Home Depot’s viral 12-foot skeleton now talks

You can use your smartphone to speak through Skelly’s animated mouth and interact with trick-or-treaters.

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The Home Depot is once again upgrading its 12-foot-tall skeleton to help keep the viral piece of Halloween decor popular as spooky season creeps closer. Skelly is borrowing some of the tech introduced in the smaller 6.5-foot Ultra Skelly last year, including letting you speak through the skeleton’s moving mouth using a mobile app. The new version of Skelly will be available online starting tomorrow for $379 and in Home Depot’s stores later this summer, along with a new collection of Halloween characters.

Skelly was last upgraded two years ago with eight different animations for its animated LCD eyes, but the new version bumps that to 20 different options selectable through the app, including animations for celebrating holidays other than Halloween. The app can also be used to customize Skelly’s head and mouth movements, record up to 30 custom sounds or phrases, and speak through the skeleton in real time over Bluetooth so you can interact with trick-or-treaters from afar. If you don’t need those new features, Home Depot is also bringing back the simpler version of Skelly at its original $299 price.

The upgraded Skelly is part of a larger collection of new Halloween creatures and animatronics debuting this year. There’s also an 11-foot mummy with sounds and motion-activated LED lighting effects, glowing trees with creepy faces for creating a haunted forest on your lawn, an 8-foot zombie velociraptor with LED eyes, and a 3-piece collection of Gremlins with animated movements and sounds.

If you’re looking for decor that specifically interacts with kids, there’s a new animated zombie parrot that uses an interactive voice system with 20 prerecorded phrases to create unique responses to yes or no questions.