Awesome Pumpkins

How can you make your Jack-o’-lantern creepier? Well, if you do what Bobby Duke did, you’ll buy a white pumpkin to make a skull inside an orange pumpkin. It’s a fun idea, but after he was done with the build, things went really off the rails for Bobby – so perform this pumpkin surgery at your own risk.

Even on our best Halloween, our pumpkin carving skills rate about a two on sculptor James Hall’s 13-level scale. The Halloween Wars two-time champ sat down with Wired to demonstrate how much more you can do with a Jack-o’-lantern than just saw out some triangular eyes and chunky teeth with a kitchen knife.

These limited-edition tiki mugs feature fantastically creepy sculpts inspired by Halloween III: Season of the Witch. With a snake winding through their ceramic heads, the jack-o’-lantern, skull, and witch look even more awesome stacked for display. Pre-orders start at 12pm CT 10.26.2021 at Mondo, shipping 5.2022.

In 2014, farmer Matt Radach captured time-lapse footage of a pumpkin growing from “seed to scale.” But this is no ordinary squash. This monster was birthed from a seed from a world-record-holding giant pumpkin, and by the time it was done, it weighed in at 1223 pounds. Keep your eyes peeled for a Transformers cameo.

For Halloween 2020, animator Lawrence Becker created a stop-motion short featuring a miniature Will Smith carving a pumpkin with a tiny sword. This behind-the-scenes look at how he made it is just as awesome as the animation itself. Also, his stop-motion Danny Devito Penguin pumpkin would make Tim Burton proud.

Yeah, yeah, we know. Billie Eilish’s megahit Bad Guy has been covered enough times already. But we couldn’t resist posting Pupsi’s version, performed entirely on pumpkins. Enjoy the extended version, complete with pumpkin carving here.

Ray Villafane knows his way around a pumpkin, having carved some of the most incredible and intricate Jack-o-lanterns ever. In this clip from azcentral, we learn a bit more about the artist, and what it is about the orange squash that inspires him. Each fall, his studio cranks out countless pumpkins for displays around the world.

We always assumed that the way they got seeds out of pumpkins was to scoop out the meat for things like canned pumpkin, then separate out the seeds. But from the looks of this video, pumpkins are smashed by machine right out of the patch, simply to extract the seeds. The process seems wasteful, but it’s still interesting to watch.

To celebrate the Halloween season, maker and tinkerer William Osman and his pals decided to see if they could transform a pumpkin into a working hovercraft. They used a vacuum cleaner as its primary source of flotation, and a couple of small drone motors to steer it.

It takes a lot of time to carve a pumpkin and make it look good, so we can only imagine how much time the guys behind Oh My Gourd spent working on this animated short, which required carving of hundreds of designs in order to pull off its stop-motion effect. Pumpkin pie, anyone?

Sculpture_Geek usually works with clay. But his Halloween episode sees him make a portrait of Resident Evil‘s Nemesis out of a pumpkin. He put a lot of effort on his opening sequence, but you can skip to 1:58 if you just want to watch him at work.

If you thought the best way to illuminate the inside of your jack-o-lantern was with a little candle, or maybe an LED tealight, you’d be wrong. PhotonicInduction shows us that a 5000-watt lamp is the way to go if you’ve got the proper power supply lying around.

In all honesty, we we’re pretty cynical about yet another pumpkin spice flavored thing, but Captain Morgan’s latest spiced rum concoction is truly delicious. You’ll want to sip this spirit all the time, not just in the Fall. Great alone, with apple cider, or ginger beer and lime.

While the end result isn’t as neat as the smoking green pumpkins we’ve seen, loading up the orange holiday squash with dangerously volatile thermite is still quite a spectacle, and way cooler than smashing them.

The Crazy Russian Hacker shows off a simple trick which allows the pressure build-up from dry ice to pop out pieces of a pre-cut pumpkin. It’s a silly effect, but a fun Halloween party trick. We’re guessing that a more tightly sealed pumpkin would be much more explosive.

Let’s take Halloween out with a grin by enjoying Nathan Pryor’s Pumpktris, a fully playable version of Tetris in a pumpkin, with 128 LEDs for the display and bonus game controller stem. (Thanks James!)

Most people light up their pumpkins with a little votive candle, but Youtuber DaveHax prefers to fill his with toilet paper and kerosene – resulting in a spectacular, but relatively contained fire show.

A fun and Tim Burton-esque Halloween animation done by Auge de Vries by painstakingly carving 400 individual scenes into candle-lit pumpkins and stitching them together frame-by-frame.

Villafane Studios claims that it’s “home of the most gorgeous pumpkins on the planet” and from what we’ve seen we believe it. Funny, grotesque and scary, these carvings are a real treat to look at.

So you’re a farmer and spent the last year growing a gigantic pumpkin and nobody bought it. What do you do? Drop it on an equally unwanted Pontiac 6000, of course.

If you thought letting kids wield a sharp knife to carve their Jack ‘O Lanterns was dangerous, then take a gander at the Glock .40 caliber carving method to put things in perspective.