Halloween 2025: Lippman Co.!

Written by Jonathan Wojcik



 October updates this year were taken over entirely by Mortasheen, which I hope made the season feel special and eventful for others, but for me personally it was more of the same kind of work I've been doing year-round! With many of my real-life plans also falling through due to time or health constraints, it didn't feel like I really had a Halloween in October at all this time.

 But, after taking a break through November, I do have a handful of Halloween posts to share with you here in December, including what was by far the best selection of Halloween items I had the chance to browse in person; the always reliable local party store, Lippman! It's even where I found the spider things, but that wasn't all!

"Creepy Jack-Lantern Cutouts"

I didn't get these, but they were fairly large cutouts of detailed pumpkins with realistic eyeballs and teeth. The five possible designs are a nice mix of goofy-creepy and more threatening, with one adorable outlier:

 Well, maybe adorable isn't the right word. Pitiful? Wretched? At least "sympathetic." It's rotting and wilting at the bottom, caving in so much that it now barely has a mouth. The rest look like they love to bite fingers off, but this pumpkin's finger-biting days are over!


Tiny Bodied Skeletons

There's a particular kind of hanging skeleton that crops up everywhere, every year, wearing all sorts of different outfits. These use the same standardized plastic skull and have the same sort of little glued-on clothes, but their bodies are tiny! Hilarious!! One option wears a black hat and a black vest over an undergarment of lace, while the other is dressed up as a bride with black hair, and I especially like that its veil is still sized for the regular-bodied skeleton, so it'd drag behind her down the aisle.


Skeleton Bodied Doll

We also have this unwholesome creation, combining the tiny skeleton body with an appropriately sized, huge-eyed, blonde haired doll head. It also wears a red and white striped suit for whatever reason, and the whole effect has that tinge of subtle surrealism you might get from an entity in a bad dream. One that's actually either exactly this tiny size, or alarming enormous.

Completely fleshless skeletons have long, long lost any shocking or gruesome properties in our culture, and even fully fleshy characters with fleshless skull heads or select skeletal limbs just feel kind cool and rad...but there's something distinctly upsetting about a fully fleshed head on an entirely skeletal body.


Giant Glowing Frankenstein Head

At some point I gave up always specifying "Frankenstein's Monster" or "Frankenstoid," yeah, his name can be Frankenstein, whatever! And here's his big green snarling glowing head, many times larger than a regular head, designed so you can set it somewhere like a lamp OR just hang it up somewhere. What does this mean? What happened to him? He's pissed as hell about it, whatever the case.

I wonder what licensing, if any, is involved with this. Frankenstein with a flat top and neck bolts is a combination strictly copyrighted by Universal Studios, but legal tie-in merchandise is usually film-accurate. They're REALLY protective of the image, and don't usually allow it this stylized and cartoons.


Wreathe Monster

Just a simple, black wreathe with bloodshot monster eyes and jagged teeth. A classic of DIY Halloween decorations since even before the iconic wreathe-monster from the Nightmare Before Christmas, but definitely popularized by it. This is just the first time I think I've seen one of these sold prefab in person.


Mini Hanging Gargoyle

Lippman always has a HUGE variety of dangling cloth-body monsters, in multiple sizes, and this is the first time I've seen this nice little gargoyle one, using a devilish head with jagged, lipless teeth and a skeleton nose-hole, painted all grey save for its ruby red eyes. I'm sure the same sculpt has been used as a non-stony devil of some sort.


Hanging Skeledemon

this one's just got a skull head with horns, but I like the pebbly texture of the bone, like the skulls of some actual reptiles. I'm not sure anyone was thinking that deep into it, but if it's pebbly for the same reason, then we know this demon in its living state has only a rather thin layer of scaly skin on its cranium.


Fungus-Infested Coffin

So cute! Just a little decorative wooden coffin with polka-dotted rubbery mushrooms erupting from it. There's no indication of a "creature" or "monster" presence, unless you imagine that this represents a full-size coffin, in which case the body housed within is growing some exceptionally huge mushrooms, and I think abnormally huge mushrooms should absolutely count as a monster.

Hanging Ghostly Alien

So this black-cloaked figure has a head similar to the "Scream Ghost" mask, but with smaller, more slanted eyes and bright lime green skin to look a bit more like an extraterrestrial. Granted, it could simply be a ghost that is also green, but there's also the third option that this is an Alien's Ghost.

Hanging Werewolf

This is one of the most common classic Halloween monsters that I've almost never seen in the danglemonster medium, probably because danglemonsters naturally evoke some sort of floating spirit-entity. This can still mesh with demons and ghouls, who may be portrayed in some media with wispy shadow-bodies, but a humanoid wolf that hovers around with no legs? Truly a rare and precious treat.

Evil Scarecrow Child

A free-standing figure, three or four feet tall, with a Jack-O-Lantern face in its burlap bag head and a cute little blue dress with a dingy white smock. Old timey farm girl clothes, I guess, and the puffs of "straw" as pigtails are fun too. I think we've seen almost this same design every few years from another manufacturer. When is burlap bag girl gonna get her own horror franchise?


Sideways Spider

Click here if you want to see my little clip of this poor, confused widow spider, clearly repurposed from a motorized crab toy with side-to-side scuttling action!


Half-Skeletonized Rubber Animals!

From this angle, this would appear to be just any generic, rubber rat, clearly even using a mold I've seen before...or at least half of that mold. Split down the middle, half of this rat is an impressively detailed skeleton, and someone even detailed the layers of skin, fat and nondescript viscera where the flesh was bisected! Amazing! And it's not alone, either:

The half-skeletal snake is a little more subtle, since the fleshed half is much closer to the coloration of the pale bone. It also has oddly human-like little blocky teeth, but that's alright! Someone deserves a prize for having sculpted every last one of those damn ribs. Its bent, wriggly pose also looks accurately like a snake that's dried out and died, to the point you could probably almost fool someone with this one. I'm pretty sure this is entirely a new sculpt, too, and not modified from any existing rubber snake.

Third and last in the line is this bat, which doesn't use a sculpt I recognize either! It's another subtle one, because both sides of its body have fully membranous wings, which I think was kind of a mistake. The bone side should definitely be JUST the phalanges, so you can tell what's going on from a distance. Otherwise, I like how the black paint of the fleshier side doesn't really make it look alive and furry, but does make it look like a three dimensional ink drawing.

And speaking of those spider things, I hoped Lippman would have a couple left shortly after Halloween, but they were evidently as popular as we all know they deserved to be. Instead, I found another of the eyeball variety at Michael's, severely discounted, because the center of its eye was missing. Fortunately, I happened to have a bunch of the same style craft eyes, and fixed this one up with what I feel was the best looking option, in the best looking orientation:

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