This is a chewed-up apple core, but with a whole bunch of differently sized human skulls in the center. Not in such a way that the center of the apple appears to have been "made" of skulls, mind you, but as if all these skulls were just buried inside it, hidden under the apple flesh. What I like about this design isn't just the weirdness of the overall combination, but the fact that the apple HAS been chewed all the way around. This implies that someone had to continue eating the apple even after hitting their first skull. They found at least one tiny, fleshless human head in their fruit, and all they thought was "huh, that's odd," and they just...kept going. They kept going, biting into skull after skull, perhaps wondering every time if the next bite might be different, perhaps wanting to see just how many more skulls there might be. Wondering where the apple is going with this.

  A statue of a hairy jumping spider, with big almond-shaped eyes rather than a real spider's perfectly circular ones. And it's got a floppy witch hat, a little star on its forehead, and another star on a magic staff. It's either a spellcaster in spider form, or maybe the spellcaster's adorable familiar? This is one that especially feels like it WAS made by a human artist, at first, but probably plagiarized.

  Likewise, this feels like it has to be a ripoff of a "real" item, maybe from a holiday figurine catalog somewhere. It's a cartoonish, stylized frog that almost looks like it's formed out of a bunch of smooth stones, except it's covered in ragdoll style stitches. It's also standing on what can only be described as a Pile of Halloween. A mass of tombstones, candles, spider webs, skulls and Jack O' Lanterns, every one of them no bigger than one of the frog's orange, glowing eyeballs. We are left to assume this frog is around elephant size, and since it has that stony texture, I can only think of it as some kind of magically animate graveyard guardian.

  That's all this was called in the particular listing I found. "Horror Figures." But it's a single figure of two people, dressed in grimy normal human clothes, with ghoulish pumpkin-shaped heads. Not necessarily pumpkins for heads, since they look more fleshy, and they're the same off-white color as the hands. The taller one has a wide, vicious smile and pure white eyes, while the shorter one has black, more corpsen looking eyes over a more gaping, more monstrously toothy mouth. Both look pretty happy about something, and they're posed pretty much like they're a proud parent and child. I guess they're just out trick-or-treating!

  A blood-stained skull, with an eyeball deep in its socket, and what appear to be two entire smaller skeletons growing or hatching out of its sides, though all we can see of them so far are their skulls and their arms, so who knows if there's really any more to them.

  This ghost looks SO unhappy, despite having both a floppy witch hat and an electric guitar. Why so glum!? What more could you possibly want?! Maybe it's just getting ready to play a really sad one. Maybe it's playing a ghostly breakup song.

  This is one of the ones where I really suspect the initial design to have been AI generated, and I really hate that I suspect it. Because it's a skull-faced ghoul, holding a pumpkin, whose entire robe or cloak also looks formed from a pumpkin. And that's the kind of oddity we do see all the time from man-made Halloween critters, the kind I built this very website upon, but now it's also the kind of oddity a bot will come up with just because it doesn't understand where the boundaries ought to be between the elements of a design. A part of me is still charmed by that, I have to say; the metaphorical ghost of the machine has its own curious charms as an "entity," but gone is the certainty that a fellow human simply came up with a cute and clever little idea that they cared about. Instead, they rolled some dice and picked from a pile of mistakes a machine randomized.

  They didn't call this anything with even that much effort, of course. I don't remember what they called this. I know it was just something like "Creative Fun Halloween Pumpkin" or something along those lines. It's a sinister Jack O' Lantern atop a mass of gnarled root-like tentacles, roughly forming a Cephalopod shape. Neat, I guess, but almost too easy by my current standards.

...An owl with a skull face, a mouthful of sharp teeth under its beak, a pumpkin SEWN onto its head, a stitched-together body and bloody skulls down its chest would have been a new all-time celebrity of Bogleech Halloween if I'd found it on store shelves before the mid-2020's, but now? I can tell immediately that this one was cooked up by AI randomization, I even recognize the specific style of AI-made cartoon monster in its facial features, and I just can't muster the same emotions I could have when I knew that someone, somewhere, was actually thinking up these kinds of things.

You can also see the 3-d print lines in the photo, so this was made for even cheaper than the cheapest molded plastic or resin figurines you could have found at Dollar General, and the paint job can't possibly look as vibrant in real life.

  Not the usual scary baby doll head, but some sort of old lady head, covered in cracks, with intense bugged-out white eyes. She's also got dark hair textured a little bit like it's made out of scaly snakes, so perhaps this is some kind of gorgon, though we can't see any heads on these serpents.

  This is a bust of a screaming nun's head, but her entire lower jaw is an upside-down skull, mirroring the human half of her face. I've seen a few different iterations of this. Was it lifted from a recent horror movie? From a horror poster? I can't be bothered to even check really.

  Generated from the same style as the owl. This is a many fanged, grinning cat, which is also a purple, green and orange clown, which is also apparently supposed to be some sort of a pumpkin monster, solely because it has a lot of orange in it and the shock of hair on top is also fused with a pumpkin stem. You can see throughout many of these how the algorithm, told to make something in "halloween style," simply pulls aspects of pumpkin to inject at random, though the stem on top ends up being the most consistent characteristic.

That's interesting in its own way, to be honest. When a computer looks at what "halloween" is supposed to mean, it apparently zeroes in on the *stems* of Jack O' Lanterns as an essential symbol. You can see the illogical logic of this, and it's the kind of error that does give algorithmic generation some charm of its own, if only it wasn't replacing humanity and poisoning our water supplies to do it.

