If you enjoyed the last round's weirdos, you're gonna LOVE this bunch. If you didn't enjoy them, then you're at least going to feel positively neutral this time around, because I've saved even weirdlier weirdos for these next thirteen!
BIG EYE WIBBLY (Thrift Store)
This is another "year round" novelty trinket that maybe shouldn't count, especially since I bought it a few weeks before the Halloween season for fifty cents at a thrift shop, but I'm sure these have been sold at some point in a Halloween context. How couldn't they be? Their heads are balls of orange tentacles, they've got giant, bulging, glow-in-the-dark ghost eyeballs, and that is clearly a stunted skeleton for a body. I'd actually seen these for sale online before, but for inordinate amounts of money. We're talking, for some reason, ten to twenty dollars each on shady ebay accounts. Big Eye Wibblies are apparently a pretty hot commodity, and I found me one for pennies just before we started to really get into the swing of the season. It's like Big Eye Wibbly was the herald of my Halloween, like he poked his gooey sea-urchin head up from a sea of filthy, discarded toys to whisper "it's coming."
And I knew it was, obviously, but I'm glad I heard it from Big Eye Wibbly's own nonexistent mouth. I needed that.
"SLIME" (Michael's)
On a return trip to Michael's, it turned out they had put up a whole lot of cheap, spooky toys that weren't out earlier in the season. One such novelty is a six-pack of slime tubes for only three dollars, and they're only labeled "slime," even though the slime is kind of the last thing you notice after the space goblins.
Freed from the gooey vials, the tiny, glow-in-the-dark plastic martians are the spitting image of the aliens described from the legendary Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, famously (to bogleech readers, anyway) the basis for the pokemon, Sableye. Of course, these little guys look a whole lot cooler immersed in colorful, gelatinous sludge, especially if you turn the aliens upside-down so you can stand the vials on their lids.
I decided a slime alien was the perfect bathroom companion to Underwater Toilet Skeleton, but with all six of the vials, LED lights and tinfoil you could make a pretty wicked little alien laboratory diorama.
Haunted Pumpkin Figurines (Gabriel Brothers)
These light-up resin Jack O' Lanterns boast gaping mouths occupied by entire, tiny ghosts and apparently metal skeletons, which is certainly interesting. The sheet ghost with skeletal hands is actually pretty menacing, while one of the other two ghosts looks a whole lot like the wandering soul of some Achewood character. I've never really seen a sheet ghost with an animal face. That opens up some interest doors for sheet-ghost design.
Haunted Books (Walgreen's)
This is another item just a little too pricey for me to have taken home, but you have to love the idea of a tiny skeleton magically emerging from a book to shush you. What a neat idea for a haunting. You could write an entire horror movie around the concept of a little ghostly skeleton that travels between books like they're interdimensional gateways and enforces common library etiquette. TO DEATH.
Melting Zombies (Michael's)
Another nice surprise were these "melting zombies" right up near the front registers. Monster body parts you can stick into putty are another of those toys that just suddenly showed up all over the place in the past couple of years, but here, the fact that they won't hold together for more than half a minute is treated as their foremost selling point, and it works. How CAN you resist a toy called "melting zombie?"
I bought the first two of the three styles, so I'd have the most skeletal-looking specimen as well as the ostensibly female one, if it means anything that green zombie is actually wearing a miniskirt under there. She's also the one with dangling intestines, always a favorite zombie feature. As you can see, their mouths differ from the package art and appear as only white voids, as though their heads are just lit up on the inside, so I'm going to assume that's exactly why. For whatever reason, zombies in "melting zombie" continuity have floodlights in their skulls.
Bag Head Monster (Halloween Experience)
This floating, blood-stained figure has life-like human hands, but her face is just sort of a cloth balloon with sprayed-on features. It's a pretty gosh-darned creepy effect, and I could easily see this as the star monster in a slasher movie. She just didn't quite seem like $30 material, is all. For half that, I may have considered.
