A LEGO Horror Chronicle, Part 12: Conclusion (As of 2025!)

Happy Halloween! Time to close out this project!

This was a long one, and I beat out my record from last year, so lord only knows what will happen in 2026, but I had a lot of fun. And gave myself a storage crisis.

I can be picky and I don't have to keep all of these builds together, but maybe more wall shelves in the basement can hold the smaller models and keep them around. I'm definitely keeping the Old Classics stand and Series 14 stand as those two mean the most to me personally, but the VIDIYO stand is such a nice result that I probably want to keep that too. I like the Zombies' set and my modifications to it, but might not need to keep it built so long as I'm using the Monster Fighters display stand. 

I did make that modification to my Haunted House, making the vaseplate a separate module now supported by full bricks. The hinge on the baseplate is three stacked hinge plates rather than a hinge brixk, because that made it stronger, and to prevent the halves of the stand from bending and breaking the hinge with their weight, it also holds closed with some 1x1 bricks with side studs that meet Technic holes on the other side. It's not a rock-solid build, but it's safer to move and handle this way. To fit in a clip and bar closure like I did for the house, the whole base would need to be a plate taller since a 1x1 brick with a vertical bar on the side has the bar at the full height of the brick. The clip brick needs to be one plate above a studded surface to nest into a build for a clip closure.

My record for collecting horror minifigures prior to this project (which I consider to have begun during the period last year when I ordered the Studios figures) is interesting to analyze.

I happened to get both of the vintage Castle horror icons, the OG ghost and Willa, incidentally through secondhand lots of parts from garage sales and rummage, without seeking those figures out. Willa's lower half came without any of her other parts in one secondhand lot, and then, a couple of years later, I got only her upper half and the ghost in another lot of parts through a church-fair sale. Was my Willa made from one copy the whole time, with both halves reunited in my hands? Very possibly, despite how unlikely it sounds. Willa did need her original red wand ordered after the fact, if we're nitpicking about her completion.

Studios, of course, was a 0% acquisition record prior to the start of this project. I started collecting LEGO after Studios was done, none of the horror sets or minifigures ever happened to mix into the secondhand LEGO lots I collected from garage sales and donations when I was a kid, and I didn't have the power to get them online for many years.

In terms of LEGO Minifigures horror, I've been on it since...day two? 

I've had a near-perfect record, sweeping every horror Minifigure (and others that I invited into the category!) during each figure's general time of release except the very first one. I had to order the Series 1 release of the Zombie after the fact because I hadn't been interested in it at the time and had few Series 1 Minifigures since I wasn't actively collecting the line until Series 2. I suppose the Bogeyman also counts because I got him after his series left shelves, but I still got him well within his year of release.

For Monster Fighters, I got most of the sets except "The Ghost Train" and "The Zombies", and I only really needed the latter for unique monster figures and moonstone completion, since the Ghost stone and Ghost minifigures appeared elsewhere in sets I did get. 

The wedding Zombies and their exclusive moonstone were thus the only things I'd been missing. My not getting 9465 "The Zombies" in its day is through no fault or lapse of my own. That was the fault of an extremely scarce limited release. I would have bought it on sight back then if I knew I had to, but I had no warning it would vanish so quickly.

For Scooby-Doo, I also failed to get one set with (a) unique monster(s), though in the case of Scooby-Doo, that meant I had every other set at some point. The set I never got had only one monster I was missing rather than two.

For Build-a-Minifigure, lines are nebulous about what parts count toward some of the designs, but at large, I realized the novelty of the Halloween parts too late and got fewer of the unique parts than I wish I had. I ordered some after the fact. I haven't attempted to get every Halloween Build-a-Minifigure entry, nor to keep them all as they were.

Comparisons

Here's a side-by-side compilation by monster type. I'm fudging it a bit because the Scooby-Doo designs which are not fully LEGO IP are being counted here, and I'm not consistent on when to feature Build-a-Minifigure entries in these compilations--I threw in the ones which I never saw fit to swap out parts on, seeing those as the most bespoke or cohesive and worth considering in the lineups. We're doing figures by chronological order of first monster appearance.

Ghosts

Here's all of the sheet ghost sculpts together. When Bluestone the Great's face is hidden, the Monster Fighters and Scooby-Doo ghosts are visually identical, give or take a leg piece, so I'm only showing three ghosts here.

The Fairground ghosts count in this visual archetype, too, despite not being sculpted with shrouds.

I think their inclusion tells a more complete story of the LEGO sheet ghost, since they're deliberate imitations of the original, and also potentially add more context. We only got the Creator shroud after the Fairground ghosts, but the Fairground ghosts being made of more common minifigure parts may suggest they were an interim design test during the time when LEGO had no active ghost shroud mold to use. Perhaps the Monster Fighters shroud was discontinued not long after Scooby-Doo and left no sheet to use at all, during which time the Fairground duo were made. LEGO can remake a dead modern mold whenever they choose, as seen with the Series 4-debuted Frankenmonster head extension that was dormant for ten years and would have required re-molding, so I'm guessing LEGO chose not to bring back the Monster Fighters piece. If the Monster Fighters shroud was still available, then maybe the Fairground ghosts wouldn't be unique designs, but perhaps these would have been the figures we got regardless. Afterward, we got our third standard shroud in the Creator theme five years later. 

Here's all of the more fully humanoid ghosts. The Fairground ghosts count in this category too, but narrowly beat out the Spectre for the simplest designs in this category.

The sheet ghosts segue into the BAM Ghost Lady with the Fairground ghosts in the middle!

And the two humanoid ghosts identified as banshees alone. 

Both banshees are green-toned and have curly hair and the ghost tail, and there's not a favorite between them. Both are excellent for their purposes. Of the non-banshees, the BAM 2025 ghost is my favorite in the more humanoid category. 

In this archetype, I'd welcome more fully-humanoid ghosts in old clothing, and more men in that niche, while I also think a ghostly bride is called for. Ghost brides are their own archetype, and I don't just want to have one through further licensing with Disney's The Haunted Mansion. LEGO making their own ghost bride design would be really fun. Ghosts with pearly white or clear parts could be fun to try, too.

We could also see more experimentation with sheet ghosts. Even casting one in black to depict a living shadow would be a fun twist, and a flat printed-face shroud could open up a lot of possibilities too. An orange shrouded ghost figure would be fun stylization too, or a ghost shroud with patchwork or stitches printed on.

When considering the licensed side of things I didn't discuss, ghosts are a plentiful category and could expand this group significantly, depending on what you count. The undead ship crew from Lord of the Rings? Captain Salazar's crew from Pirates of the Caribbean? The Hogwarts ghosts? (Not happening here, at least.) I'd definitely count the Ghostbusters ghosts and monsters, though. They're considered horror and Halloween enough. That would mean the Library Ghost, Slimer, the Mr. Stay-Puft minifigure, and Mayhem. I don't currently have the Library Ghost or Mayhem, but do have Slimer and Mr. Stay-Puft.

Witches

Willa is technically an honorary inclusion thanks to being from a Castle theme, but she's objectively in a horror context given the name and aesthetics of her Castle theme, and ticks all the boxes for a Halloween witch. Being the first monster in the archetype isn't enough to qualify if the context is wrong (thus why I excluded the Adventurers theme's Pharaoh Hotep), but Willa is not only the first witch, but also hits all the correct markers to count as both horror and Castle, allowing her to join us here. 

I'm so partial to the wacky-hag archetype of witches myself that I'd like to see more in that vein, though I appreciate cute and glamorous witches being represented as well. What I'd absolutely go over the moon for would be a "vintage Halloween" witch entirely in orange, white and black (orange skintone included), and with graphics in a more vintage Halloween art style. 

In terms of licensed minifigures, the only Halloweeny witches I don't have are the Minecraft Witch mob and the Sanderson sisters from Hocus Pocus: Winifred, Mary, and Sarah. I adore the first film and the figures are nice, but the set they came in is expensive and I could probably give it a miss and get the figures alone. Winnie also begs for a collar on her cape. Disney animation has figures of Maleficent, Ursula, and the disguised Evil Queen, but none are Halloween icons in my mind, no matter how much the Mouse pushes them as such.

Mummies

Of this group, I think the Studios Mummy is probably my favorite design, and then maybe the Mummy Queen and Series 3 Mummy after him. The first Mummy has great detail for his time and I love his dusty colors and the charm of his face designs. For the latter two, I like that they have goofier aspects for a silly Halloween tone, and the Mummy Queen's death mask, while a repeated gimmick, is still great. 

The Studios Mummy looks like he has very little in the way of imitation, but Pharaoh's Quest puts his design and the LEGO mummy evolution in better context--it just doesn't count for my horror review. The mummy soldiers under Amset-Ra echo the Studios Mummy's grey and tan colors, and Amset-Ra himself provides a second "sleeping and awakened" face duality after Studios and directly influences the Mummy Queen's own faces by introducing the element of a death mask.

I'm glad we finally got a female mummy in Series 19, but I'd like to see more examples as well. I feel like a classic horror mummy can be one of the harder monster archetypes to iterate upon, since Egyptian theming and bandages are constants. Heck, this is the most homogenous group of LEGO monsters due to those factors, to the point where hashing out design influences and evolution is harder in this group, since they all have commonalities. But more colors for the corpse, more personalities and costume designs and headdresses/wigs can always lend variety and distinction to a mummy's design. I'd also accept other kinds of mummification, like a reanimated bog mummy with an intact well-preserved asleep-looking face...but that's very much a "me and my tastes" concept and not actually an established, marketable horror icon or fictional archetype.

