Once upon a plastic graveyard, long before screens ruled every waking moment, Halloween spirit lived on in the toy aisles — where monsters had moveable limbs and ghosts came with proton packs. It was a time when your favorite action figures got spooky makeovers, and the toy box doubled as a haunted house.
Welcome back to The Boo Box, your haunted guide through Halloween's weirdest and most wonderful collectibles. This segment? We call it Action Figure Afterlife — where ghoulish gear, monstrous remixes, and pint-sized nightmares rise again from the retail crypt.
From bug-eyed ghosts in The Real Ghostbusters line to the time Ninja Turtles got a Universal Monsters makeover, NECA turned slasher legends into shelf-worthy nightmares, and even Mattel (home of Barbie) entered a goth phase with Monster High — this is where Halloween hit the action figure aisle like a bolt of lightning.
These weren't just toys; they were portals to spooky worlds. And in the Action Figure Afterlife, the play never really dies — it just gets creepier.
Monster High (Mattel, 2010–present)
What if Dracula's daughter had serious fashion drama? Mattel answered that.
In the Halloween afterglow of Bratz and Barbie fatigue, 2010 brought a fashionably freaky resurrection: Monster High. Mattel cracked the code of spooky cool by mashing up high school cliques with classic horror tropes, creating a universe where ghouls just wanna have fun... and maybe a little angst.
Each doll was the offspring of a horror icon: Frankie Stein (daughter of Frankenstein), Clawdeen Wolf (Werewolf), Draculaura (self-explanatory, and vegan?), and Lagoona Blue (Creature from the Fashion Lagoon). These weren't just dolls with themed outfits — they came with whole personalities, webisodes, diaries, and more drama than a full season of Buffy.
What made Monster High iconic wasn't just the monster lineage, but the unapologetic weirdness. Green skin? Fabulous. Fangs? Fierce. Bolts in your neck? Work it. It championed individuality, outsider pride, and goth-glam aesthetics long before Wednesday Addams started trendjacking TikTok.
Monster High didn't just ride the Halloween wave — it set up shop and threw a year-round haunted prom. And yes, it's back from the dead (again), proving that monsters (and good branding) never really die. It later spawned animated TV specials and its own comic book from IDW.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Universal Monsters Line (Playmates, 1993 & Reboots)
Just when you thought the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had done it all — samurai, aliens, sports stars — they went full Halloween in early 1993. Enter the Universal Monsters x TMNT crossover: a monster mash so brilliant it had no right working as well as it did.
These weren't just costumes. These were full-blown horror remixes. Leonardo as The Wolfman. Donatello as Dracula. Raphael as the Mummy. Party guy Michelangelo as Frankenstein's monster. Complete with gory green skin, bandages, bolts, and Playmates' signature over-the-top sculpting, these figures brought a dose of horror to your Saturday morning sewer adventures.
The best part? These figures looked amazing, even by TMNT's already bonkers standards. They were chunky, freaky, and just self-aware enough to embrace the ridiculousness. Playmates said, "What if your favorite mutant turtle also had a blood curse?" and honestly, kids said, "More, please" — and that's what they got.
There was a second wave released in 1994 that had some recasting with Invisible Man Michaelangelo, Bride of Frankenstein April, Creature from the Black Lagoon Leonardo, The Mutant Raphael, modeled after the creatures from This Island Earth.
The line was resurrected more than once — NECA even gave it a high-end glow-up decades later, turning these horror hybrids into collector must-haves. Because if there's anything scarier than the Mummy, it's the Mummy with nunchucks. It brought back some of the original toy ideas like Creature Leo, Bride April, but made Donnie the Invisible Man (being the science bro made sense), Mikey as the Mummy, and Raph pulling double duty as the Wolfman and Frankenstein, lighting bolt sais and all. It also introduced Casey Jones as the Phantom of the Opera, Splinter as Van Helsing, and Shredder as Dracula.
NECA Horror Figures (2000s–Present)
If Kenner gave us Saturday morning spooks, NECA handed us the 3 a.m. version. Since the early 2000s, NECA (National Entertainment Collectibles Association, but let's be honest, it might as well stand for "Not Even Children Allowed") has been crafting hyper-detailed, hauntingly accurate, and downright unsettling figures of horror icons that make your childhood nightmares feel collectible.
Freddy Krueger? Jason Voorhees? Michael Myers? Leatherface? All here. All terrifying. All with accessories you're not sure should be in a plastic clamshell near the checkout line at Target. Blood-soaked machetes, alternate screaming heads, and enough tiny chainsaws to make your diorama scream in terror.
But it's not all just straight slasher worship. NECA goes deep — we're talking The Fog, They Live, Trick 'r Treat, Re-Animator, Creepshow — cult horror turned into posable perfection. And yes, NECA even resurrected those classic Universal Monsters (with enough dry brushing to make Frankenstein look like he walked straight off a black-and-white soundstage).
This isn't nostalgia for the faint of heart — it's for the grown-up kids who watched horror VHS tapes on mute so their parents wouldn't know. NECA's figures are made with collector reverence and Halloween glee. They're basically haunted movie props in miniature, sitting on your shelf and silently judging your taste in scream queens.
