YMMV / Spirit Halloween

• Bile Fascination: Johnny Punk was such a derided and unpopular prop for his lackluster execution and bad voice acting that jokes around the prop as The Scrappy or a Memetic Loser started to flip around back to giving the animatronic an ironic appeal.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The Dead Ringer is a telephone made out of skin. Its earpiece has an ear on it, and the mouthpiece is made of a jaw.
  • Sawin' Wood Doll is a twisted version of Pinocchio. He's sawing his hands off for some reason, and the fluid coming from his wrists looks more like blood than tree sap.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rosemary, Pumpkin Nester, the Broken Spine Girl, and the Jumping Spiders are all very popular props.
• Memetic Molester: Waving Wally's prototype at the Flagship location has a rather... Disturbing phrase that brings this trope to mind.
  Waving Wally: Come with me to the big top. We will have such a fun time. I love to play games... I know the back way into the tent, I will show you the way! Come with me...
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Spirit Halloween's tendency to rent out the buildings of recently-closed businesses for their store locations has not gone unnoticed, and anytime a place closes for any reason, there's usually at least one person joking that they have been purchased by Spirit Halloween. This has even extended to the United States Capitol Building with a Spirit banner across it, with captions like "three hours into government shutdown and already there's one of those Halloween stores in there". One time a group of striking Warner Bros employees hung a banner over the doors as if to suggest the company will go bankrupt without them.
  • The Spirit Costume Parody^Explanation Multiple fake costume packages came out in the run-up to Halloween 2022. The photoshopped images were posted to Twitter en-masse covering multiple subjects. Even Spirit Halloween itself found it hilarious
• Narm Charm: A very early promotional sketch video on their channel, "Helena's 'Spirit'ed Halloween Shopping Trip", should be the most awkward thing in the world, with low production value as we watch a lonely actress and her inanimate skeleton companion, watching her prattle some presumed improv to various decorations while shopping. And yet, the actress puts so much energy into it and has so much fun that it's still enjoyable.
• Nightmare Retardant: A few props fail to be scary because they are cheesy, but some fail because they make no sense.
  • The Convulsing Nurse is a nurse whose arms have been cut off and attached to hooked chains, but her face doesn't make much sense. She appears to be wearing some sort of mask, and the first aid box is supposed to imply that her face and fingers have been removed, but it doesn't look convincing. Her general lack of hair also detracts from the realism.
  • The Deady Teddy is ridiculous when you think about it. Why on earth does a plush teddy bear have a humanoid skull and a heart? And why is he eating it?
  • Wheelchair Granny takes this to a whole new level. Her animation is biologically impossible (and it's clearly not for a surreal effect), and her voice and the phrases she speaks are far from intimidating.
  • Morbid Enterprises props have been subject to this reaction due to bizarre appearances, poor voice acting and very poor quality overall. These very reasons are most likely why their props have been dropped from being sold in Spirit’s stores and reduced to being online only on Spirit’s website.
  • The Walking Zombie Girl might have been creepy, but her audio totally ruins the effect, due to chipmunked laughter and unintelligible speech.
  • 2012's Ghost Girl is often criticized by the haunter community for her flailing inflatable arms and goofy-looking face.
  • The Creepy Roaming Bear makes absolutely no attempts to hide its roaming base, unlike the dolls, and the fact that the subject couldn't be squeezed into a robe or dress that would preserve the effect makes it questionable why they even tried to pull it off.
  • Lost Her Way, a headless bump-and-go prop is a good creepy idea, but her dialogue lets it down, since it is literally impossible to talk without a head.
  • Evil Ragdoll. Unless she’s possessed a lá Chucky, the blood on her mouth makes no sense. And why is she sewing her mouth shut anyway?
  • Jumping Cat is pretty frightening, until you realize that its hissing and yowls post-Jump Scare are from the viral "Mad Cat Burger and Fries" Youtube video.
  • Betty Sharpe's face is supposed to be creepy, with bugged-out eyes and a demented grin, but it's way too silly-looking to take seriously. Plus, the blood splatter on her face looks more like a bad case of zits or chicken pox.
• Periphery Demographic: Spirit initially marketed itself to older teens and adult haunters, but as a haunting community sprung up on YouTube, it became evident that one of the largest demographics for big scary Halloween props was young boys, who would, sometimes before the age of 13, showcase expertise on the prop mechanics and catalog that the manufacturers would be challenged to match. Spirit seems to have eventually picked up on the fact that their fanbase and word-of-mouth promotion were being led by children and more kids were coming into their stores to see their edgy props, leading to them controversially making their darker props fewer in number, lightening some prop rereleases, and keeping darker props out of in-store displays.