  It's been a while since I've seen a new style of skeleton octopus! This one has many typical hallmarks of the trope. A head made of a ribcage, empty black eye sockets and tentacles made of vertebrae. It has rounder, sadder sockets than some of the others I've seen though, it comes painted green like a cthuly-monster, and the tentacles feature little pink suckers. Aesthetically one of the better looking skelepuses to rip off what Crazy Bonez started.

  This one is only just strange enough that you can't be entirely sure of AI meddling. Certainly I've seen this level of weird many times before such a thing could be automated at all. It's a mostly normal witch head, but it's on top of a pumpkin, and it has a big long tongue trailing to the ground. And that's it. That's a "pumpkin witch," apparently. An old lady with a limbless vegetable body and a giant gross tongue. Fine. Sure.

  So this is what a computer program, at some point, deduced as the ideal Scary Clown. Nothing's really overtly clownish about this cackling nosferatu's face, per se, but it has three colorful, oversized hands, one of which sprouts off its head as one half of its jester cap, and it has a little tiny body with a rib cage that's also a neck.

  This one is definitely more human-designed. It's just not quite tryhard enough to be algorithmic. Two mushrooms whose caps look a little like wrinkly cloth, with adorable little eye and mouth holes to indicate that they are ghosts, and even little nubby ghost arms sticking out the sides. Precious!

  This is a bendy-legged giant spider that rolls round on a set of wheels, and it has a plastic vampire bat head on top with light-up eyes. I actually really love that, because how often do you see a bat hybrid creature that uses only the bat's head, without any wings? Bats have AWESOME heads, even when they're kind of stylized a little too much like a weird cat or dog monster, as is the case here. That probably only even happens as much as it does because the wings are always hogging the spotlight so much. Don't let bat wings push you around, bat heads! Stand up for yourself, bat heads!!!!

  A skull with limbs attached is usually spider-like, but this is a skull with multiple limbs radiating out in a more starfish-like configuration, or maybe like the demon Buer. The limbs aren't even arranged in bilateral pairs, like an insect or anything, but with one limb sticking straight up, one straight down, and four out the sides. This is an entirely new and unique species of undead.

  There are multiple listings for this "Halloween Hanging Decor," and even slight variations, but it's straight-up just a plastic baby covered in blood, shipped with bandages and a noose. And I mean "shipped with," as in they are shown to be separate items you assemble yourself. You know. Like a craft project.

  Finally, some brave soul has the integrity to stand up and really tell it like it is.

  So I actually saw these and actually ordered them all the way back in June or July, since they were only $3.50 at the time, technically making them my very first Halloween purchase of the season. They're nothing but a pair of ghostly hands modeled in resin, sticking straight up, and each has two cartoonish yellow ghost eyes, so basically they're entire hand-shaped sheet ghosts. It's almost too simple to be AI, but it's also not a normal human concept. I've given up trying to guess every time, for my sanity's sake. They're cute, and they actually even look better in person, with a pleasing blue tinge:

  These also feel pretty solid and hefty for being only three inches tall, actually not cheap 3-d printed material at all! But speaking of the 3-d printed guys, just how do those stack up?

  The last of the "most likely ai generated" we're looking at here, this appears to be a purple and greenish zombie imp wrapped in dirty mummy bandages, drooling blood and emerging from a whole blood-filled cauldron. It does have a cool, strikingly colorful style to it that brings to mind old horror manga, and I like the design on its own merits enough that I decided, of all the "slop" items on here, this is the one I should order for more accurate review purposes. Slop or not, we need to see just how much these things look at all like the image, and luckily, I caught them "on sale" for only around five bucks with free shipping.

Two weeks later...

  To be honest, I was expecting worse. You can tell by my fingers that it's slightly smaller than they made it look, it doesn't have the teeth, the print job left some hanging crumbs of plastic and the face doesn't have the purple paint application, but everything else is exactly what was in the photo. 3-d printed, but definitely painted by hand. I have to say the visual difference between a 3-d printed decoration and a traditional factory-molded decoration is negligible, though the $5 I paid for this was marked down from an original price of $20, and frankly even the $5 was pushing it.

There are, admittedly, upsides to the 3-d print invasion, if by any chance it evolves along the right path. The same piece of equipment can make any shape, and the items can be made on-demand, which technically means that these faceless manufacturing brands have the ability to cut way, way down on both the total space they need for factory equipment and the total amount of plastic junk they ship out all at once. Compare the idea of printing only what is actually ordered to the Funko Pop strategy of filling entire warehouses with ten billion grogus before anybody even asks, and you should get what I mean. It CAN be a boon, emphasis on "can."

...But if you want my more detailed feelings on the AI generation aspect, well, I started writing that out here, and it went on for so long that I wound up scrapping it, because what I had to say was as long as a whole article itself. The shortened version is that I hate every direction in which the technology is being abused, for all the well-established reasons, but I don't hate the technology itself. It was not supposed to generate mountains of garbage for the benefit of a few stupidly rich manchildren. It was supposed to run on just a few harddrives at a time, assist with highly specific kinds of tasks that happen to demand more pattern recognition than a human being can reasonably undertake, to run interesting experiments in the simulation of cognitive processes and occasionally amuse people with wonky pictures of amorphous dogs. Now there's a great idea for Halloween decor. Remember the amorphous dogs?? They went so viral back in the day, they should have been a shoe-in for a new archetype of monster.

Blob dogs, am I right?? We could have called them "blogs!"

I hope that isn't taken already.