Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Justin Harding Talk First Horror Movie Role and Sentient Pumpkins In Carved

In Carved, an unlikely group finds themselves trapped in a historical reenactment village on Halloween night alongside a vengeful pumpkin. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with actress Peyton Elizabeth Lee and director Justin Harding about the Hulu horror film.

Harding had been holding onto the idea that became Carved for quite a while. He was able to make it into a short for the Huluween Film Fest before eventually turning it into a feature. “The idea has been in my mind for a long time. About 20 years ago, I worked at an attraction as an exhibit designer. It was the Toronto Zoo. Every year the departments would compete in a pumpkin carving contest that was judged by the guests at the zoo and every single year we won because we were the exhibit designers so we were very creative. It was very competitive this pumpkin carving contest and one year I pitched the idea of a sentient pumpkin carving a real human to create a monster as a display,” he explained. “My boss was like, ‘Um, this is a family attraction. You can't like… we can't do that.’ We ended up making an orangatang instead, but the idea stuck with me. We won that year and we won a pizza party. It was a big deal.”

He continued: “But that idea always lingered, a pumpkin that carves humans. We haven't really seen this in a film before. It seems like an obvious idea, like why isn't there a Halloween movie about a pumpkin that's a monster? So when I was asked to pitch shorts for a Halloween special part of the Huluween Film Festival, they asked me, ‘Do you have any Halloween ideas?’ I was like, ‘Sentient pumpkin that carves humans!’ and that's what spawned. The rest is history.”

Meanwhile, Carved marks Lee’s first horror film. “I've always loved horror movies. I think they're so fun. This is my first horror movie and so it was different in a lot of ways,” she shared. “There's a lot of different acting challenges and we have this pumpkin so there's this other kind of creature that you're in a sense acting with. It was very different, but I had a ton of fun.”

“Getting to work with Justin who just loves horror movies so much and knows so much about them and getting to learn from him and rely on him to connect some of those dots where I had never experienced anything like that or made anything like that was so fun,” Lee continued. “It's just cool to kind of use your creativity in different ways and see how everyone that was a part of the project really got to infuse their own passions and care about the genre into it.”

While horror movies can be terrifying to watch, they’re pretty fun to make! “It's a good point because when you're filming the movie it's never really scary. [We were] doing a lot of night shoots so it's actually a very process driven thing of trying to put the puzzle pieces together as you're shooting it. What I like to do is play music on the set to actually not only make it not scary but to actually make it fun. So when it's three, four in the morning I tried to almost DJ the set with music,” said Harding. “I had a playlist that we would play so anytime the actors would roll into the set there would be a walk song ‘cause we have smoke machines and stuff and there's beams of light coming through. The cast would come in like a parade dancing into the set.”

Harding also added he loved working with their sentient pumpkin puppet. “This thing was brought to life as a puppet so the most memorable, most fun moments were trying to actually puppeteer this thing because it's a big foam latex creature that's hanging off wires,” he shared. “Whenever we were able to capture these moments on camera it was very inspiring and exciting because when it works it's fantastic.”

While there was a ton of Halloween cheer on set, Lee did experience her own scary movie moment. “There was this handprint on the inside of my door. We were filming and staying in this place that was supposedly haunted so there was a moment where it was a little scary for a second, but other than that only fun,” she laughed. “I called my dad. I was like, ‘What do I do?’ He was like, ‘I don't know, wipe it off?’”

Carved is streaming on Hulu.