The Halloween retail world is largely a ghost town this year, in the literal non-Halloween way, and it will probably keep fading in the years to come as all those Temu and Amazon type services accrue more and more market dominance...but the BONE WAR hasn't changed. Perhaps it never will!

Home Depot Scorpion Skeleton

  This is the largest skullpion I think we've ever seen around here, somewhere between seven and ten inches in any direction! The body plan has a lot of thoughtful accuracy, the eight legs aren't all posed the same, the highly realistic claws are in full hunting posture and the tail is on a hinge to swing forward or back. It also has light-up eyes, it seems! The head is the usual abstract mid-way point between scorpion face and human skull, and I wish at least one of these had actual scorpion chelicerae, but I do like how it has a humanlike upper jaw without any human teeth in it. It really looks like something that shuffled some characteristics around as it "mutated;" a perfect prop for a radioactive or polluted desert theme, in my opinion!

Spirit Groundbreaker Snake

 From Spirit Halloween comes this giant skeletal snake, designed to look like it's winding in and out of the ground in that "sea serpent" kind of pose that real living snakes cannot actually do, but magically animated snakes made of bone can probably pull of just fine, I'm sure.

Michael's Rat-a-lope

  Home Depot sold a skeletal jackalope in 2025, ie a rabbit with antlers. In 2026, Michael's has responded with the all-original invention of a skeleton rat with antlers, and it's two or three times bigger than the jackalope.

Home Depot Axolotl(ish) Skeleton

  When I was a wee little lad, no one else in my entire life knew what an axolotl was, and they didn't appear in any media anywhere. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly they went mainstream, but I remember when the first one I ever saw represented in anything was Animal Crossing, unless you count Wooper from Pokemon, which isn't really an axolotl. But mainstream they have went, and you know they've really made it when they've got their first inaccurate Halloween skeleton.

   It's actually ALMOST right, besides the obvious fact that the gills shouldn't still be there, but that's how you know it's an axolotl! You could paint them red if you want to pretend they're soft tissue! In fact, the only "glaringly" inaccurate thing is the exaggerated skull shape with large, forward-facing eye sockets, but this is part of a long running skeleton line that are always cartoonishly stylized, so it really works just fine and keeps consistent with the established aesthetic. It's just that the actual rounded skull of the actual thing IS a lot cuter.

Target Lizard Skeleton

  Only sold at Target as far as I know, this is kind of the skeleton of a bearded dragon lizard, chibified to have a big ungainly head on a chubby little body. Very cute for bearded dragon lizard fans, but just so-so as a Halloween Skelecreature overall.

Walmart Skeleton "Vampire"

  Not bad at all! A creature with a stylized, fanged bat skull head and bat's wings with a humanoid body, crouching on its clawed hands and feet. I will say that when it comes to vampires in hybrid bat form, I instinctively expect the arms to become the wings, like in a regular bat from science, whereas this six-limbed flying body plan feels more intuitive to an imp, a gargoyle or some manner of winged goblin. That just goes to show the versatility of this as a holiday prop, of course!

Walmart Skeleton "Cartoon" Mouse

  We've seen this squat, miniature humanoid skeleton body a number of times now over the last few years, first appearing with an oversized human skull head and later with a pumpkin head. This year, it haunts Wally's shelves with an unsettlingly fleshy looking rat or mouse head. Bone-colored, yes, and with empty eye sockets, but still not nearly bony enough to be called a "skull." It has no visible teeth at all, even the adorable front teeth always visible on real rodents, which makes it look all the more unnatural. I guess they were thinking of a Mickey Mouse sort of character.

But with that, I give you the breakout star of 2026 Halloween:

MICHAEL'S SKELEMANTIS!!!

   A mantis has always been high on my skelecreature wishlist, and in fact always high on my wishlist for basically anything that could conceivably have a wishlist, now that I mention it. There is never an inappropriate context for the presence of a preying mantis, for any occasion, in any format or medium, and I'm glad it finally happened in the world of seasonal boneimals.

  The design and sculpt are pretty decent for what they are, too. Every body segment and appendage is in the correct location, and it stands flat on four osseous tarsi with impressive stability for such a thin, gangly object. The head might have been cooler and more mantisly with a broader shape and bigger eyes, but it does the job, and it's articulated to turn, which is especially important for the insect with the most flexible neck!

I do have one more creature to review, because it's actually a straggler from 2025 that I didn't get around to:

2025's Home Depot "Twistable" Skeleton

  Home Depot has experimented with their full-size plastic skeletons in a number of fun ways over recent years, but in 2025, they were ambitious enough to unleash this truly unnatural, totally original monstrosity that's neither quite a human skeleton, quite a snake skeleton, or even exactly what most people think of when they think of a human-snake hybrid.

The large, reptilian skull has an even larger lower jaw, hinged not only where it attaches to the skull but where the quadrate bone connects to each mandible, much like an actual snake! This lets the jaw move forward and backward horizontally, in addition to just swinging open and shut, so you can pull it back to align with the upper jaw or let it jut forward in an extreme underbite, and of course pose it to grasp relatively large objects between its teeth!

   A normal, human skeleton with a monster snake head would be too easy, so these guys were also given elongated, bendable necks, waists and limbs formed from the same tiny "vertebrae," making even the arms and legs into noodly serpentine appendages! All four end in the same three long, clawed digits, two fingers and a thumb with a single hinge each, making it easy to hook the creature onto various objects with ease! Last but not least, the sockets house colorful, shiny reptilian eyes that also light up intensely green:
 

  I've said this before, but I wish it was easier to track down actual artist credit for items like these. Someone had a very cool artistic vision for this bony monster, which surely now stands as the most creative full-size Halloween skeleton ever released to the market...but alas, it was perhaps TOO creative for the general public, because at every single Home Depot I ever saw that year, these poor things were the very last Halloween items to go unsold. I got mine at a 50% discount for only $20, and they still hung around for a few days beyond the markdown.

  What did they do wrong?? What wasn't appealing enough? You would think anyone interested in Halloween ghouls and monsters would think this looks awesome, but perhaps even that demographic overwhelmingly prefers things that they've seen before? Perhaps they were also just a little too fragile, because I saw at least a couple whose jaws or limbs had snapped off, and the ball joints connecting the limbs to the body do feel a little like they're always at least thinking about breaking.

   A year later, in 2026, Home Depot's entire normal-size skeleton selection is conventionally human, as though the failure of this sloth-snake-man-mutant scared them off from innovation altogether.