New Video! Pumpkinhead | Anatomy of a Franchise

Hello all, hope you are doing well and having a fun spooky season. I also hope you enjoy this new video on the Pumpkinhead Franchise. I enjoyed not knowing what this video would be about, and definitely plan on having some more be up to a vote like this again in the future, I thought that was a fun idea. This video will not go live on the channel for a little while, probably another two weeks or so, I imagine.

You’ll find in the attachments a graph of my views from the past year. YouTube works in a funny way, it equates all of your videos watchability to the performance of your most recent work. You will see that in times when I put out something that didn’t get a lot of clicks, the views are low across the board until I make something else that brings them up again, and they stay mostly up until another lower performing video brings them down once more. Once you release a new video, YouTube also in some circumstances stops recommending what was the most recent video. You can see that since the Nothing But Trouble project did quite well that views for all of my videos have been up substantially, we have had the best month of the year by far. So instead of risking ending that peak prematurely by releasing this, I’m going to wait until the views go down again before putting this Pumpkinhead video out to the public. So that may take a week or two to happen. It is funny and a bit backwards I think that sometimes on YouTube it is more beneficial to not make new things. 

As for my Halloween special, it is going well but is an extremely daunting task, but I really can’t wait to share it with you. It is the best thing I’ve ever written. But at the same time, it is the most complicated project I have ever taken on and I believe is quite unlike just about anything that anyone has done on YouTube before. It is taking a great deal of nuance and a secret delicate hand. I’m sorry I’ve not been available recently, I’ve been hard to reach and haven’t been on the discord. When you see this you’ll hopefully understand why. I started making this video in June or July and it was about one thing, and it has slowly during the research process turned into something else over the past few months. Not something larger, just a situation that is extremely complex, and one that I only have one shot to get right. It is still about Joann, it is still about her trail and the events that surrounded that, but I’ve been trying hard to not say a lot about it as to keep as much of the nature of this as possible a secret, so I’ll leave it at that.

I’ve temporarily moved back to the town it takes place in to document the area and have quick access to the resources here. It is a lot about me, where I grew up, the people here. I feel very conflicted about this whole thing, and truth be told it has weighed heavily on me for the past few months. For the most part, people in that town don’t know who I am. They don’t know what I do, largely. Some of them are lifelong friends and Patrons on here and will read this, but most just know me as Zane (or don’t know me at all) and have no clue what I do for work. It is a town of fifteen thousand people, and I’ve managed to keep my anonymous nature for years. But now this entire project is going to come out about them and their town and how they handled and participated in an outrageous situation decades ago. And on a global scale in a certain way it will again be what the town is known for, just like it was back when all this happened in 1976. It is a weird feeling, resurrecting ghosts like this and I know a good few will not be happy about that. Even if this video is a flop, which I hope it isn’t and don't feel that it will be, I’m living in the last few weeks of just being Zane when I’m back in my hometown and it has depressed me a bit. My life will change from this point on in ways that I can’t predict, even if in just small uncomfortable social ones. 

A few days ago, I arranged a situation to publically run into one of the people who were involved in these events at a location that I knew she would be at in advance. I said I was making a video about this and would very much like for her to be interviewed for it. She was very caught off guard by this, but said yes, which made me happy. The style of this video is completely unlike anything you have seen from me before, and is more like a full on traditional feature documentary at this point than anything else. I’m trying to keep my presence in town as quiet as possible to make the production of this video go as smoothly and unnoticed as I can, but there are some who are now aware of what I’m doing and one woman who I do not know chased me to my car the other day and took a picture of my license plate as I drove away. I know some people began to grow suspicious of me when I was at the library every day working with the Joann files, as you aren’t allowed to check them out and they have to stay in the research room at all times. Several people would come up to me and ask me why I was there reading them day after day, and why I had been asking questions about her. So I know that some are already suspicious that something is coming, or at least curious.

Everyone over a certain age knows the witch Joann. She was a part of everyone’s life for a moment in time for better or worse, and many are happy that it is a story that has remained in the past and has been forgotten except to those who live here and lived through it. And soon they will all see me in a very particular way. It was seen as an embarrassing period of time that reflected badly on the town. These are just ideas that have been on my mind a great deal lately. That doesn’t mean I am not excited about this project at all. I am extremely excited about it. I wake up thinking about it every day. It has become a bit of a compulsion for me. It’s just that my feelings are very, very complicated, and I needed to share them somehow where I’m at deep in this process. It will be out at the end of October, and then after that hopefully I’ll return to a bit more normalcy in being on Discord and hanging out. I miss doing that, I miss talking with you all, but social things have been difficult for me while this has been going on ever since it entered my life this past summer. I’ve already built a schedule for next year also. I’ve found that having a pre-planned out schedule makes it more likely that I will get content out on time, and I have some fun things planned and I think you’ll hopefully enjoy it. Until then, take care, and I’ll see you again very soon.

-Zane