HALLOWEEN SHOPPING 2022:
HALLOWEEN CITY

Spirit Halloween had just a couple of things I found reviewable in 2022, but it was also the first year a Halloween City came to our local area, and even right down the road from Spirit! Bold move! This chain is actually an extension of Party City, but it tends to have some more exclusive seasonal stuff, not all of which you can find in Party City's online catalog!

MOM SPIDER

This is the classic, simple bendy-legged hairy spider, one that we see every year in an assortment of colors and sizes, but this one's a mom! The many little black and grey "baby" spiders attached to her abdomen stand out nicely against her pale, brown fur! In real life, it's mostly only wolf spiders who carry their young on their backs, and they are very very good at it. They'll even run around trying to recollect every last baby if any of them fall off!

ZOMBIE SNAKES

These animated decorations consist of a fake little wooden crate warning us of the "Undead Specimen," but the rotten green snake has already broken loose! Of course its eyes light up, it hisses, and it "strikes" when activated by sound or motion. It's always nice to see undead that aren't the usual humans, dogs or cats.

ZOMBIE VULTURES

...Like these vultures, too! These just light up and squawk, but they have exposed ribs and pale white, decayed looking heads. I like that they're absurdly smaller than any actual vulture, too, clearly fully grown but no bigger than a crow. Adorable!

GHOST PILLOW

These little plushes were for sale at the front of the store and I just think the ghost's face is the funniest thing. Just the typical three black holes for a mouth and eyes but the mouth hole is SO TALL. Maybe one of the tallest and skinniest mouth holes I have ever seen on a Halloween ghost? Easily in the top ten, max.

THE EXTERMINATOR

This animatronic character is just dressed up like an exterminator in a haz-mat suit and everything! He's supposed to be a zombie, and does have a ghoulish skull faintly visible through his protective face shield, but I like this in the context of insect-themed horror antics. If you put a big spider or cockroach prop on the back, then it'd look like the arthropod is controlling the exterminator like a puppet, right?!

BIOHAZARD SKULLS

Resin skulls with a black biohazard logo on the forehead, while the rest of the skull has this green and yellow, thickly corroded texture that's wonderfully grody. In fact, I hate to say it, but as much as I respect the silliness of a skull with a biohazard logo on it, I think most people might have preferred just the rotten toxic looking skull on its own!

GIANT "ATTACK SPIDER"

This is another spider with long bendable legs, but this one is covered in black fabric that's only fuzzy at "joints" along the limbs, with tufts of long pale hair, and in a hairy fringe around its face, which is a fully painted rubber spider monster! It has a fleshy appearance, its eight black eyes even lidded more like a humans, and it has large, thick black mandibles instead of a spider's chelicerae or fangs. For those unaware, we decided some years ago that "inaccurate" Halloween "spiders" ought to be considered supernatural monsters and that they already have a pretty good name. This "attack spider" is really just one of the largest examples of a Heebie-Jeebie!

HANGING GARGOYLE

One of those hanging monsters that's just a head and arms with a creepy cloth body, but this one is a grey-skinned gargoyle with a scowling, horned face. It's of the smaller and cheaper variety when it comes to these decorations, the head made of mostly unpainted grey plastic. That's precisely what I find charming about it, of course, but I was either in a minority or they still GROSSLY overestimated demand because they had easily a hundred of these little guys, displayed in multiple places, with very few other hanging monsters of this scale or quality.

PIRATE SKULL

This is a large, rubber disembodied head, another common category of prop, but this one in particular is a pirate skull with octopus tentacles pouring out of its mouth and eye socket. Always nice to see more Horror Cephalopods.

LAVA DEMON

The display model wasn't working but I just want to call attention to the fact that this demon sprays fog out of the ends of its horns, like when steam shoots out of somebody's ears in a cartoon. I just think that's sublime.

SPIDER BABY

I saw this online, and it was apparently sold through Halloween City, but there wasn't one to be found! In fact, even the ones online are being sold second hand already for up to and over a hundred dollars, so I guess this was a pretty hot item! And why wouldn't it be?! It's a cool looking, monstrous black spider with huge chelicerae and a bunch of little eyes, and then it has an entire creepy white baby doll head growing out of the back of its abdomen, which has light-up red eyes. It apparently roams around on the floor and giggles in a baby voice, which is great. Is this an attempt to lure humans? Get their guard down? A lot of mythological entities will imitate a baby to prey on human compassion, and this is a bit too on-the-nose to have evolved naturally, so I'm sure this is some kind of demonic entity pulling this classic routine in some creepy basement out in the woods.

Obviously the trick isn't going to work on most people when the "baby" is just a head with an entire spider for a body, no, but this particular spirit certainly doesn't know that. It thinks it's just perfectly, flawlessly imitating an actual, helpless infant, so you have to tell yourself which is worse: getting your brains sucked out by a demonic entity, or leaving anyone, including a demonic entity, with the impression that you'd leave a whole ass normal human baby to starve to death in a creepy basement out in the woods? Yeah. Think about it.