The opening scene, showing a man being attacked by the eponymous demon, oozes paranoia. The initial shot of him running through the woods makes for an effective jumpscare, as well.
Haggis, the old lady who helps Harley summon the beast. With her disturbing appearance, creepy voice, and extensive knowledge of Pumpkinhead and the process behind summoning him, it can be easy to wonder if she's actually human at all.
Pumpkinhead himself, holy hell. When the man who gave us the T-800, the Xenomorph Queen, and the Velociraptors is given free range to work on a monster movie, you can bet on some utterly nightmarish effects, and boy howdy, did he not disappoint.
Theres a sound effect playing whenever Pumpkinhead approaches, a hissing, chittering noise that is like high tension wires rattling in a high wind. You can hear it announcing his attack in the opening scene before his first victim is killed as well as his "awakening". Hell Is That Noise indeed.
Pumpkinhead's attacks are this as well. Unlike other, similar horror movies from around the time this was made, most of the deaths take place offscreen, and we are left to fill in the blanks with our imagination. One of the few exceptions is Joel, and good Lord, is his death a brutal one. We are initially led to believe that he will suffer a simple shotgun blast to the gut. By no means lovely, but it is still rather tame by the standards of the horror genre. But Pumpkinhead being his usual, sadistic self, the scene instead goes in another direction by having him actually impale Joel through the belly with the barrel of the shotgun and lift him up to give everyone a good view of what's happening. Ouch.
Even while we don't see much of the kills it's clear Pumpkinhead has a sadistic streak. Most of his kills are unnecessarily protracted, it's readily apparent that he could kill nearly any of his victims the second they're within reaching distance, but he usually causes slow, painful deaths. Haggis lampshades this, sarcastically asking if Ed Harley thought that the unholy force of wrath he had summoned would be "neat and clean and painless"?
After Ed Harley has called up the demon to avenge his young son's death, he's driving with the boy's body wrapped up on the front seat of his truck. Suddenly, Billy - complete with the wounds he'd suffered - sits up and quietly asks "What'd you do, daddy?"
One very subtle and yet unsettling detail: Every scene the monster's in, it has a slightly different face until, at last, it has Harley's.
The fact that defeating Pumpkinhead requires Harley to kill himself. Already unpleasant, but it gets worse when Harley (and, by extension, Pumpkinhead) is revealed to still be alive after his initial self-inflicted gunshot, and is briefly left bleeding out on the ground.