• Quantity Versus Quality: Tekky Toys props are generally considered to have great ideas and animation, but some buyers avoid them due to several of their props being prone to malfunction or damage. Demonica had to be redesigned due to chronic mechanical breakdowns, but even the new version had lots of problems.
• The Scrappy: Props that don't work well or just have a terrible execution.
  • One of the least popular props they've ever sold is the Wheelchair Granny. Many would think she'd be a redo of the Wheelchair Psycho and lean forward while grunting as if trying to get you with her cleaver, but they thought wrong. What she does is impossibly bob up and down in her seat, while she speaks fairly tame phrases in an annoyed tone. The motors on her rising mechanism are very loud, and the drool coming out of her mouth was open to far grosser interpretations that undermined the prop's gravitas even further.
  • 2020's Johnny Punk (a preteen bully in a clown mask sitting on a swing) was disdained by the haunting community for his poor voice acting and phrases, cheap-looking quality and the fact he was chosen to be an in-store display prop over more popular choices, like Clowning Around.
  • A lot of the pumpkins and zombies are extremely fragile.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Several recurring mechanical or design choices have proven unpopular with regular customers of Halloween props.
  • Props with light-up eyes can be creepy and easier to see, but the sometimes-illogical applications of eye lights and occasional use of blinking glow with the time of the prop's dialogue have been seen as cheesy and annoying. On the other hand, props with blank or striking eyes that don't glow have been criticized.
  • The common use of plastic gears (rather than metal) in props has been widely criticized for lacking durability,particularly for props with high-stress rapid motion. The issue of a prop freezing with ratcheting clicking noises has been well-known to fans, being a sign of worn gears.
  • Props without a volume control are likely to be either too quiet or much too loud.
  • Props with moving plastic against plastic, as the mechanics can be very noisy and highlight the fakeness of the props. Props with plastic faces run the additional risk of having a puppet-style mouth that can look out of place, and the Nightmare Before Christmas Sally animatronic had noisy shutting plastic eyelids that put many people off.
• Squick: Most of their props are gory or unsettling. Sometimes counts as Nightmare Fuel.
• Tear Jerker: 2020's Punctured Pete and Miserable Marie's backstories have been regarded by many to be depressing, once being a peaceful elderly couple caught in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. Especially the last few lines of Miserable Marie's backstory:
  At least Marie got to hear the birds one last time before they ate her face. Now, she and Pete can be together forever.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • It's arguable that the later shifts in the themes, mainly, changing to two larger themes a year and then making those two themes unified halves of a single concept in later years was for the worse, since the fewer actual settings that are in the displays, the harder it is to justify the eclectic props' presence there. With three unique themes or at least two larger but different themes, the product catalog could be distributed in a more meaningful display, but with two themes that unify under one idea, a larger number of the props wind up feeling out-of-place. This is especially bad in 2019's themes, being a haunted boat and boardwalk aquarium. Nice displays...but there are no pirate or nautical animatronics at all, and instead there are some Monster Clowns, old-fashioned Creepy Twins, a Creepy Doll, a decapitated butler, a grim reaper, a dog in a doghouse, a scarecrow, and two possessed characters better suited to a domestic setting. Then there are three props based on torture experiments or accidents, but there's no evidence of a laboratory setting. Waving Wally has the feel of a retro animatronic, and this fits the boardwalk well, but the other clowns have no business in a salty seaside year. If the 2019 assortment was in a three-theme group of a haunted farm carnival, a haunted house, and a laboratory, there would be no misfit props.
  • The general shift in later years to making the props Lighter and Softer by shifting themes away from gore and mutilation (or at least, keeping those props out of the theme display). Even returning props have had tweaks to look less gruesome or scary, like the newer Wacky Mole's hammer being less bloody or Uncle Charlie becoming more cartoony in his rerelease. It's likely because Spirit realized the haunting community has a large and active population of minors and wanted to avoid looking as if they're making age-inappropriate material for their young demographic. These changes haven't been well-received by some younger haunters themselves, with wider fan consensus being that the tonal shift is unwelcome. Gorier, more disturbing props from other retailers have also become darlings in the haunting community because Spirit isn't seen as delivering on that tone.
• Win Back the Crowd: Spirit Halloween's 2023 animatronic lineup received a lot of praise in the haunting community, with opinions largely considering the assortment to be much better than the previous few years' own lineups which were criticized for a higher proportion of cheap-feeling, underwhelming, or toothless props for a store that built itself on selling innovative props and real scares. 2023's assortment included several props praised for their groundbreaking mechanics, visual impact, and creativity, and brought back some of the fear factor that fans feared had been going away.

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