Scary Pumpkins

I think Jack O'Lanterns at Halloween aren't at their scariest. They're too fresh and new looking. The more I think about it I should probably carve them at least a week ahead of time as it usually takes a week or more for them to become truly scary. You need to wait for them to become slightly moldy and wizened shadows of their former selves, oozing and wrinkling in the early November weather.

I wanted to take these pictures last weekend, but the pumpkins were not truly scary yet. The weather has been a bit cool over the last two weeks and hasn't been ideal for making this year's pumpkins as scary as last year's pumpkins were in DW's post found here. On clearing away last year's crop of orange mutants, there were some that were more liquid than solid as they were taken to the compost bin.

Here's the slowly collapsing "boo" pumpkin...


The "B" has wrinkled into nothingness and one "O" has fallen out while the lid has actually collapsed into the center.

The Harry Potter pumpkin is somewhat more menacing with a slowly spreading goatee of black mold developing from the inside out. From a purely dental standpoint, he's beginning to look a little less toothy and a lot more gummy...


I figured that the vampire pumpkin would be as moldy as Harry was as they were both from the same place and equally soft when I cut them, but this was not to be. With the softening of the edges on this one, it looks decidedly more smiley than menacing.


The pumpkin in the left foreground does look more menacing than it did, but isn't anywhere near as scary as it could be. The haka pumpkin in the background with the (now) string of a tongue now just looks ridiculous.


The most frightening pumpkin in the whole crop is the one in the right foreground of the photo above. It was given to DS by a friend of mine who lives nearby. This pumpkin arrived looking as it does in the picture - the white marks were not carved by us. They were made by bear claws as the gourd was growing!