Gas Masked Mother and Child

  Kicking off our look at Spirit's 2026 stuff are these animatronic props of a couple "wasteland survivor" characters, a mom and a kid begging for help, complaining about feeling unwell until they pull off their gas masks to reveal that they're already undead, or mutated, or whatever the apocalyptic threat has wrought! Or maybe there isn't any apocalypse, and they're just the roaming ghosts of people who died from a past atomic accident? Victims of a war? Victims of a government experiment? Pretty much every option is bleak. These might be the darkest and saddest Spirit Halloween characters we've ever seen.

The kiddo has kind of a generic sharp-toothed ghoul face, but the mom has hollow, rotten eye sockets and a long, stretched jaw, a bit more like the Scream Ghost mask, which is a whole lot more disturbing in this context. Like she's melting.

BURLAP ANIMAL PALS

  I'm not using the official names of these or most of the other products here, because I don't remember them and I don't feel like I have time to go look them all up. These are pretty large, hanging decorations of cloth dolls with burlap animal faces, a rabbit and a bear, and what appear to be real actual teeth behind their tattered mouth-holes. Spirit has sold a line of masks in this style for years, so it's cool to see them evolve into free-living character entities. You know, as opposed to parasitic.

DELIA'S SCULPTURE

  The iconic antler-like abstract sculpture that Lydia's mom made in Beetlejuice, which also came to life later and crawled around like an adorable bug. I always loved this thing, and the idea of owning my own would have always appealed to me, but this is almost forty dollars and it's only ten inches tall. I might have considered it worth that much if it were a life-size prop, even if it had to be made out of the cheapest and crappiest possible materials. When I started these reviews some twenty years ago, $30 could buy you up to five feet of rubber centipede.

HANGING RAVEN SPIRIT

  A simple hanging cloth ghost, entirely black, but with a solid black plastic raven head. Or maybe it's a raven skull, since it has skeletal eye sockets? As a big fan of dangling cloth ghost thingies with heads, I appreciate how cool the effect is of simply swapping out the typical humanoid head for an ominous bird.

CANDY CORN HEAD

  This is part of Spirit's full size, realistic latex head series, which are usually bloody, severed corpse heads or skulls, but this one is a big piece of candy corn with eye sockets, sharp teeth and mouth stitches! There's no sawed-off neck or anything like the other heads, so this is basically the entire creature! You pay for a candy corn monster head, but you're really getting a candy corn monster FULL BODY prop!

SPIRIT'S MASCOT SKELETON

  Is this seriously the first time they've ever done this??? It's the black-robed skeleton iconic to Spirit's signage, with the single red eye in its right socket, but as a semi-life-size hanging prop with plastic skeletal hands on bendable wire arms. It's about time!

UNDEAD FROG PLUSH

  This is really cute! It's a fuzzy green teddy bear frog, with hard rubber red tree-frog eyeballs, an exposed ribcage and intestines, like the vengeful revenant of a science project.

GIANT LATEX EYEBALL

  This is another in their "severed head" line, but even less of a "severed head" than the candy corn! It's just a whole veiny eyeball, bigger than your face, dangling by a cord of muscle. The fact that the cord is bending, allowing the eye to look forward rather than hanging straight down, tells me it is very much alive and sentient, and again there's no point at which it's sculpted to look "severed" from anything at all, so we can only assume this represents an entire eye-creature as the lord god intended.

GROUNDBREAKER PUMPKIN

  This is an outdoor decoration designed to imply some sort of pumpkin ghoul emerged from the ground, with both a head and bony orange hands to stick in your lawn. The shape of the head is interesting though, isn't it? It's a scowling pumpkin with black skull-like eye and nose pits, but no visible mouth, and the bottom edge of it is jagged, scalloped and splayed out all the way around, more like it's either been hacked away at the bottom and has already begun sagging into a puddle, or it's stretching up from a larger subterranean body.

MUTANT ZOMBIE TURTLE

  A 2026 addition to Spirit's latex zombie animal props is a turtle, or maybe tortoise with two heads and a broken shell. Very cute! I also like the stylistic, angular spirals on each of the shell's hexagonal scutes. A little "cartoonier" than the rest of the realistic sculpt, in a fun way.

FACE-BURSTING CLOWN

  Spirit puts out lots and lots of giant animatronic clowns, and most of them kind of blend together for me. I like this one, though, because it has a genuinely cute and innocent old-fashioned clown face, not trying too hard to already look "monstrous," until of course the face splits open and there's some kind of fanged skull-demon underneath. It's a fun concept! I might have put something different under the clown face, maybe something "eerier," like just glowing eyes in blackness, but I understand falling back on something tried and true for the scary prop market.

MUTANT ZOMBIE COCKROACH

  I should have been a little more delighted by this, and I do appreciate the addition of another insect to this line, but 2025's zombie fly, which they thankfully still sell this year, had a gorgeously detailed and imaginative design. This is an ordinary looking cockroach, smoother and less detailed than a real cockroach, with a patch of glowing intestine-like guts on the back. It's just a little too plain, not really living up to what it's supposed to be and certainly not living up to the standard set by last year's Dipteran.

GIANT ANIMATRONIC "FLY"

  NOW we're talking! A big giant black and grey insect monster with bulging, highly detailed compound eyes and translucent, flapping wings! My only critique here is that the face is more like that of a mutant wasp or beetle. With a fly-like proboscis, I would actually want one, but I guess it's a good thing that it only has monster fangs, so I don't have to feel sad that I don't have hundreds of money to spend on a plastic bug I don't even have any room for.

MUTANT FISH

  This is actually my favorite thing at Spirit this year. A piranha-like greenish fish with four bulging black eyes, red muscle and white bone exposed from where it's already been filleted, but it's also UNDEAD, or at least did not yet naturally die, because it's animated to shake and flail around on the hook it's hung from! It apparently ties in to some sort of haunted bayou line, but also fits with all the other zombie or mutant animals, and even with the gas mask family.

  It's just....not worth the almost sixty or seventy dollar price tag. You read that correctly. The shaking mechanism cannot be that advanced, can it?! This rubber fish, which is only like a foot long, costs more than some 50-hour video games. It costs more than it does to fill the average car with gas right now, during a war. What the heck are you even doing, Spirit. This didn't even need to be animatronic. It ought to have just been another static rubber animal!