Skip to content
Movie still from the film 'Maximum Overdrive.' Pictured is writer and director Stephen King, who autographed the picture. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and International Autograph Auctions Ltd.

Ohioan restores goblin head from Stephen King film

Tom Hoepf
Tom Hoepf
Movie still from the film 'Maximum Overdrive.' Pictured is writer and director Stephen King, who autographed the picture. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and International Autograph Auctions Ltd.
Movie still from the film ‘Maximum Overdrive.’ Pictured is writer and director Stephen King, who autographed the picture. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and International Autograph Auctions Ltd.

PIKETON, Ohio (AP) – A southern Ohio collector has restored an 8-foot goblin head to its glossy green glory, decades after the prop’s glowing eyes were used to signal imminent attacks in a Stephen King horror film.

The fiberglass face, which had been attached to a truck in the 1986 movie Maximum Overdrive, spent years being bumped by the lawn mower and climbed by children in Tim Shockey’s Piketon backyard before he decided to fix it up as a personal project. He began documenting it on Facebook last year and turned it into a moneymaking venture when he started getting messages from fans of the film, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

“I never knew this market existed,” said Shockey, who now takes the prop to horror-film conventions and sells photos of fans with the eerie green face.

To help pay for the fix-up, he sold dust sanded from the prop as $10 vials of “Goblin Dust” online.

“My wife (Janie) said, ‘There’s no way anyone will buy that,’” he said. “By the time I went to bed, I had sold three of them.”

Despite the movie’s limited success, one explanation for the interest in the goblin might be that horror fans tend to be loyal, said filmmaker Lucas Ostrowski, an assistant professor at Bowling Green State University.

“If you have a key prop that’s iconic, it doesn’t matter how obscure the movie is, because fans latch onto an iconic image,” he said.

Shockey is getting a glimpse of that.

“It has opened up a whole new world to me,” the 54-year-old sign company owner said.

Shockey, a movie fan himself, bought the head in 1987 from someone who’d purchased it at a junkyard. He displayed it at his Waverly, Ohio, video store until he sold the place in 1992 and moved the goblin to his property.

It’s among 600-plus Hollywood movie props he owns and sometimes sells. The items also include a Scream 4 mask signed by director Wes Craven and a football used by Adam Sandler in the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard.

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-08-11-13 2054GMT

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

Movie still from the film 'Maximum Overdrive.' Pictured is writer and director Stephen King, who autographed the picture. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and International Autograph Auctions Ltd.
Movie still from the film ‘Maximum Overdrive.’ Pictured is writer and director Stephen King, who autographed the picture. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and International Autograph Auctions Ltd.