A Brutal Criminal

This oversized plastic French bulldog or Boston Terrier (I'm not 100% sure) may look like he's just dressed up cute in a black and white striped prison costume...but he IS a lot larger than any normal, natural canine of his ilk, and he sure looks proud of the human skull he's perching on. A human skull still wearing the cranial strap from, I believe, an execution by electric chair. From this I believe we can extrapolate either that this dog is an accomplice to the ghost of his master, long ago executed for murder and communicating to his faithful beast through his old skull. I'd watch this movie, and its many arbitrary sequels and streaming series. This could be the next Child's Play, honestly.

Eye-Holding Pumpkin

This is a soft rubbery Jack O' Lantern that can walk around and make spooky noises, which is something we've seen previous years, but this is a new design holding out one of its own humanlike eyeballs in one of its two plant-matter arms! It seems pretty proud of that fact. Proud as a dog with his dead master's talking skull.

Life-Size Animatronic Ogre

They wheeled out a magical fantasy theme this year for a few new animatronics, like this big green tusk-faced ogre wielding a huge, spiked club! This isn't just perfect for Halloween, but in my opinion an obvious must-have for fantasy gaming stores.

Animatronic Evil Leprechaun

Seemingly straight out of those Leprechaun horror movies, except he's a slightly different copyright-friendly design. The funniest thing about "Cursed Clover" as they call him is that he's still several feet tall, with a huge enough head to swallow a regular size head in one bite. They did not need to make him so massive at all, I mean, he's a Leprechaun; he easily could have been a 20-inch item. But no, Home Depot has decided that a Leprechaun should be roughly the mass of the average grown man, if not more.

Poseable Evil Pixies

These are modifications to the poseable life-size plastic skeleton template, built the same way with all the same joints, except this is an emaciated green goblin with a mouthful of fangs and four dragonfly-like wings! Like the Leprechaun, this is also a creature you would normally expect to be tiny size. I guess these are basically to scale with the giant human skeleton then. I do think they probably should have offered a tiny version too, though; cheap little hanging evil plastic pixies are something that'd surely get snapped up quick.

Zombie trio

These are three short, comical zombies, one with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, designed to either stand separately or ride piggy-back in a tower! The three argue with one another in goofy, but implicitly threatening ways, insulting your audience by first implying there aren't good enough brains to eat, then finally conceding that they may as well enjoy the smorgasborg before them. CHILLING.

Fear Valley Wolf

Too black, chunky and shaggy to actually be any kind of wolf, but that only makes it cooler; more like the mythological Black Shuck or Church Grim or other big woolly black dog-monsters, and it's also a half-rotten ghoul-dog with patches of exposed bone and muscle!

Animatronic Butcher

A life size butcher character with a stitched-together pig head! Is it his real head, or is he just wearing it?! His glowing eyes are definitely too far apart for a normal, human head underneath.

Giant Spooky Tree

I'm always a fan of spooky trees as characters in their own right. This one is as tall as the now classic giant skeleton, beautifully detailed with dangling vines and moss, and the sorrowful ghostly face on it just looks great!

Arachnophobia

Finally, a giant solid plastic spider at giant plastic skeleton proportions! It's a fanciful "monster" spider, with a distinct head segment and multiple fangly teeth that spiders do not have, but the details are otherwise pretty awesome, and every body segment lights up a different color.

Animated Raven

They just call this a Raven, but it's a six foot tall humanoid bird-man whose head looks more like a carved wooden bird skull with glowing eyes, and whose feathers are more like a hoodie he's wearing. He carries a lantern, and when activated, rants about your imminent death, so he's more like some kind of afterlife ferryman or shinigami kind of thing, right?! But he's not the only Corvoid menace at the Depot this year...

Giant "Gally Crow"

This is a variation on Home Depot's giant ten foot plastic scarecrow character, having the same greatly elongated, warped wooden body with hollow, illuminated ribcage, except it's all black where the scarecrow was brown, and the pumpkin head has been swapped out for a bird skull kind of head, completely different from the Raven Man we juse saw. This actually looks a lot more like a raven's skull than a crow's skull in shape, with a nice big chunky beak, but it also has that strange weathered stone sort of texture, covered in dark trypophobic pits, and large glowing eyes with thick fleshy lids. Is it burnt flesh? Is it something else carved into bird-head shape? What IS a "Gally Crow?!"

Six Foot Animatronic Plague Doctor

Have I featured this before? Is this a returning character? I think it did show up in 2023, when they avoided calling it a "plague doctor" the first time around, or maybe I'm confusing it with one of the other multiple Home Depot Halloween characters that are also obvious plague doctors or adjacent to such. They sure like them, don't they?! And bird-faced man-things in general, it would seem. I wonder if they're all related? This one isn't even alone this year, either!

Plastic Lawn Statue Plague Doctor

This one is DEFINITELY brand new, a tall hollow blow-mold yard decoration of not just a cool and spooky looking plague doc, but one whose tattered robes reveal a SKELETON underneath! I think this might in fact be one of the first explicitly undead and/or skeletal plague doctors I've seen on the market! I'm still so proud of these guys for becoming the holiday mascots I always knew they could be. If I were made of more money, I'd even buy this thing myself...along with another Home Depot item that's actually so cool and unique, it will likely get an article post all its own. Stay tuned!!