For lovers of the Home Depot's iconic 12-foot skeleton, the first "Code Orange" of the year is finally imminent. The Home Depot announced Tuesday that its 2025 Halloween collection will launch next month and include the return of "Skelly," plus two new petrifying pets.
The full lineup will go live online and in the Home Depot app on Monday, August 4, before select items hit store shelves later this fall around Labor Day.
"This year’s collection has something for everyone," said Aubrey Horowitz, the Home Depot's decorative holiday merchant. "Whether you’re a Halloween enthusiast adding to your collection or a family starting new traditions, we’ve combined creativity, quality, and value to make your celebrations even spookier.”
Next week's sale will mark the home improvement retailer's first Halloween drop of the year after it scrapped a "Halfway to Halloween" launch in April, disappointing collectors and sparking conspiracy theories among its active fandom on Facebook.
The Home Depot 2025 Halloween collection: What's new and what's not
Skelly helms the Home Depot's marquee "Grave & Bones" collection for the sixth year in a row at its usual price of $299. It's joined for the first time by a 5-foot-tall, Doberman-style Sitting Skelly's Dog with moving LCD "LifeEyes" ($249) and a frisky 5-foot-long Skelly's Cat ($199). The Home Depot got a lot of requests for the latter specifically, Horowitz told Mashable. Skelly's other pet, the megapopular seven-foot-long Skelly's Dog ($199), which debuted in 2024, will get an online-only restock alongside them.
Rounding out the Skelly family is a new 6.5-foot animated Ultra Skelly ($279), which has Bluetooth support — users can have it play recorded messages or control it in real time from their smartphone. Horowitz said it's the item she's "probably most excited about" because the Halloween market hasn't seen such technology before.
"He's completely customizable, so you can speak into him live and really spook your trick-or-treaters on Halloween," she explained. "You can customize his lights and motion. He has 18 different eyes [settings], so really perfect for any party — Halloween, New Year's. He's kind of a year-round fixture, so I'm really excited about him."
The Home Depot is also launching a new woodland-inspired "Gruesome Grounds" collection that includes the "Worricrow" and "Gally Crow," two light-up, motion-activated 15-footers with 12-foot arm spans — its largest animatronics yet. They're both priced at $399, and the Gally Crow will be an online exclusive.
The Home Depot didn't specify when exactly its Halloween drop will begin on August 4, but in years past, its listings have gone live around 6 a.m. ET. All featured items will be available while supplies last.
Happy belated Summerween
August might seem premature for a Halloween drop, but it's extremely late by the Home Depot's standards. From 2022 to 2024, the retailer launched select props and animatronics in April as part of a Halfway to Halloween sale before releasing its complete lineup in mid-July. That spring sale was canceled for 2025.
The decision was cause for serious concern among the Home Depot's Facebook fandoms, as Mashable previously reported. Many members theorized that the retailer's usual programming was thwarted by President Donald Trump's tariffs on imported goods from China, as Skelly and other Home Depot animatronics are made by a California company called Seasonal Visions International (SVI).
The Home Depot wouldn't confirm that tariffs directly impacted its Halfway to Halloween event. The company told Mashable in June that its past iterations were meant as a "surprise and delight moment" for its Halloween superfans and that "it's not necessarily a core part of our strategy." However, our investigation found that tariffs had a ripple effect on the Halloween industry this spring.
Some of the Home Depot's competitors wound up postponing or cancelling their own Halloween drops due to economic turmoil. And for its part, SVI ended its free replacement part program, reduced its overall parts availability, and closed its support lines in July, citing "changes in tariffs and the global supply chain shifts" in a note on its website.
