The Final Halloween Decor Haul of 2024, part one: It's Alive (with Frankenstein merch)

Each year, to wrap up our multi-month Halloween Haunt event, we here at Cereal Creatures do one final Halloween decor hunt for the latest, spookiest and yes, Frankenstein-iest merch on store shelves. Because we covered so much ground this year, we're going to break it down into multiple posts so that we can share all our great finds!

And what better way to start than this great Frankenstein monster from HomeGoods? He stands about 16" tall.

Here was an unexpected find--these Frankenstein monster and Dracula things from Michaels. I'm not sure if they are planters or vases or candy dishes. I guess you can do with them whatever you please, but it had been so long since we'd been able to get to a Michael's, we'd expected them to have sold out long ago. Luckily, that was not the case!

This vintage-style Owl blowmold with lights and sounds is another item we expected to be long gone--but alas, one of the Targets we hit had this one in stock. As creator of the Green Owl comic, we love our owls and the fact that it's vintage Halloween decor makes it all that more sweeter!

Again, this Target find was no where on our plans, but like our owl above, one lonely jack o'lantern headed dapper man was in blow mold form was just what we needed to top off our "in your face" Halloween finds. He kind of reminds us of our own original character, Gourd Rotter! Also, while we had grown to hate the battery-operated decor, this year we're seeing quite a few of the automatic shut-off/turn-on pieces like this. And better yet, this one just lights up without music or sounds.

Here'a a plethora of finds. We really didn't need the candy, but the artwork on two of our favoirte characters, Frankenstein and a Scarecrow, forced us top pic these two up from Homegoods. The Frankenstein monster and Dracula heads are candles from TJ Maxx. The metal Frankenstein is a light-up lantern from Menards and yes, once again we ordered Boris Karloff coffee this year. We didn't know this, but recently heard from the makers of this coffee, who collaborated with Karloff's daughter, that this blend was what Boris himself preferred.

This Frankenstein monster is a cookie jar, an early pickup from Homegoods.

A vintage cat pillow. No, this isn't the one seen at some Five Below's, this was a pickup from a local antique mall.

Our Spirit Halloween haul included this guy--an animated plague doctor plush. It looked really good, but secretly, I plan to use the concept for a new character I'm writing for an upcoming comic!

When I first heard about the Care Bears x Universal Monsters collab, I wasn't that thrilled. The end result looks pretty good though. This plush was the only one avaible and we think it was from Target.

The local Party City is one of those closing, so this knock-off Wolf Man figure, the last lonely one in the store is now mine. His eyes light up and make a sound.

As is this Frankenstein monster, also the last one. He didn't even have price stickers on him, but both were part of a Halloween closeout sale. It's too bad the store is closing, they had a lot of cool Halloween decor and this late in the season what they did have was picked over and still had quite a few worthwhile pieces.

It's not a haul if we don't over do it at the local toy and collectible shop, 1313 Mocking Bird Lane in Lawrence, KS. One of the things we got there was this Wolf Man head knocker joining the Dracula and Frankenstein monster we picked up last time.

And finally, Spirit Halloween had a few of these vintage-style masks that we've been picking up over the years.