Halloween 2024: Week One Sightings

Written by Jonathan Wojcik


We're already halfway through August! In the past, I'd have half a dozen posts by now detailing whatever I found "most interesting" from a number of different retailers, but now that I'm more serious about quality over quantity, we're going to look at a bunch of my top favorite Halloween retail items from only the first seven days of August in one go!


Cyclops Pumpkin (At Home stores)

I saw these online, since there's no "At Home" in reasonable driving distance. This is a large, light-up plastic blow-mold pumpkin with one big bloodshot eyeball and rotten looking humanlike teeth. Cartoony and fun!


Pillow Skeleton (Joann Fabrics)

I've seen skeletons *printed* on pillows, dakimakura style, but this year I've noticed a few different skeletons who are "made" of pillows, the first of which I spotted at Joann's. They're like giant dolls, basically, with dangling arms and legs, a pillow skeleton that can hug you back! Unfortunately, at Joann Fabrics, this is like a $9000 item. Or maybe it was $40? That's all kind of the same thing when you're the kind of person who considers a $20 meal to be entering "fancy" territory.


Terrified Manpumpkin (Homegoods)

Some years, there's enough zany stuff going on at Homegoods for it to get articles all its own. Last year it even got two of them, thanks to their amazing Nautical Shelf. They aren't quite so ambitious this year, but they did have some very large, disturbingly detailed model pumpkins with lifelike human faces. This one feature's a man's face in a horrified gasp, clutching his own head with his botanical arms in obvious shock at the state of his existence. Crossed the wrong witch, I'll bet!


There was this lady pumpkin too, and even more disturbing; while the manpumpkin's human face was still made of pumpkin flesh, this is just an actual human head emerging from a gourd, and she has a pair of human hands beginning to push their way from under the vegetable's skin. It's harder to say what might actually be going on here, like if she's stuck this way or still in the process of growing. It's pretty unsettling, though.


Golden Gorgon (Ross)

Just a cool bust of a naked Medusa made of solid fake gold, and with SO MUCH snake hair! This is the ideal ratio of humanoid to snake hair, really; nice large, long serpents cascading all the way down her body. Heck yeah!!


Pearly Halloween (Michaels)

I decided to stick a bunch of these in one entry; Michael's has an entire aisle of Halloween decor with a sort of "wedding cake" aesthetic, almost entirely white with the occasional dash of rosy pink. Most of it is sincerely cool, beautiful angelic-gothic imagery with diamond-crusted skulls, ghostly figures veiled in lace, and those rad looking bird claw candlesticks, but then there's also the pearly miniature toilets with roses and snakes on them.


Paintable Carnivorous Plant (Michaels)

Michael's always has these solid white ceramic items you're intended to paint yourself, and this year in addition to the typical ghosts, skulls and haunted houses they've got this adorable plant monster that's mostly one big, round, gaping mouth! It reminds me a lot of Malboros or Molbors from the Final Fantasy franchise. This is actually the first plant creature I've seen this year, after the last few years really exploded with them!


Bottletoads (Michael's)

Not what they're really called, but I couldn't have called them anything else. These are ostensibly toad-shaped bottles filled with "Forest Toad Wart Extract," but they're so detailed, with fully painted eyes, I can't see them as anything other than living supernatural combinations of bottle and toad. Something else that slowly came to life in a Witch's lair, or perhaps something deliberately enchanted? I like how serene and stately they look, and their mottled, glazed looking brown, yellow and green pottery texture is beautiful. I take it the easiest way to get a bottle of toad juice, when you've already got magic powers, is to zap an actual toad into a bottletoad and call it a day.


Defecating Headless Horseman (Michael's)

For some reason, another Michael's offering this year is a variety of different monsters on toilets. I've seen skeletons on toilets a number of times, but this time there's a vampire, a frankenstein's monster, and this Horseman holding his own pumpkin head in one hand and a good book in the other, though the book isn't even aimed at the pumpkin, so how is he reading?! Maybe he just wants to look smart.


Eyeder (Michael's)

Whoa, a new eyeball spider! Surprisingly, one of the first eyeball bodied-spiders I've ever seen in a Halloween item was only in 2023, sculpted into a pumpkin I featured in a climactic roundup of 31 spooky things, and I'd later discover soft, felted eyeball spiders from Dollar General. One year later, Michael's is offering what I believe to be the first standalone Eyeder "sculpture," a large eyeball with pale, fleshy eyelids serving as the arachnid's abdomen. I like that it accurately attaches all eight legs to the cephalothorax, especially considering how small its cephalothorax actually is, and I also find it interesting that the spider has no other eyes of its own. That could just be laziness, I suppose, but it reads more to me as this creature really having only the one big ocular.

That's officially THREE times I've finally seen a spider-eyeball hybrid in Halloween merchandise. Hm!


Dead Cats (Marshalls)

This little light-up sculpture is way too cute; a mummy cat and a ghost cat together with a pumpkin! The mummy is the best kind of Halloween mummy, having only little eyeballs visible in the blackness between its bandages, and the ghost is the best kind of Halloween ghost, a simple sheet with googly eyes straight out of a Pac-Man game, albeit with cat ears and a tail as well. I like the mummy being posed like it's about to pounce, too. They're fine! Even in death, they are still kitties having fun!


"Nope-Rope Sssam" (Marshall's)

This is a dog toy, but it's SO cute and so stylish, just a big black and orange cartoon snake with an adorable happy face and a springy, coiled body, it feels like it'd be tons of fun for humans to play with too. This is also the first time I've seen "nope rope" break out of the internet.


Vampiress with Sunglasses (Homegoods)

Just the head and upper body of a vampire woman with sunglasses. Why the heck not.


"Living End" Exotic Plants (Michael's)

One of 2024's new Halloween Village miniatures is this plant store overflowing with carnivorous flora! Multiple species can be seen, including blue flowers with sinister little faces, white mushroom-like growths with chompy mouths and a number of Audrey II knockoffs, though the latter interestingly have little yellow eyes inside their mouths, situated on a small red nodule that may represent their uvula, or something!


Spider Baby (Lippman co)

Local party store Lippman always gets a few fun things in stock from who knows where, and one inclusion this year are these white-skinned, black-eyed baby heads with shiny black, poseable spider legs. Their construction is cheap, just a styrofoam head and wire legs wrapped in a rubbery material, but the visual is still very effective!


Neon Big Head Skeletons (Lippman)

These are dangling plastic skeletons that come in bright colors, like purple, green and orange, but with oversized skulls! Basically the manufacturer give them the heads of a larger model, and I'm surprised I've never seen this done with these sort of straightforward, realistic skellos. It's so obvious! It's so fun! They look great!!


Eyeball Mushrooms (Internet)

I may be partially responsible for the rise of mushroom critters in recent Halloweens, and of my sorta-babies, I have to say these little tiny garden sculptures are the best looking yet. They come in three pieces: one has two mushrooms with a single eyeball each, one has a single-eyed mushroom together with a two-eyed mushroom, and then there's one big two-eyed mushroom! All are the classic red and white "fly agaric" style, with intensely blue-green eyes emerging just between the cap and the gill flesh, and as soon as I saw the one with the two eerie humanlike eyes in that position I thought "wow! That looks really cool! I wish I'd thought of it!" Then I finally remembered that it's similar to the shape and positioning of the eyes in my 2020 speculation anyway. So I guess I did thought of it!

I only found these on one of those kinda shady websites, one of those alibaba spinoffs. I ordered some, but there's no telling if they'll really arrive, or if they'll really look this way. I'll keep you posted!



WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS SITE!

MORE HALLOWEEN FEATURES: