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As an archetypal monstrous-pumpkin narrative, Justin Harding’s “Carved” reiterates the Halloween tale of a revengeful pumpkin in the hot pursuit of the humans that wronged it. The ceaseless killing makes the film a gore fest in a pumpkin fest. However, the humor never fails to announce its presence from time to time. Keeping alive the narrative is the motley of characters that negotiate with the narrative in ways that become humorous. One can, however, not deny the strand of the standard ‘monster genre’ that underpins the narrative which merits reappraisal.
The article contains spoilers.
Carved (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
A Tale of Mutation and Survival in Cedar Creek
The film is set in 1993. Cedar Creek’s Pioneer Village, trumpeted as Maine’s First Living Museum, is a tourist attraction for its inhabitants who revel in historical reenactments and seasonal amusements. U24 News anchor AJ is gung ho on squeezing out news from the horrific disaster that struck the quaint community a year before– a chemical disaster following a train derailment of a chemical company called CLIONYX. However, General Manager Bill Brown and Head of Grounds, Kevin Turner insist on focusing on their Pumpkin Fest and only that.
Miles away, Clint, the owner of the Corn Wagon, which does its business in Cedar Creek, finds a hideous-looking pumpkin, bubbling with tumors, in their family-owned pumpkin patch. The pumpkin, shriveled and scotched, is most certainly a mutant that was exposed to the toxic waste of the spill. Clint carves a face on it and carries it with him to the village in his wagon.
After the live theatre, the locals back in the village are gearing up for the pumpkin carving contest. Kira, a young resident and the play’s director, and her brother, Trevor, have lost their parents following the nuclear waste cleanup. She is now trying to reassemble the pieces of her life with her boyfriend, Cody.
Can Kira’s Plan Outsmart the Mutant Pumpkin and Save Cedar Creek?
Words spread about the freak pumpkin Clint has brought to the fest. The pumpkin gets the center stage in the festival. As the pumpkin carving contest begins, point-of-view shots reveal that the pumpkin is witnessing the massacre that its own species is facing at the hands of humans. Finally, seeking revenge on the locals responsible for slaughtering its own kind, monstrous pumpkin strikes. The locals are scalped, skinned, and impaled by the vengeful pumpkin. It goes after anybody and everybody who is stored in its memory for mercilessly deriving pleasure out of gutting out the innards of its mates.
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The village theatre crew, including Kira, Cody, and Trevor along with others take shelter in the tool shed. From the shed, they witness the pumpkin going after the others, from Kevin to AJ. It is not too long before it is figured out that the pumpkin has hearing abilities too. So, it makes way for the others in the shed and its tentacles reach out to drag the ones in hiding. At this moment, Kevin, who the others thought to be dead, communicates with Bill through his walkie-talkie.
Kevin, from his safe hiding place at the security office, comes up with the plan of distracting the pumpkin with a walkie-talkie that fell from his hand outside the shed. The group decides to flee by using Cody’s truck but the keys are not with Cody. So, Kira makes a plan to decoy the pumpkin using Kevin as a key point. With Cody’s keys in the staff building, Kira asks Kevin to distract the monster using his five walkies as bait. Meanwhile, Cody can run for the keys and direct the others to the parking lot.
How does the decoy plan go haywire?
However, things go haywire when Kevin switches to the wrong channel and the pumpkin spots him at the security building and goes after him. Meanwhile, Cody loses his keys inside a vent and takes an inordinate amount of time to retrieve them in the dark. The sound operator, Barbara’s presence of mind saves them as she brings in AJ’s camera and uses the panel flash to light up the vent. Unfortunately, the four have to hear the pumpkin squelching its tentacles through the guts of Bill and Kevin.
Only five remain–Kira, Cody, Trevor, Barbara, and a girl called Maddie. However, when they try to escape in the Corn Wagon, Maddie gets left behind and attacked by the pumpkin. As they leave they find that Clint has been in a doped stupor and has been ignorant of the disaster they escaped from. The pumpkin follows them and a huge thud on the ceiling of the wagon announces its accompaniment in their travel. The wagon breaks down in the middle of the road and the pumpkin gets to them. Kira, Cody, and Trevor simply pretend to be dead to deflect the pumpkin. Barbara and Clint, however, have to sacrifice their lives.
Where is the end to the monstrosity?
Kira spots lights in a distant barn and runs there to seek help. Turns out that it is Clint’s family barn. His father appears wielding a gun but is confused to see Kira. Both Kira and Clint’s father get confused to see Clint appearing from the dark. However, it is Clint’s decapitated body that is worn by the pumpkin. Clint’s father aims at the pumpkin but fails to destroy it so the inevitable occurs to him as well. Kira runs for her life and she meets Cody and Trveor halfway.
After a while, the three realize that they have landed in a pumpkin patch and are now surrounded by innumerable mutant baby pumpkins. With the killer pumpkin in hot pursuit, they run with one of its offspring inside the barn. The monster follows and without realizing that the baby is in fact a bait gets sucked into a chaff cutter along with its baby. Kira, Cody, and Trevor shove the monster inside and get drenched by the green fluid that the crusher expels. They realise that in order to put an end to the curse of the monstrous vegetable it is important to exterminate all of its remaining babies.
Carved (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Is there an end to the curse of the revenge-seeking pumpkin?
The next morning, Trevor goes to the patch alone and tries to stomp down one of the babies. However, he gets nearly killed when the equally powerful baby unleashes its tentacles and throttles him. He would have been dead had it not been for the heroic arrival of Maddie in her scooter. Maddie explains that she was never dead, the blood that everyone saw was just her splattering around some iron fluoride and potassium thiocyanate, a herbicide and a pesticide.Kira finally exterminates all the monster babies by placing them all in a row and driving the chaff-cutting tractor over them.
The end however leaves open more anxieties for the town. The extermination seems to be a ruse in the narrative. Some of the monsters have successfully averted death. In the end, a panning shot reveals Clint’s head at the end of a line of carved Halloween pumpkins. Clint’s head is missing eyes, nose, and lips. His face bears the mark of the same carved pattern that is drawn on pumpkins with a knife. This is perhaps the monstrous pumpkin avenging the violent mutilation that it received at first from Clint at the patch. From one of his vacant eye sockets, a tentacled tendril crawls out marking the persevering anxiety that the monster has not lost its foothold after all.
