Scotland on Screen: Bryan M. Ferguson on Pumpkin Guts

Bryan M. Ferguson's latest short film is Pumpkin Guts, a stylish and hugely imaginative blend of 80s slasher movie and creature feature, shot in Glasgow's Southside for £800

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 13 Jan 2025
  • Pumpkin Guts

Of all the talented young filmmakers working on the Scottish short film scene, the most visually distinctive might be Bryan M. Ferguson. His early work is distinguished by bold acid colours and startling framing, a fashion scout’s eye for casting performers with great faces and a fondness for a music promo aesthetic that he has put to use in a string of brilliant videos for the likes of Garbage, Ladytron, and Arab Strap​​. His style has become even more dynamic and gnarly with his recent micro-horrors Satanic Panic ‘87 and Earworm, commissioned by Channel 4 and Adult Swim respectively. 

On those professionally-funded shorts, Ferguson’s visual invention really lets rip. What most impressive about his latest short, Pumpkin Guts, however, is that despite being self-financed (the budget was in the region of £800), it still brims with the same cinematic virtuosity. This is Ferguson in pure 80s throwback mode, complete with a delicious John Carpenter-esque score by The Soft Moon’s Luis Vasquez, as we follow a babysitter with a frizzy perm and NHS specs as she’s terrorised by the Pumpkin Pincher. Part autumnal fruit, part folk horror nightmare, you better do the Pumpkin Pincher’s bidding or you’ll end up like the other teens in town whose faces are now plastered on the side of milk cartons.

We caught up with Ferguson to discuss Pumpkin Guts, its pitch-perfect 80s aesthetic, and his future plans.

The Skinny: I know you’ve had a rough couple of years, hence no films from you since 2022’s Earworm. It’s unusual for you to have such a long gap between projects – can you fill me in on what’s been happening in your life?

2023 was just an absolute bastard of a year. My wife took ill and was in the ICU (thankfully she’s all good now), every single music video gig I wrangled fell through, funding opportunities would be rejected. We were pretty skint and had to move out of our place – our whole year was in flux. During all that I had spent 2022 and 2023 trying to get a feature financed. It’s called Dysphonia, and I’m absolutely dying to make it, but it’s one of those ones where everyone seems to love it but no one is willing to take the risk to actually foot the bill. I also started developing another two features with the producers of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor, which will be brilliant if we can somehow convince the money people to take a chance.

So I was writing a lot, getting rejected more than usual and our financial situation was becoming a problem. It just started to get to a point where I was climbing the walls. I was sick of everything and tired of being told “naw” for all the hard work of developing ideas and writing, just for someone to tell me “We’d love to but no”. So I decided to just fucking go back to my roots and use the old “beg, borrow and steal” method.

I think I got to a point in my career where I felt that I had done my time running and gunning when I did all my old gonzo shorts but I thought fuck it, I need to do something. So my wife and I just started selling old mobile phones and camera equipment and asking for favours left and right from talented mates. It was absolutely exhausting but it felt great to be making something again that wasn’t just a written document sitting in an inbox for someone to eventually read and tell me I couldn’t do it.

Where did the idea of Pumpkin Guts come from?

I came up with the idea while walking my dog at night around Halloween time in 2020. I came back from the walk and tried to explain it to my wife. It didn’t make much sense because it was only half-baked and I didn’t have the lore down yet. So I let it gestate a bit and then an opportunity came up where I got to pitch it to 20th Century the following year. They had a thing called Bite Size Halloween where they’d commission some horror shorts that they’d premiere in the States on Hulu with quite hefty budgets.

I pitched it over Zoom to a sea of unimpressed faces; I wasn’t sure if they couldn't understand my accent or they just thought I was a nutcase. 20th Century is owned by Disney, so they basically flatout told me that it’s not Disney-friendly and it wasn’t modern enough, which is fair enough. I put it aside to work on other stuff but it always stuck in my head. So when 2023 started kicking my arse, I decided, fuck it, I want to make that and show that it can be done. My whole career sometimes feels like it was driven by spite.

Pumpkin Guts is paying tribute to a number of horror classics. Halloween is an obvious one but the 80s aesthetic calls to mind loads of other great movies too, and the pass-it-on style monster of the Pumpkin Pincher reminded me of the premise of things like Ringu and It Follows. Could you talk me through some of your influences?

I’ve always been a fan of “pass-it-on” style horror – films that build their own worlds, have their own rules and lore. I really wanted to build my own. I was influenced by all of the sort of films you’d expect because I wanted the film to feel familiar but then fuck with the audience when they realise this is something completely different. I wanted the film to feel fresh but lived in, with an authentic concept that could have been made in the 80s with a modern spin.

The film is a love letter to the horror films everyone loves, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead 2 with some Ringu and It Follows. But essentially what I set out to do was shove Adventures in Babysitting, After Hours and The Thing into a blender then season it with Halloween and Scream. A slasher film that’s fused with a creature feature.

The 1987 setting gives the film a very distinct feel. I also love how the characters are super Scottish but the aesthetic suggests US suburbia. What atmosphere you were trying to create?

That's something that seems to creep up in my work a lot. I’m a massively proud Scot but I feel my artistic sensibilities and aesthetics bleed into Americana – feels more like a “movie” to me. I also love the challenge of trying to figure out how to achieve making it look different rather than shrugging and settling for what’s down the street.

