then the costume layer, and that's how it was done."

    BEHIND THE SCENES · SOURCED

    ShareReport
  4. #022

    Shane Mahan described working with Florence Schauffler to get the most out of the elaborate makeup glued to her face: "I used examples for her like: 'It's like the Salieri makeup in Amadeus, F. Murray Abraham's makeup (created by Oscar winner Dick Smith). That makeup consists of sponge, wig and paint. But he is extraordinarily impressive.' She was great about it. She wanted to be very impressive."

    BEHIND THE SCENES · SOURCED

    ShareReport

Characters & Cast (1)

  1. #023

    The scene that made Lance Henriksen want the part was the dead Billy sitting up and asking his father what he's doing.

    CHARACTERS & CAST · SOURCED

    ShareReport

Continue through the archive

Sources & editorial notes

Reference databases

  • IMDb IMDb title page (trivia)

Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work