Spirit Halloween 2016

Spirit Halloween shops are opening around this time. I checked one out the other day and had a blast! Let's take a look at the items and trends this season.

There was a nice showing of Ouija-inspired items and some more gothic cemetery type items (greatly appreciated). There were creepy baby dolls and more traditionally menacing masks that looked fairly pagan (greatly appreciated). 

There was a new line of items that are more like haunted objects (greatly appreciated). It's fairly intuitive that Spirit Halloween is offering objects like wall hangings with a spider that moves across it on its own, a quill pen that writes on its own in a book, and a Ouija board that lights up and the planchette moves on its own. It's a great selling feature when someone wants to put items that move on their own throughout their home for a haunted house effect. Instead of one obnoxious automaton, they could have subtle things that, when someone passes by them, they startle and move. I only wish they would quit giving these items voices and obnoxious noises! It ruins the effect. 

It's much more scary to see something move on its own and not know why than to have the object tell you why in an annoying loud voice.

There was a nice showing of scarecrow-related items (greatly appreciated by us traditionalists). Day of the Dead and sugar skull items were still in show this year and election-related costumes. Superheroes are still quite popular, as well. 

They also were carrying all the fantastic AtmosFEARfx items. If you haven't seen these, they are DVDs that can be played on your TV or projected onto a piece of cloth to make a holographic image in a window or door, or out in the yard. They are really amazing. Check out samples on their YouTube channel. 

All in all, given the huge amount of zombie items and automatons of the past several years, it is so nice to see Spirit Halloween getting into the "spirit" of Halloween more with traditional, vintage, nostalgic, and gothic items more and more. In fact, some of these items, folks could keep up year-round in their homes, just like I advised in the "Everyday Halloween" section of new book Adult Halloween: Taking Back the Season!