In short: If McDonald's toys were your gateway drug, NECA is the final form. You don't play with these toys — you offer them tribute.
The Real Ghostbusters (Kenner, 1986–1991)
Let's rewind to a time when the Ghostbusters cartoon had nothing "real" about it except its commitment to being absolutely bonkers — in the best way. The Real Ghostbusters (yes, that was the name — long story involving lawsuits and a gorilla, which we'll get into) took the supernatural success of the 1984 movie and dialed the ghostly chaos up to 11.
Kenner, clearly under the influence of high-fructose corn syrup and pure imagination, went wild with the toy line. Beyond your core team — each sold with screaming features, bugged-out eyeballs, and hair-raising expressions — the real stars were the ghosts. And these weren't your standard bed-sheet boogeymen. We're talking haunted toilets (Fearsome Flush), demon food (Terror Trash), ghost mailboxes, mailmen, football players — if it existed in your daily life, Kenner imagined it could be possessed and made it into a toy.
Kenner's Real Ghostbusters toys didn't just sell ghostbusting gear — they sold a vibe. A neon-drenched, slime-coated, glow-in-the-dark fever dream of Halloween 365. Whether you were trapping spooks or just using the proton pack as an elaborate candy delivery system, these toys made every day feel like a trick-or-treat mission.
There were glow-in-the-dark features, color-changing ghosts, and playsets that oozed slime like it was going out of style. Which it kind of was…but not if you were lucky enough to own the Ecto-Plazm cans (Kenner's version of ghost snot in a jar).
If NECA is the "Criterion Collection" of horror toys, The Real Ghostbusters was the Saturday morning cartoon sugar rush — bright, bizarre, and born to haunt your toy box.
McFarlane Toys – Movie Maniacs (1998–2004, 2023-Present)
Before NECA made their footprint, McFarlane's Movie Maniacs line was the horror punk rocker that kicked the doors open in '98 and screamed, "Let's put entrails in blister packs!"
Spawn creator Todd McFarlane saw a toy industry obsessed with safety-tested smiles and said, "Nah, let's give the people Freddy Krueger with a removable face." Movie Maniacs was revolutionary, grotesque, and weirdly elegant — a mashup of high-detail sculpting and low-key parental trauma. These weren't action figures — they were horror film shrines disguised as toys.
The line featured a slasher hall of fame: Leatherface, Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, and even the freakin' Candyman. And McFarlane didn't stop at slashers — no, he went for the deep cuts too. Evil Dead's Ash, The Thing, Robocop, Edward Scissorhands, and yes...Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the blood-bathing noblewoman turned urban legend, immortalized in plastic because nothing says "shelf-worthy" like a centuries-old possible murderer cradling a tub of blood.
Each figure came with elaborate diorama bases, movie poster backdrops, and so much sculpted gore you could practically smell the latex. These weren't for playing — these were for displaying, preferably under red lighting, next to your VHS copies of Hellraiser and Phantasm.
McFarlane's legacy? He made horror toys that felt like forbidden objects. Owning one felt like you got away with something, which is what Halloween has always been about.
Ghost Busters (Schaper/Tyco, 1986–1988)
While Kenner was busy sliming up the Real Ghostbusters based on the blockbuster movie, Schaper (later Tyco) rolled out toys for the original Ghost Busters — a Filmation property featuring two dudes and a talking gorilla who fight supernatural threats in bright, Saturday-morning chaos.
Confused? So were kids. The name war between Filmation's Ghost Busters (with a space) and the movie's Ghostbusters led to one of the strangest side-by-side toylines in history. But Filmation's version leaned hard into the absurd — and we love them for it.
The toyline had Jake Kong Jr., Eddie Spencer Jr., and Tracy the Gorilla decked out in bright jumpsuits and armed with "ghost gadgets" like dematerializers, spook-sniffers, and other sci-fi nonsense with pun-laden names. Their ghostly foes? Even better. Prime Evil was a bone-faced cape-wearing baddie with a Skeletor-meets-Space-Ghost vibe. His crew included punny villains like Mysteria, Scared Stiff, and Haunter, each more toyetic than the last.
The Ghost Command playset was a massive haunted HQ shaped like a skeleton-faced castle — one of the coolest and most overlooked playsets of the decade. Seriously, it looked like a kaiju haunted house and doubled as a fortress for any villain figure you had lying around.
Were they cooler than the Real Ghostbusters? No. But were they way weirder, with gorilla-based tech support and haunted skateboards? Absolutely.
The Filmation Ghost Busters were the cult-classic B-movie version of your favorite franchise — misunderstood, kind of insane, and completely committed to the bit. If Halloween is about embracing the strange, then Tracy the talking gorilla with a ghost-blasting backpack belongs in the Boo Box hall of fame.
And thus concludes this week's plastic séance — where action figures didn't just walk, talk, or punch — they haunted and howled their way into our hearts and onto our shelves.
Whether you were battling spectral toilets with Egon, holding hands with a blood-drenched Elizabeth Báthory in the clearance aisle, or just deeply confused about why there was a gorilla in a Ghostbusters uniform, one thing's for sure: the afterlife of spooky toys is alive and well.
But don't put the lid on The Boo Box just yet, there's still three more peeks inside before Halloween.
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