Home Depot is giving Skelly, its 12-foot Halloween skeleton, another hardware refresh for 2026. The change most likely to annoy the neighbors is voice control: the new model lets a user talk through the skeleton’s moving mouth from a mobile app, according to Home Depot.
The updated Skelly goes on sale online July 16 for $379, with store availability planned for later this summer. Home Depot is also rolling out additional Halloween characters alongside it, the company said.
Skelly has been a recurring seasonal product for Home Depot since the oversized skeleton turned into a viral lawn-decor object rather than just another plastic thing in the Halloween aisle. The company has kept the product alive by adding electronics to a prop whose main feature was once its refusal to fit in a normal garage.
What changed
The 2026 model borrows from Home Depot’s smaller 6.5-foot Ultra Skelly, which introduced app-based animated features last year. The headline addition is the ability to speak through the decoration using a phone, with the skeleton’s mouth moving as part of the effect.
The new Skelly also expands its animated LCD eyes. Home Depot previously upgraded the 12-foot version two years ago with eight eye animations. The 2026 version raises that count to 20, according to the company.
That means the prop is becoming less of a static yard marker and more of a remote-controlled Halloween display. The mechanism is not complicated: the app provides the control layer, while the skeleton supplies the theatrical output through its mouth movement and screen-based eyes. Home Depot has not described it as anything more exotic than that.
Why Home Depot keeps updating it
Home Depot’s strategy here is familiar consumer hardware behavior applied to seasonal decor. The frame and silhouette remain recognizable, while the electronics change just enough to give returning buyers, collectors and Halloween display obsessives a reason to look again.
The company has not said how many units it expects to sell, nor has it provided details about production volume. For now, the confirmed details are the price, online launch timing, store rollout window, voice feature and expanded set of LCD eye animations.
Skelly’s 2026 upgrade is not a reinvention. It is a taller-than-most-humans skeleton with more expressions and a phone-assisted mouth. For Home Depot’s Halloween business, that may be enough.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
