These sexy skeletons are a modern twist on an immortal tradition

Skeletons, it seems, have gone soft.

No longer content to loom over you from a height of 12 feet, the latest en vogue Halloween collectibles are skewing more farcical than fearsome. A skeleton sitting on the toilet, for example, hunched over a laptop or scrolling on a cellphone. (Even death cannot sever us from our screen addictions.) Or two skeletons in an amorous embrace, of which there are many varieties: fondling over a gravestone, in a midair canoodle, in front of a Victorian mirror or in a colorful bubbled tub. Lust of the flesh, as it turns out, does not require flesh.

These are just a few of the more attention-grabbing tchotchkes at arts and crafts store Michaels this spooky season – all smaller than an average adult tibia bone.

Violet de la Torre, a special effects makeup artist and horror film reviewer, was in a Michaels in Colma, California, with her boyfriend when she saw the figurines in early September. First, she saw the skeletons in the bathtub. “I was like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of silly but cute,’ ” she says. “We kept walking down the aisle and I kept spotting more, and they got more and more, like, provocative or intimate, I guess you could say.” They burst into laughter.

So she decided to film the little skeletons. “Honestly, I thought they were pretty cute and romantic,” she says, while still being “very goofy at the same time.” She posted a video of them on TikTok with the text “I didn’t know Michaels was so freaky,” in a post that has since gone viral.

“They’ve definitely gotten sillier,” says Melissa Mills, senior vice president and general merchandise manager at Michaels. “We got permission from our customer to go a little crazy.” Many of the goofy figurines are among the retailer’s highest-selling Halloween items, and this year Michaels is offering twice as many of “these little skeleton options” as it did in 2023, per Mills.

But while a figurine depicting a bag o’ bones couple taking a selfie is decidedly modern, small decorative skeletons – including those with a healthy dose of whimsy – have been a part of the cultural landscape for millennia. They serve as a memento mori, a sort of skeletal YOLO that acts as a reminder of the inevitability of death and a call to live it up until the Reaper comes to collect.

The idea of a skeleton representing death is so intuitive as to be overly obvious. Once we shuffle off this mortal coil, our bones will be the last to leave the party. So, throughout human history, people have brought bones – whether real or ersatz – to all manner of celebrations.

In ancient Rome, tiny skeletons would sit on the table near the food “when you were having some blowout banquet to say, ‘Yeah, you’re having fun, but tomorrow’ ” you could die, says Anita Guerrini, an emeritus professor of history at Oregon State University. “The Satyricon,” a novel from the 1st century A.D., includes a description of a silver skeleton that could be posed in grotesque postures. In the book, the host of the banquet says of the small sculpture, per Sarah Ruden’s translation: “Woe is us! / This is what happens, for all our fuss. / When Orcus comes to get us, this is what we’ll all become. / So while we’re still alive, let’s have some fun!” The rhyme wouldn’t be out of place in the lyrics of a modern pop song.

The Dance of Death was a popular trope in medieval art. Paintings and woodcuttings would show a version of death – typically a skeleton – visiting people while they go about their routines and leading them to the grave. Whether the living are paupers or princes, “you’re going to die,” Guerrini says. “In some ways, (the trope is) laughing about it. And you know, the idea that the moneylender is going to die, too, and all this money is not going to save him is very, in many ways, satisfying.”

In a similar vein, but with a heaping dash of judgment, Vanitas paintings during the baroque period featured skulls among flowers and fruit in still lifes. These served as a reminder of the inescapability of death and pointed to the fleeting nature of superficial pleasures. The message of these works: “You’d better prepare yourself now to live beyond those vanities, because death is coming,” says Paul Koudounaris, an art historian who writes about rituals of remains, most recently in “Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion.”

The notion of skeletons performing the same tasks as their fleshy living counterparts has long been a source of humor – and potential profit. Guerrini is especially fond of the Moving Skeleton, a curiosity advertised in the Daily Courant, Britain’s first daily newspaper, for more than a year in the early 19th century. People could pay to watch a real skeleton rigged with wires do a range of movements, including smoking a pipe “as naturally as if Alive,” the advertisement claims. Guerrini describes it as “macabre, but also very silly … the discomfort is part of the amusement.”

And calaveras, the skulls and skeletons that have become synonymous with Mexican Dia de los Muertos celebrations, traditionally come with the bite of satire. The modern iconography was popularized by José Guadalupe Posada, who illustrated Day of the Dead newspaper poems. “They’re little short, humorous poems that will poke fun especially at politicians or at actors, athletes,” says Duncan Tonatiuh, the author and illustrator of “Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras.” In Posada’s hands, the calaveras have “a political truth to power, a kind of social commentary vibe,” he says. “In more modern iterations, I don’t know how much of that survives.”

In modern times, most of the skeletons used in spooky season decor are intended to be funny, if not particularly profound. The joke is generally referential: Here is something in the zeitgeist – perhaps a much-memed Australian breakdancer – only it’s a skeleton. The real memento mori, if you’re not totally desensitized, is the slew of social media and news apps bringing you face-to-face with horrifying suffering and death every time you scroll. The wacky displays, meanwhile, are divorced from the literal definition of a skeleton. They’re less “remember that you will die” and more “remember that pop culture event?”

Koudounaris welcomes this casual treatment of skeletons because modern Western culture overall has “a pretty bad relationship with death.” For those obsessed with notions of postponing or even besting eternal rest, memento mori aren’t exactly welcome guests at the party.

He thinks that’s a shame. “Every memento mori is also a memento vivere. Every reminder of death is also a reminder of life, as we understand that they’re part of the same circle,” Koudounaris says. “There is no reason that death shouldn’t be treated with humor and it shouldn’t be treated with the kind of warmth that we would treat any other aspect of living.”

Keeping the dead close, as many cultures have done throughout history, is the more human path, he says. “When you’re standing in this room with 20,000 skulls or 50,000 skulls or 10,000 mummies, you’re standing in the present looking at the past, but contemplating the future,” he says. “Time collapses around you.”

For many of us, it might be difficult to get in the room with tens of thousands of skulls or mummies. And that brings us back to the Halloween aisle of Michaels, where we can wonder at the meaning of these goofy skeleton figurines and, indeed, life itself.

“The viewer completes the meaning,” Koudounaris says. For instance, you could interpret the skeleton on the toilet as we fixate on our phones in a never-ending scroll, we are the living dead. Someone else might skip the deeper analysis, seeing it as a simple sight gag or an ideal white elephant gift.

For Michaels, it means money. The company’s Halloween sales are up more than 23% year-over-year at this point, and skeletons in the bathtub and on the toilet have been among the chain’s top 10 items since mid-July. As the silly skeletons continue to exceed their sales expectations, the retailer sees them as part of its future. “It’s great because we’re working on next Halloween right now, and that informs how we approach next year,” Mills says.