I’m always trying to find a balance of how I can make my work not typically Scottish: I want to show the world we as a country have more to give, more outsider shit and not just the tired Scottish archetypes that filmmakers are often forced to shoehorn into their works. It feels like we’re stagnant. We as a country have been pigeonholed long enough and I want to be some small part in showing that we can do fucking interesting things that don’t involve the bullshit stereotypes.

It’s also just exciting to build worlds and fuck with the audience's perception of setting. There’s an uncanny valley vibe when you have Scottish accents being spat out in what seemingly appears like a US suburb when really it’s just cleverly shooting Pollokshields and Govanhill in the southside of Glasgow. I don’t think the US audiences at Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest [the festivals Pumpkin Guts has played in the States so far] were expecting the Scottish characters either.

The 80s look of the film is pretty convincing, which is all the more impressive given that the film’s budget was only 800 quid. How did you pull that off with so little money?

I’ve made so many period-set shorts now that I think I’ve cracked how to do it successfully with very little. What was really important was to have the film shot anamorphic. MTP/Randan Productions really liked the script and I have a history with the company – they were so gracious and allowed us to use their equipment, which was insane, because they had these old anamorphic lenses that would not only give us the look of an 80s film but great texture to the visuals.

I was also the production designer and my wife was the art director – so we carefully curated what was going to be seen in each scene. I was able to grab a few 70s/80s bits and pieces from Etsy and eBay and got cheap hero wardrobe from Depop with a little favour from a stylist friend that I worked with previously. Then we actually asked for some help on Instagram and were fortunate enough to scrape together another 50 or so quid to nab some retro items from prop houses on the cheap. It’s about being obsessive and resourceful but smart about what’s actually needed to build the world. All the Halloween shit I already owned.

The film also features some ear mutilation, which has become a running theme in your films. What’s your deal with ears?

Fuck ears. Ears are for suckers. Joking aside, I’ve no idea why I always choose ears. I always want to choose something that someone can viscerally feel. No one would be able to know what a decapitation would feel like but we all have some semblance of what having your ear mutilated would feel like.

You've dedicate Pumpkin Guts to Luis Vasquez, the film's composer, who tragically died back in January while the film was in post-production. The music Luis created is fantastic. Can you talk about your collaboration with Luis? What was your pitch to him in terms of the sound you were after and what did you make of his end product?

Losing Luis was a huge blow, I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news because we had literally just spoken the night before he died. We started talking way back during the pandemic. I was a fan of The Soft Moon for years before. I’d listen to his music on my miserable commute to work for years. When I started hustling to do music videos, I just reached out and shared my work with him and he loved it. We shared a similar aesthetic and he was a horror film nut like me, so we shared a great knowledge of genre stuff.

I ended up doing a music video for The Soft Moon for his single Monster in 2022 (literally a week after completing Earworm for Adult Swim) and from then on we became fast friends. He had always wanted to score films and when I started to prep Pumpkin Guts, I figured he’d be great because his last album had a really great melding of old and new sounds that would fit the tone of what I was trying to do visually and narratively with the film. I just messaged him and asked if he had the time and if he’d be able to work on it as a favour. He immediately got excited, especially after reading the script. He was so encouraging. I feel like his confidence in the project really spurred me on to make something greater.

I told him, I really wanted a familiar but really unique sound for the film. I sent him so many fucking references, Charles Bernstein’s synth score for A Nightmare on Elm Street, John Carpenter/Alan Howarth’s Halloween III score, John Carpenter’s Halloween (2018) score, Johann Johansson’s Mandy score, Rob’s score for the Maniac remake, Disasterpeace’s It Follows score. What was great was he showed me that he already had most of those scores in his record collection. So I would update him through prep and shoot and send him the very first rough cuts around October 2023 and we’d discuss the film and it’s sound pretty much every single day up until his death. It was not a normal day if we hadn’t sent several voice notes to each other coming up with new ideas or him playing demos of the Pumpkin Guts theme over the phone. He’d send over countless versions and I’d give my notes on it and he’d go away and tweak something and then what he tweaked would make me recut scenes to fit the music even better. We immediately just complimented each others work. We were literally living in a Pumpkin Guts bubble for months fine-tuning it.

We had a lot of plans for future projects. I genuinely felt like we were going to collaborate on everything from then on. His work on the film is amazing. It pains me to know we’ll never talk again, I miss him.

You said in your interview with Fangoria that a Pumpkin Guts feature was in the works. Can you tell us more?

Very much full steam ahead on that at the moment. It was always going to be just a short, though I had ideas of where it could go and how the world could be expanded so the producers at Restless Native Studios and the VP at Shudder convinced me to expand it. I’ve written the script and we’re currently seeking finance and using the short film and its success (Variety included it in its Best Horror list in December) as a proof of concept. We figured the short was made with £800, if we could scrape a little more together we could pull off a feature version.

The script has turned out to be After Hours set on Halloween night with themes of alienation, coming-of-age and teen rebellion with an acerbic sense of humour akin to Heathers. It’s going to be pretty fucking wild – fingers well and truly crossed that this thing gets made. I’d like to make a feature film before I’m 40 (which isn’t too far off now).


Filmography (selected): Earworm (2022), Red Room (2021), Insecticide (2020), Satanic Panic '87 (2019), Toxic Haircut (2018), Umbilical Glue (2017), Blockhead (2017), Rubber Guillotine (2016), Flamingo (2016), Caustic Gulp (2015), The Misbehaviour of Polly Paper Cut (2013), Sockets (2012)


Pumpkin Guts gets its UK premiere at London Short Film Festival, 24 Jan

http://bryanmferguson.co.uk