Pumpkinhead Reboot In The Works

The Pumpkinhead franchise is in line to get a high-profile relaunch from one of the executive producers behind Saw.

The 1988 original starred Lance Henriksen as a desperate man out for revenge, who summons a hideous creature to kill a group of teens responsible for the death of his son. The movie earned less than $5 million worldwide, but went on to become a cult classic with a die-hard fan base.

Pumpkinhead would spawn not one but three sequels -- none of which got a theatrical release. Six years after the first, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings went straight to VHS. 2006 and 2007 both gave us sequels on Syfy, subtitled Ashes to Ashes and Blood Feud, respectively.

Now, a new Pumpkinhead is heading into production next year from Saw's Peter Block, who told Entertainment Weekly last night that he's looking for a director to helm the project, which he plans to get a theatrical release.

"Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror films of the late '80s, early '90s," said Block, who told EW that the new film will cover a lot of the same ground as the original, but won't be a straight remake. "[Creature designer] 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."

"I am a big proponent of practical effects," he added, saying he hoped to hold true to Winston's original approach. "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."

The film is expected to start production in early 2017.