Giant Girl (Party City)
This is so, so much scarier the deeper you dwell on it. It has the face of a sickly-colored little girl, but easily twice the size of any normal human head, her cloth body trails a good seven feet or more, and she has massive, gnarled monster hands. The cherry on top? She sings "I know something you don't know" in a giggling, childish voice when you walk by. Stop and imagine this as a monster in basically any horror narrative. Just a pallid, towering child with a "secret" she thinks is really funny. We don't even need any more than that. We don't need to know why she exists or what her secret is. She is drop-dead terrifying as-is, moreso than any knife-wielding demon clown or rotten zombie.
Skull Nests (Nobbies)
So these are literally nothing but the same fake bird's nests and fake eggs many craft stores sell year round, but at Nobbies party supply, they come with tiny human skulls in them, amongst the eggs. Even by my standards, that's so weird. What a weird, weird thing to decide to sell, and equally weird to buy and decorate with. I'd do just that myself, except I think I could assemble my own for a lot less than the ten bucks they're asking, and I could use much more realistic-looking skulls.
What does this mean though? Why are the skulls here? Maybe they're like cuckoo eggs? Maybe ghosts lay skulls in the nests of birds, and when the baby ghosts hatch out, they spook all the baby birds right out of the nest and get fed and nurtured by the naive bird parents. The raw brutality of nature.
Skeleton Cat (???)
I can't remember what store this even was, but it was at a mall in Maryland, and if it were ten dollars or less I might have considered buying one, but it was almost thirty bucks. It's pretty dreadful, though, with that pained expression and a pitch black, humanoid skeleton body instead of a cat or even skeleton-cat body. I don't know what kind of specter takes the form of a black human skeleton with a black cat's head, but that's sincerely scary as hell. Imagine that in jittery stop motion, in some forgotten 80's horror movie where it's the vengeful familiar of a burned witch, or something. The more I talk about it the more I wish I could snag one on clearance, but I'm now a zillion miles away from them.
Skeleton Crows (Party City)
These things may be sold as "skeleton crows," but that doesn't do them justice at all. They look so unsettlingly fleshy, more like a human transformed 70% of the way into a wretched little bird-goblin, or like when the Maitlands in Beetlejuice stretched their faces out.
This RAT BASTARD
Sighted in a claw machine at a Japanese buffet, this bloody, plush mummy skull is actually the same design as a plastic, non-bloody mummy skull I found at Halloween Experience last year, and I'm not going to say how many times I tried to get this thing before I gave up. I swear I even had him teetering on the very precipice of my possession, only for him to tumble straight back to his original position. I can't find one like him on ebay, neither.
Sexy Skeletons (Safeway)
It took me a minute to even realize anything was unique or unusual about these two dangling skeletons. I've seen the exact same models in a variety of places, wearing a variety of outfits, but this is definitely the first time I've seen them dressed up for some sort of erotic photoshoot. Pumpkin-head is wearing nothing but a bridal veil and a sheer nightgown, or something, while our other skeleton is done up like a lacy french maid with no top. I look at these two, and the only sentence that comes to my mind is "harem anime I could finally tolerate watching."
BONESLY: THE SKELETON PUN HAT (Marshall's)
Meet Bonesly. Bonesly is a skeleton. Somehow, he's also a fat skeleton. Not only that, not only is he fat, but Bonesly the skeleton can be worn as a hat. I'll stop rhyming only if you promised me you watched and enjoyed all of Bonesly's skeleton puns. Why, if you have the option to wear a skeleton hat that makes skeleton puns, would you ever conceivably wear anything else? ANYTHING else. You should just hit the town completely naked except for Bonesly. As soon as anyone asks why, all you have to do is squeeze Bonesly's little foot, and then they'll get to hear a skeleton pun while they call the police!
What really immediately stood out to me about Bonesly, though, wasn't even the skeleton puns, as top-quality as they are, but how much his voice sounds like ARKTOS.
