Scary Pumpkins

This Halloween, we are all out of little kids at the house, and I’m tired of carving two triangles and what looks like a piece of cantaloupe for a smile in a pumpkin.

I want it to be SCARY.  I love slasher movies and serial killers, fake blood and well done special effects.  When I carved these, I was thinking of what it would be like if the pumpkin were alive.  I kept thinking of Pennywise, stitches and flames when I carved this.  I had lots of great canvas to work with. 

I love this pumpkin gutter for my drill.  It was one of the easiest ways to get the pumpkins ready for carving.

Scary is actually easier for me than classy.  There are a couple rules to scary.

1.  Messy looks good.
2. Everyone has their own definition of scary.  Some are scared of clowns, spiders, darkness, or bugs.  Make something that you think defines scary; don’t worry if someone else doesn’t think so.
3. You don’t need it to be symmetrical.  We are put off by asymmetry, it makes the majority of us uncomfortable.
4. There are no mistakes.  Any strange or errant marks become weird scars for your pumpkin’s face.
5. Lighting makes the pumpkin.  Weird glows, strobes, underlighting, shadows that don’t go away; there are a ton of ways to make your Halloween scarier with lights.

I’m not scared of much.  Tentacles and things with more than eight legs are the creepiest things on the surface of the planet.  I wanted one of my pumpkins to look as though the void were escaping through the top of my pumpkin.  I found a really cool razor knife in the basement.  I started using it to skin the pumpkin.  I envisioned tentacles seeping out of the crack, oozing from beyond.  With the number of tentacles I wanted to do, I couldn’t actually carve them from the pumpkin.  There wouldn’t be enough pumpkin left to put the lid back on.  I removed the skin of the tentacles instead.  Maybe next time, I’ll remove all the skin except the tentacles.

I was hoping to make it glow a little more, so I outlined the tentacles with glow in the dark paint.  Unfortunately, it didn’t end up glowing as much as I’d like.  I think if I use it again I’ll put it under a blacklight.

Half way through carving, my razor snapped.  I found a skin peeler at my mom’s house.  It was easier to use, but the strokes weren’t as smooth as they had been with the razor.  After snapping the metal of the razor though I don’t think that it was safe to keep using it.  I chose not to replace the blade and move on to another tool.

At my candy table, I wanted to scribble all over a pumpkin.  I was searching for just the right phrase or poem, but I felt like most people wouldn’t stick around long enough to read even a few sentences of a poem.  Movie quotes scattered all over this pumpkin really get me in the mood for the holiday.  Some of them just jump out; you hear the actors’ voices in your head.  Although this probably isn’t the scariest pumpkin I could do, it was one of the most fun.

Here are the scariest pumpkins I could come up with this season.  Fire and stitches filled my mind for this pumpkin.  Halloween night, I filled this guy’s mouth with red glow sticks from the inside.  The line of his mouth was just wide enough for the glow stick to shine through.  I loved the effect of the lights, but I just could not get the picture to turn out the same way it looked in reality, so here’s a pic of the finished product sans lights.  This guy looked evil.  His eyes aren’t quite the same, which I think lends him more character and realism.  I think he was one of my favorites.

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