Makeup master Stan Winston certainly swung for the fences with his debut feature, introducing the world to a brand new horror icon in the form of Pumpkinhead. The vengeance demon, one of the coolest practically-created movie monsters in the genre’s history, became the star of his very own four-film franchise, but there’s a reason fans only ever really talk about the ’88 original.

Released in 1994, Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings took the franchise into direct-to-video territory in only its second installment, and the subsequent two sequels, Ashes to Ashes and Blood Feud, aired exclusively on Syfy in 2006 and 2007. Needless to say, the series never really got much of a chance to shine, which is a bummer considering the rich mythology laid out by Winston and company.

One of Pumpkinhead‘s four writers, Gary Gerani was, along with Mark Patrick Carducci, the co-creator of the story that became the film – it began its life as 7 Gargoyles of Satan, which Gerani and Carducci wrote together – and it was Gerani who was once upon a time intent on using the mythology as the springboard for a TV series. Titled Tales of Pumpkinhead, the show was pitched to Syfy prior to them making Ashes to Ashes and Blood Feud, and in our exclusive chat with Gerani, we learned a wealth of information about the unmade project – which you won’t find anywhere else on the net.

Gerani’s plan? To create what can only be described as the Pumpkinhead Universe.

“I wrote an extensive TV proposal for Tales of Pumpkinhead, which would have explored the other ‘sin demons’ in what I call the Dark Pantheon,” Gerani told me in a chat I had with him some time ago, which spawned a much more in-depth conversation this week. “It spanned centuries and had a really interesting mythology, which built to a season finale involving an unholy team of [seven] sin demons, with Pumpkinhead leading the pack.”

“Tales of Pumpkinhead was a semi-anthology, but with continuing demon hunter characters connected to the Vatican,” he elaborated in our recent chat. “The Pumpkinhead ‘Demon of Revenge’ stories would alternate with different demon tales (Demon of Greed, Demon of Envy, etc.), and all of these entities were part of the Lovecraftian ‘Dark Pantheon.’ The other demons were completely original, Stan Winston-esque creations. They each had official numbers, based on the high-tech ways the modern Vatican was tracking them. These stories could take place at any time in history, since Pumpkinhead and his ilk have been around for as long as Man has been on Earth.”

Digging into specific episode plots…

“One story offered a Pumpkinhead in ancient Rome; another had a Holocaust survivor sending Pumpkinhead husks through the black market to the offspring of Nazi officers who tortured and killed his parents,” Gerani revealed to us. “Yet another tale dealt with the origin of our witch Haggis, a beautiful woman when she was young. She was portrayed as something of a victim, a seeker of truth hated by the locals and at odds with regressive religious-types. So the drama here was pretty far-ranging.”

When I asked Gerani if Tales of Pumpkinhead was going to directly reference the events of the 1988 Pumpkinhead, he noted that it indeed would, and even recalled that one of the demon hunters was going to be a grown-up version of Bunt, a memorable character from Winston’s film.

So what happened? Why did the show never get off the ground?

“Although my extensive (full season of episode storylines) proposal was well-received [by Syfy], nothing came of it,” Gerani told me, before indicating that some of his ideas, without his approval, found their way into the network’s made-for-TV sequels. “The TV movies they eventually produced were inspired by that idea-heavy, book-like proposal. It was pitched to Brad Krevoy at the Motion Picture Corporation of America, who co-produced those Syfy movies. So there’s no doubt in my mind that Tales of Pumpkinhead was used as a reference source.”

With a feature film reboot of Pumpkinhead currently in the works, I think it’s safe to say that Tales of Pumpkinhead is completely off the table at this point in time, but it’s certainly an idea that seems ripe for potential exploration in the future. Expanding upon the mythology and creating a specific demon tied to each of the seven deadly sins is quite a brilliant concept, and it’s hard not to wish that Gary Gerani had the chance to flesh it out and bring it to the screen. One of those projects that may or may not have worked, and the bummer is that we’ll just never know.

Many thanks to Gary Gerani for graciously speaking with us about his Tales of Pumpkinhead!