Folks, as Halloween approaches, it’s time to talk about our nation’s tragic addiction to giant plastic skeletons.
You can’t throw a fun-sized Snickers bar these days without hitting some towering skeletal figure posed like it’s tromping across a person’s yard or pulling itself up from the ground. They’ve been all the Halloween rage for several years, and are now bordering on ubiquitous. And they are, in my opinion, ruining the spookiness of a season known for its realism and believability.
Oh yeah, right, like I’m going to believe a giant was buried in your yard and is now emerging as a reanimated skeleton. Gimme a break!
Who ever heard of a giant skeleton? Scary human skeletons, as we all know, are the reanimated bones of people long-dead. That’s just basic biology/horrorology. The same holds true with the skeletons of dogs, wolves, horses, etc. The bony undead beings are the same size as the once-alive creatures from whence they came.
So now, all of a sudden, I’m supposed to believe giants exist? Just because some profit-hungry Halloween profiteers in corporate America started cranking out ludicrously large skeletons?
C’mon! I wasn’t born, bitten by a vampire and then reborn as an eternal creature of the night yesterday.
A yard full of regular, human-sized skeletons mucking about next to styrofoam gravestones and an inflatable ghost — that makes sense. That’s scary, because it’s something that could totally happen.
A perfectly normal looking, 100% believable skeleton. Was that so hard?
But a giant-ass skeleton that is, presumably, the remains of some towering giant, far taller than any human in recorded history? Nonsense! Do these companies think I’m a child? Do they think I consider “Jack and the Beanstalk” a work of nonfiction?
Halloween will only remain scary if we decorate in accordance with the rules of common sense.
Could there be a six-foot-wide spider with bright-red eyes climbing up the front of my neighbor’s home? Yes. I’ve seen some pretty big spiders in my day — easily an inch or two wide — so what’s stopping them from growing as big as a dining-room table? It could absolutely happen, and that’s why every time I see my neighbor’s spider decoration, I feel a tingle of terror up my spine.
Could a witch fly into a tree and wind up splayed out across the bark? Of course. I’ve never flown a broom, but I have to imagine it’s tricky.
Absurd giant skeletons are putting perfectly scary ghosts out of work. Photo by Carlos Nunez on Unsplash
Every year I take a human-sized skeleton and connect it to a fountain pump and then use green-dyed water to make it look like the skeleton is puking nuclear waste. Could there be a nuclear-waste-spewing skeleton in my front yard? Absolutely. Just as long as it’s what we in the accurate Halloween decor community call a Skeleton Of Believable Size (SOBS).
Were I to connect that nuclear-waste-looking water system to a Skeleton Of Unbelievable Size (SOUS), it would look ridiculous. The parents of trick-or-treaters passing by would say, “So I guess he thinks giants are real and, once their skeletons are reanimated, they vomit some kind of green juice? What a weirdo. We’re not stopping there, kids.”
My guess is this fad will pass once more people realize the logic behind my argument. They’ll return to the accurate old ways, decorating with things any sensible person believes in, like werewolves and zombies and such.
There will eventually be landfills nationwide filled with oversized skeleton bones.
You could say it will make the country look like a massive graveyard for giants.
But only a fool would believe giants exist.
