This review by the Guardian covers RL Stine’s Pumpkinhead, a Netflix horror film for children adapted from a 1999 short story by the Goosebumps author. Directed by Jem Garrard, the film borrows heavily from The Wicker Man, Stephen King and Tim Burton as it follows a New York family settling in the eerie farming town of Redhaven, but the reviewer finds it too derivative and reliant on familiar plot devices to carve out its own identity, apart from a late twist.

The plot centres on Sam (Bean Reid), who moves to Redhaven with his mother and older brother Finn, and discovers that local farmer Palmer (Kevin McNulty) has mysteriously revived the town's blighted fields. After Sam steals Palmer's prize pumpkin, Finn becomes magically trapped inside it and forgotten by the adults, leaving Sam until midnight on Halloween to break the curse. The reviewer praises the child performers and a suitably creepy scarecrow and pumpkin, but criticises the Scooby-Doo-style sleuthing and McNulty's underwhelming villain, while noting that the film's genuinely unsettling final twist, involving psychological rather than physical horror, arrives too late to redeem the overall experience.