Spooky Town Halloween Superstore

Phoning this one in this week, since October begins on a Wednesday, and I most certainly have nothing prepared. Well, I’ve been gathering material for over a month, but I’ve yet to get our familiar characters out of the attic and set up a space that I can trip over for the next 31 days.

SPOOKY TOWN!

Never heard of it? I don’t imagine you would have. It sort of popped up once and then disappeared, never to be seen again. Think of it like: Spirit meets the discount section of your local drugstore that actually sells drugs. It has the essentials, but they’re from an alternate dimension that feels oddly unsettling. Familiar but foreign. In other words, perfect.

Now, unlike the signage for Spirit Halloween, which speaks for itself through clever use of color and graphic design, Spirit World needs to show you the goods up front. There’s no PR team, nor is there a teenage webmaster prodigy who’s going to whip up a catchy logo. No, no. We’re working with the BloodDrip font that comes with MS Word 2010 and a whole bay window full of the best items on display.

It’s a mix of inflatables, quasi-coherent costume combinations, and stray indoor/outdoor decor. Any ol’ random mask is combined with an ol’ random outfit. Want a blowup spider and haunted tree? They have two. Want just the top half of a baby zombie doll? They have three. Want a date with either of those seductive mannequins? Well… you’ll have to meet the manager out back. Moving on.

I mentioned an unsettling alternate dimension, and I believe such a place is called Quebec. Now having descended from family roots several generations ago, I have far kinder feelings toward the French up north than, say, actual Canadians. And if there was any dispute, it’s settled once you see the packaging here. The translations prove far more effective at conveying the Halloween vibe. Body in a Bag? Please… Corps dans un sac is just brimming with imagery. We even have the famous Toile D’Araigne… the Spider’s Toilet from one of my previous Halloween articles that I won’t link to.

You may think that the selection is lacking given the hodgepodge nature of this shelf, but fear not. The entire store is chock-full, just not in any meaningful order. There’s a certain feng shui to having shower curtains next to window clings next to rubber, severed feet. Bonus points for them admitting that all this stuff is ancient and will give you fresh batteries so you don’t pull a Clark Griswold when you get home and nothing works.

Hoping to find a mask? Spooky Town has you covered. Cheap too. The best part is they’re the rubber kind you used to find all over before manufacturers started taking it seriously and adding proper visibility and some semblance of structural integrity. They certainly won’t hold their shape, and you may begrudge having to take the police officer’s advice from 1986 into account and cut the eyeholesa little larger, but you won’t have any lack of variety to choose from when you do.

Stoned lizards… 500 Clowns… The Bird of Staring… They’re all here, and 50% off the marked price. Things were already discounted, so it only gets better.

But wait! Are there bigger items I can buy to win the neighborhood decoration contest against Tim Allen? You betcha. I lied about everything being cheap, but I guess in the grand scheme of things, these are at least on par or a little under places like Target and Home Depot. And compared to the proper stores, it’s a no-brainer.

Just don’t touch the rabbit. He’s got some weird kinks, and his favorite song is apparently Wolf Moon. You’ve been warned.

I want to hype up the mystique and pretend that much of this stuff is decades old, having waited ages for the perfect moment to land in your hands. But the Frelons Meurtriers betrays itself as a relic of 2020, when we playfully thought we’d get a collectable plague each month instead of endless boredom and people throwing themselves into the ocean because they lost their income.

The others are timeless, though. The usual Ginger Devil Elvis and the rubber skele-goose. You’ve seen it all before, so let’s continue.

That said… I certainly feel like this packaging harkens back to my youth. I can’t really pinpoint it, since I wasn’t in the habit of keeping random wrappers around for posterity, but that array of ‘Colors’ fires something in my memory that can’t be denied. If I had to guess, they were at the Christmas Tree Shop back when glowsticks were novel and only available once a year. The metallic baggie’s distinctive, so I won’t believe these are from any later than 1987.

That brand apparently also did more than mix volatile chemicals into portable containers; they’re pioneers of equity too. For far too long, mimes and clowns have oppressed us with their white paint supremacy. COLORCOLOR, COLORCOLOR, COLORCOLOR, took the brave step and gave us the option of recreating your favorite Amos and Andy skit. It’s also beneficial that they stick with just the French translations.

Well, that’s it. I have much to do and less time to do it, so wish me luck pulling a Halloween story arc out of thin air and finding 25 more spiders before November.

You can tell I'm rushing. I forgot to mention if I bought anything. I did! It's this inflatable spider here, and the lights died shortly after. Bye...