Rotting Pumpkins

Where do good pumpkins go when they die?

Well, nowhere really as they were pretty much dead when you picked them. All they can do now is rot. But at least they can do so gloriously as with these three messy fellows from my front porch.

I’d actually only carved the one pumpkin some time ago and posted it here at the time but with two other pumpkins gutted and waiting to be carved the holiday got away from me and they never got their proper faces. I was about to toss these nasty rotters in the trash when I suddenly thought, hang on! That rot looks like pretty great zombie make up.

Well, nasty as it may sound I decided to go ahead and carve away even though they are pretty nasty. Have a look at the results!

This pumpkin showed the least amount of decay and it was still pretty firm though mold had started growing on the inside. I quickly discovered that it was mostly rotting from the bottom up. So, I carved him a face, cut his face off, and then stapled his face back on. GRUESOME!

This was the most far-gone of the three and just touching it with an old butter nice allowed the skin to give way making it super easy to carve. Honestly, I think it’s the best looking of the bunch!

And this poor fellow was the one I had actually carved a few weeks ago. Originally the egg was painted like a bulging eye and there was a fork sticking out of the stem on top as if it had been gouged int he eye. That big gaping maw in the middle is it’s mouth but it sort of looks like an old guy with no teeth! I finally decided to crack the rotten egg and let the gooey innards leak all over.

And so here they are, my three friendly, ghastly, wonderfully-rotted pumpkins. They won’t be around much longer but it’s been fun watching them slowly fall apart.

Zombie Pumpkins

Carving a Jack O’Lantern is one of my favorite Halloween traditions. Not just because it’s fun to do but because of how much creativity it allows for. There is so much we can do with a thing as simple as a pumpkin.

Casting about online I picked out a few of my favorite zombie pumpkins!

This is a fun simple pumpkin that says, evil a bit more than it says zombie. The face is a bit too small for the head but what I love is the use of the seeds and especially the worms. Candy worms are a great way to spice up any halloween pumpkin.

Here again I love the use of the seeds from inside the pumpkin. What this gruesome ghoul has going for it is a great carving, (that couldn’t have been easy) and the use of the clever still stuck in the yea dog the ghoul. Like the worms it breaks away from being just  a pumpkin to being more sculptural.

This “Day of the Dead” style pumpkin rocks for breaking with the tradition of simply carving a face and gives us  a powerful image of the zombie horde lurching its way towards us. 

Giant zombie pumpkin sculpture by Ray Villafane.

I don’t know if it’s possible to top this bad ass sculptural adventure. I’ve posted a link to more photos of this amazing carving above and can’t say how incredibly impressed I am with it. It mixes the use of broken pumpkins, great carving, and gross out effects with incredible creativity and artistry. There are very few of us who are ever going to go this far with our pumpkins.

And finally this last entry is my own creation. This pumpkin zombie with a fork in his eye is my pumpkin from this year. I wasn’t able to get a great shot of it lit up but I’ve used an egg for one eye, great to break and watch oooooozing down. I had fun with the fork and the seeds in the mouth though they went nasty pretty quick so they aren’t in this photo.

What are your favorite pumpkins? Zombie or not, let’s see what you’ve got!