Minka Kelly’s The Pumpkin Karver Death Explained

How does Minka Kelly’s character die in The Pumpkin Karver? As the spookiest time of the year, it’s no surprise so many horror directors use Halloween as a setting for their movies. From Night Of The Demons or Dark Night Of The Scarecrow to Trick ‘R Treat and John Carpenter’s Halloween, the holiday has inspired some great horror movies. On the flip-side, however, Halloween has also spawned some pretty terrible films too like The Clown Murders, Jack-O and Hellions. The Pumpkin Karver, unfortunately, falls into the latter category of not-so-good Halloween movies.

Directed by actor and filmmaker Robert Mann, the 2006 movie follows a brother and sister duo – Jonathan (Michael Zara) and Lynn (former wrestler Amy Weber) – who have a rather traumatic history with the holiday. As the opening scenes of the slasher horror movie The Pumpkin Karver explain, Jonathan accidentally stabbed Lynn’s boyfriend Alec (David J. Wright) to death one Halloween night when the latter tried to pull off a badly thought-out prank on his sister.

Fast-forward one year and The Pumpkin Karver finds the siblings living in a new town and trying to start over after Jonathan was cleared of any criminal responsibility. Against better judgment – considering their history with the holiday – Jonathan and Lynn decide to attend a Halloween party being held at a rural pumpkin patch where they and fellow party-goers are inevitably picked off by a killer who dons a costume suspiciously similar to the one Alec was wearing the night he died and has a nasty habit of carving his victim’s faces like they were pumpkins. Horror movie fans and critics didn’t really take to The Pumpkin Karver despite the movie offering a few gory scenes of note – one of which features the death of Minka Kelly’s character Tammy.

Nice girl Tammy is Lynn’s friend and Jonathan’s love interest, but those plot points don’t save her from dying a gruesome death in The Pumpkin Karver. After slaying most of the party-goers, the movie’s killer turns his attention to poor Tammy. She puts up a good fight, smacking the killer with a plank of wood and battling her way through a barbed-wire fence to escape. Soon enough, the killer catches up with Charlie’s Angels 2011 star Minka Kelly’s character in a barn where she gets ensnared in a bear trap and is fatally stabbed in the chest. Adding insult to injury, the killer carves up Tammy’s face and sticks a candle in her mouth before staging her body in a car for her pal Lynn to find.

What’s perhaps even more disturbing than Minka Kelly’s death in The Pumpkin Karver is the fact the slasher horror could get a sequel. Back in 2014 director Robert Mann mentioned during an interview with Humanitarian Radio that he intended to make a follow-up film, but there haven’t been any concrete updates on the horror movie sequel since. That probably means plans for The Pumpkin Karver sequel have been abandoned.