Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
Pumpkinhead
Scored from 202 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
After his young son is accidentally killed by a group of vacationing city teenagers, a grieving backwoods farmer named Ed Harley seeks out an old mountain witch to summon a terrifying demon of vengeance called Pumpkinhead. As the creature begins hunting down the teens one by one, Harley discovers a horrifying psychic bond with the monster and must confront the true cost of his revenge.
Released in 1988, Pumpkinhead is a fantasy and horror film.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 720 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 202 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 204 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Pumpkinhead lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 202.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
