Skip NavigationAlisa Stern | Make It; Home Depot; Lowe’s; DNY59 | Getty Images
If it feels like there are a lot more giant skeletons around these days, you’re not imagining it.
What began as a viral novelty just six years ago has become a Halloween staple, and a growing line of business, as big-box retailers have responded to demand with an expanding array of towering monsters each fall.
“In 2020, Skelly’s debut really was … the genesis of these fully molded structures that people could put in their yards,” said Tyler Pelfrey, a manager of brand communications at Home Depot.
What followed was a retail arms race of increasingly elaborate creatures — undead horses, zombie velociraptors — with shoppers hauling home 85-pound boxes of oversized bones that might not fit in a car trunk.
The decorations aren’t the only thing expanding. As shoppers spend more on Halloween, retailers are giving the holiday more room, with seasonal displays arriving earlier and occupying larger sections of stores.
Americans are expected to spend a record $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, up from $8.8 billion in 2019, according to the National Retail Federation. Spending on decorations alone has risen from $2.6 billion to $4.3 billion over that period.
The giant Halloween decoration arms race
Home Depot introduced its 12-foot skeleton in 2020 for $299. Nicknamed “Skelly,” it quickly sold out, with some fetching around $1,000 on the resale market at the time.
Retailers responded by making more of them — and more things like them. By 2024, Home Depot had quadrupled production of Skelly from its first year and increased its assortment of giant Halloween decorations fivefold, according to Fast Company. It has introduced at least one new giant every year since 2021, Pelfrey says.
Other big-box retailers followed suit. Sam’s Club now offers oversized animatronics reaching 12 feet tall, while Lowe’s sells the 15-foot headless Skeleton Watcher, which holds its severed skull aloft and projects spotlight beams from its glowing eyes. Home Depot, meanwhile, has upgraded Skelly with new tricks: an app-controlled version can move its head and mouth, let owners speak through it in real time and display American-flag eyeballs, among other settings.
Oversized Halloween animatronics have proliferated with an almost Darwinian biodiversity: motion-activated 12-foot pumpkin kings, three-headed carnivorous plants studded with human bones and a 5-foot undead parrot that answers yes-or-no questions are all on sale this fall.
At Sam’s Club, the 11-foot Towering Reaper is among its 10 best-selling Halloween items this year, with sales ahead of expectations and sellouts at some locations. Online visits to the retailer’s Halloween décor listings rose 67% in July from a year earlier, according to Business Insider.
That growth is visible inside the stores, too. In 2013, Home Depot’s Halloween merchandise occupied a single endcap — a display at the end of a store aisle. By 2026, its displays can take up more than 800 square feet of floor space.
Halloween shopping is starting earlier, too. Nearly half of shoppers planned to begin their Halloween shopping by September or earlier this year, compared with about a third a decade ago, according to the National Retail Federation.
“Halloween has evolved from a discrete event into an extended consumption season,” said Ross Steinman, a consumer psychology professor at Widener University.
Why giant skeletons caught on
One reason for the oversized monsters’ appeal is obvious. They’re really big.
And size was always the point: Home Depot’s team wanted something “larger than life” that would feel overpowering when it began developing Skelly in 2019, Lance Allen, the retailer’s senior product merchant, recalled in a 2024 Vice oral history.
“At one time, it was like, ‘Ah, a 10-foot would be huge. That’d be empowering. Everybody would like 10 feet!’” Allen said. “And then it’s like, let’s just press everything, no limits! Let’s go higher than everybody thought was possible.”
The result was the 12-foot Skelly. And when it debuted in 2020, its visibility was well suited to the moment. It was the first Halloween of the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were social distancing and spending much more time at home.
“With everyone being at home, I think [Skelly] being so giant and being able to [be seen] from a far distance, really helped with him being so popular,” Rachel Little, a former Home Depot product engineer who helped develop Skelly, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2023.
The popularity has endured, with owners sharing their creations on social media, often in tableaus that might include skeleton families or a giant skeleton walking a skeleton dog. But when the first Skelly came out, it was only designed for the Halloween season.
“One of the things we didn’t prepare for was, we didn’t know people were going to keep these up year-round,” Allen told Vice.
Indeed, owners found reasons to keep Skelly on the lawn, dressing it for Christmas and Independence Day — enough of them that Home Depot eventually added UV protection and changed the resin to better withstand summer heat. The dress-up trend has even attracted brands: Arby’s this year released a $46.66 “Meat Sweats” tracksuit specifically designed to fit a 12-foot skeleton.
Some owners go even further, buying articulated elbows and other replacement joints designed and sold by independent sellers to give their Skellies more flexibility for elaborate poses.
Of course, you don’t put a Hawaiian shirt on a 12-foot skeleton and pose it just for yourself. It’s meant to be seen.
“Giant Halloween displays are directed outward towards a public and the front lawn becomes a stage, the homeowner becomes a producer, and neighbors and passersby become the audience,” says Timothy Malefyt, a marketing professor and business anthropologist at Fordham University.
And putting something that conspicuous in the front yard can get neighbors talking. As more of life has moved online, Malefyt says opportunities for shared, real-world experiences have become more meaningful — and Halloween decorations offer one without requiring much formal social interaction.
“Large-scale displays transform a home from a private space into part of a shared neighborhood experience,” Steinman says. “In that sense, consumers are purchasing an experience as much as a decoration.”
VIDEO09:36I quit my $250K/year tech job–now I make $33K/year selling matchaMillennial Money
