It’s spooky season and that means it’s time for horror loving folks among us to find appropriately spooky things to watch. Maybe that’s just flipping on AMC and seeing what marathon FearFest has to offer us this year. Perhaps that’s watching an old favorite from a beloved franchise, such as Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. For those who are looking to add something new to the rotation this year, director Bryan M. Ferguson’s short Pumpkin Guts is ripe for the taking, particularly for those who are feeling nostalgic for ‘80s slashers and/or creature features. You can check out the short in its entirety for yourself below.
Ferguson’s short recently premiered at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin Texas, while also screening at Beyond Fest as part of the festival’s shorts lineup. The response has been very positive thus far, and it’s not hard to see why. The filmmaker personally describes it as After Hours but set on Halloween night, though he also says it’s best to go into it as blindly as possible. But one should watch it with the knowledge that it was produced for a mere $800, which is downright astonishing given its production value.
“I was near penniless when we made this,” Ferguson tells us. “2023 was pretty much a year of incessant rejection, music video jobs were drying up, my wife fell seriously ill and we had to move out of our home. We were in a really awful place. I'm often at my lowest when I'm not making something, so I'm usually climbing the walls or clawing my face off if I'm sitting with a head full of ideas and feeling there's no way to execute them.”
The film is dripping with peak ‘80s era nostalgia, with a synth-heavy, Carpenter-seque score. It feels a bit like Halloween III: Season of the Witch (and not just because of the pumpkin), with the “Pumpkin Pincher” is the villain here. The film takes place in 1987 and centers on a poor woman who is asked to carry out a terrible task when an ominous object is place on her doorstep. Yes, it involves a pumpkin. It plays out well on its own, but clearly sets the stage for a larger exploration of this universe.
“I had initially pitched the short to 20th Century for their Bite Size Halloween season,” Ferguson explained. “I think they thought I was crazy and the idea was looney tunes, so I put the script and treatment aside and thought it would never see the light of day but the idea stuck with me, it's something I had never seen before and just fell right in my wheelhouse of films I love to watch – what if we made a night gone bad, high stress levels and have it set on Halloween.
Despite the hardship of having to put together an ambitious short with essentially no money at a time of personal turmoil, it harkened back to Ferguson’s early days of filmmaking. While he had secured funding for several other shorts in the past, this situation forced him to go back to his earlier days as a young, hungry director.
“I think I started to forget my roots, where the first 10 years of my career was spent wearing 17 different crew hats and killing myself as a one man production army. I thought fuck it, what have I got to lose at this point. I started selling old cell phones and camera equipment to scrape together anything that I could to make this happen, I rinsed every favour I could to get this thing going.”
The production was, as one might expect, a bit of a nightmare. Crew members had to drop out in favor of gigs that actually paid money. So, Ferguson had to shoulder a lot of the responsibility himself. When it came to the actual shoot, he was working with a dedicated skeleton crew.
“Production was great but incredibly difficult, people tell you never do nights and never work with animals or kids. We did all of that,” Ferguson said knowingly. “Six long, hot as hell nights, a skeleton crew of 5 people, $800 cash and a fuck ton of hard graft. We were like a motley crew pulling a graveyard shift on something wild while the city slept. It was exhausting but we pulled it off.”
The score for Pumpkin Guts, in particular, is a highlight. It was composed by Luis Vasquez (aka The Soft Moon), did the score for the film for free. Sadly, his involvement cast a shadow over the long, difficult post-production process as he unexpectedly passed away in January.
Ferguson described it as a “massive blow,” one and ultimately caused the film's post-production to hit a hiatus for months. “It felt strange working on it without him,” the filmmaker explained. But it was emblematic of the journey making this short.
“There was not one easy thing – I often thought the fucking film was cursed. I've had things go wrong in the past on shoots but this felt like everything and anything was trying to prevent the film from existing which I guess kinda fuels me as a filmmaker.”
As for the future, much like David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out or Damien Leone’s Terrifier, this seems like the next horror short that will make the jump to a feature-length film. “A feature is most definitely happening through hell or high water,” Ferguson teased. “With the short having some much traction and interest, I really feel we'll be seeing a Pumpkin Guts feature slithering into theatres sooner rather than later.”
What advice would Ferguson give to other budding filmmakers? Perseverance and a thick skin. “Rejection comes thick and fast almost 80-90% of the time and no one else is going to break themselves to get your film made,” he says. “You have to really want this to make it work. If you're not willing to give everything down to your bone marrow to get your film made then you're in the wrong field.”
“It feels great to pull everyone together and make something but making something with absolutely nothing,” Ferguson concludes. “For people to really respond to it and have it screen at legendary festivals makes it worth all the broken bones suffered to get here.”
Watch Pumpkin Guts in its entirety below.
