Halloween 2025: SPIRIT HALLOWEEN ZOMBIE FLY! (video and photos)
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
This year has had already had so many exceptional Halloween creatures, mere written articles don't feel like they're enough. I promise I'm not "pivoting to video" altogether, but a number of updates this year will consist of my actual voice while I show you something silly. Something THIS silly...
GLAMOR SHOTS:
This is, by far, the best Dipteran Halloween Prop Creature I have yet encountered. Even the long gone, more naturalistic latex example I mourn in the video didn't have such a finely detailed sculpt!
I like that the "exposed" "bones" are the same black and brown as the rest of the exoskeleton, anyway, making it all the easier to interpret as a mutagenic malformity of the thorax! If these creatures do develop actual vertebrate endoskeletons, however, that might be another reason for the various skele-bugs every Halloween, if you'd prefer a more science-fiction backstory than my usual "a witch did it."
A closeup of the face; all the major elements are there! The center protrusions are the antennae, which are typically short and stubby in "true" flies.
Even the interior of the labellum is detailed! This is the fluid-feeding "proboscis" of most flies, in its retracted position. The sharp palps above this are often mistaken for the proboscis of biting flies, but unlike the delicate syringe of a mosquito, tabanids simply slash your skin open with their face-knives and slurp up the juice with their sucker-tube! Like mosquitoes however, it's only the females who do this.
