Vintage-style jack-o’-lanterns and glow-in-the-dark ghouls are outselling modern spooky season decor, and major retailers have noticed. So have a few independent designers.
Halloween 2026 looks a lot like Halloween 1978.
ABC News ran a feature on the shift this week, and said that shoppers want the Halloween they remember instead of the one currently on shelves.
Retailers have stopped fighting it. The vintage-inspired look is now stocked at scale, which means nobody has to dig through an antique store to get it.
Why vintage Halloween decor is trending
Bob Richter, a vintage lifestyle expert and author of A Very Vintage Holiday, attributes the surge to three things working together: nostalgia, social media discovery, and the appeal of finding something distinctive without paying much for it.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of this trend is not new merchandise at all. It is people buying decades-old decorations from thrift stores, garage sales, eBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace, often for less than a new equivalent costs.
Halloween decorating also grew into something adults do for themselves. The holiday stopped being only for kids somewhere along the way, and the decor budget followed.
Blow molds and Beistle die-cuts
Two categories are driving most of it.
Blow molds are the hollow plastic light-up figures that sat on lawns and porches through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Pumpkins, witches, ghosts, the occasional Dracula. They were considered kitsch for decades and are now genuinely collectible, with the rarer pieces commanding real money.
The other is Beistle. Beistle produced some of the first mass-produced Halloween decorations in the 1920s. The company is still around, and its cardboard die-cuts are still being reissued from the old designs.
Which means a chunk of the retro Halloween trend involves buying new copies of century-old artwork from the same company that printed the originals. Collectors argue about the reissues, mostly that the modern stock is thinner and the colors are brighter than the embossed originals. They buy them anyway.
The 90s wave is arriving too. Blow-mold string lights, the shrieking motion-activated ghosts, and the McDonald’s plastic pumpkin pails from the 80s all have active collector followings.
Geeky Sparkles’ glow-in-the-dark pins are back
Independent designers have been working this vein for a while, and one campaign running right now is a decent snapshot of the demand.
Geeky Sparkles RETRO HALLOWEEN REVENGE Glowing Enamel Pins! is on Kickstarter through August 28, run by Nydaria Entertainment, which is a sister company to WebReef Media, the publisher of this site. It brings back the 2025 glow-in-the-dark pin designs by request and adds new ones.
The campaign has cleared its $3,500 goal with about a week and a half left. Crowdfunding totals move daily, so the current figure is on the campaign page.
What last year’s campaign did, and what it says about the trend
The 2025 version is the more interesting data point, because it is finished and the numbers are fixed.
Glowin’ Ghouls ran from August 25 to September 10, 2025 and raised $24,740 against a $2,500 goal. That is 990%, from 387 backers at an average pledge of roughly $64.
Retro Halloween specifically is where the demand concentrates, and it concentrates hard.
Glow-in-the-dark helps. It was the defining novelty of 70s and 80s Halloween merchandise, stamped on everything from mask packaging to trick-or-treat bags, and it is the one detail a photograph cannot reproduce.
Spooky season starts in earnest in about six weeks. The thrift stores already know.
Disclosure: Nydaria Entertainment is a sister company to WebReef Media, which publishes D/REZZED and Clownfish TV.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, subscribe at clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Hat Tips:
ABC News (August 17, 2026), the vintage Halloween decor trend and the shift in retailer stocking
Times Union (2025), Bob Richter’s analysis of what is driving the nostalgia surge
Mental Floss (2025), the Beistle history and the secondhand sourcing routes
Daily Dot (2026), the 90s and 80s collector categories including the McDonald’s pumpkin pails