In terms of licensing, there's one mummy that fits this archetype in the most recent blip of LEGO Indiana Jones. It was a sad attempt at a theme revival that was likely hoping for the zeitgeist to be back on Indiana Jones, only for Dial of Destiny to attract no viewers and for LEGO's own finished Temple of Doom set in the theme to be scrapped before release (potentially for cultural sensitivity concerns, though LEGO made no clarification as to why). The mummy figure in the recent theme looks scary enough to count for a horror collection in my book, though you could argue he's an adventure figure and deserves exclusion based on my own whims.

Werewolves

The LEGO Games head is in the timeline despite not having a full minifigure it's associated with.

We desperately need more color variation in the fur. Light grey and black and dark brown (even white!) are sitting on the table waiting, but using the current werewolf sculpt in medium brown would also be nice because that's four uses of the head in dark grey (the fourth was a non-horror figure of Little Red Riding Hood's imposter grandma).

The Big Bad Wolf.

It's annoying that two other colors for LEGO werewolves (dark tan on Remus Lupin and nougat on Werewolf Spider-Man) were on licensed figures, while LEGO seems insistent on using dark grey for all of their original designs.

I'm also itching for more clothing colors. Denim and red flannel are all well and good, but there are other colors of pants and shirts. Part of why I like the Werewolf Drummer so much is because he truly stands out despite his fur being the same old color. I love his eerie pale eyes and his very different costume. The Creator werewolf is too much of the other minifigures when there were options that could have set him apart. I do also think another "transforming" werewolf like the Studios figure would be fun too, using a mask again. I think my personal favorite is the Series 4 minifigure. I love his creative wolfman design leaning more humanoid, and he stands out all the more as time has gone on and made him more different from the rest of the pack. He's a great design. 

I wouldn't mind seeing more LEGO werewolves using the digitigrade animal legs, though LEGO hasn't rigged them for dual-molding, so depicting shorts on them would be a hurdle and the werewolf would probably need to be unclothed to use the legs, like Lupin's most recent wolf minifigure did.

The other thing I want to see from LEGO werewolves is a woman. (Not a male wolf in granny drag.) I know werewolves are very associated with masculinity for various metaphorical and cultural reasons, but there's nothing about lycanthropy that needs to be inherently male and seeing a girl werewolf would be a welcome element of variety. LEGO's pretty good about making equitable nonhuman character designs these days, too, so I'm not even saying it needs to be an absurd contrast of femininity with the wolf head like "Grandma" above there. You could just make a werewolf lady into her own cool thing.

In the licensed category, there's the Remus Lupin wolf minifigure I refuse to pursue, Jacob Black from the Twilight set, as well as two Marvel figures--Werewolf by Night, and Werewolf Spider-Man. I have the latter, and definitely want the former, who is directly channeling classic Universal horror in a way that minimizes the comic-book element of things.

Vampires

I counted he Spooky Boy and Spider Suit Boy in this category because the Spooky Boy is all but explicitly a vampire and the Spider Suit Boy is more ambiguous, but has a fang and could be a vampire, enough so that he's included to avoid omitting an intentional vampire design out of uncertainty.

Here's all of the male vampires.

The biggest stylistic outlier is the Vampire Guitarist, whose skintone isn't white and whose eyes are standard black. The spooky boys only break the eye standard but their greyscale colors leave their skintone white like more traditional LEGO vampires. Balthazar from The LEGO Movie 2 would join the Guitarist in the aqua-skin club if minidolls were being counted, though Balthazar himself isn't directly horror-themed enough besides.

Here are all of the vampire women together. If dividing the gendered vampires as separate archetypes, then Vampyre's Bride is the originator and the blueprint for her group.

The female vampires from LEGO all have black hair like the men, and all so far have white skin. Celeste from The LEGO Movie 2 breaks this pattern if she's included, but she's a minidoll and not quite horror. While the male vampires more often have glowy colored eyes, and red most commonly, the ladies tend to favor standard black minifigure eyes, with only the most recent in the Creator Haunted Mansion having an option with red glowy eyes, while she has another face print on the other side with black eyes. Only the Creator vampire is a direct visual successor to Vampyre's Bride, while the Spider Lady and Vampire Bassist do more of their own thing in terms of color palette and costume design. It's funny that the one direct chain of design succession within this group is between the oldest and most recent figures, rather than the two oldest at the start. Of this group, it's hard to pick a favorite. I appreciate Vampyre's Bride for her tattered Gothic beauty, while the Spider Lady is fabulous and I really enjoy the Creator vampire with her red-eyed face. The Bassist is also really awesome for what she does and has phenomenal detail. In terms of more that could be done here, I wouldn't mind seeing a vampire with a white dress and long hair akin to Dracula's Daughter or Lily Munster (heck, I'd accept the Lily Munster as a licensed minifigure so long as it wasn't the awful Rob Zombie film version). It could also be fun seeing more youthful designs of vampires. It's hard to go wrong with the monster type.

Adjacent/subset to the vampires are the bat monsters, which have only two designs right now. If we counted the renditions of DC Comics' Man-Bat, there'd be more, but they're not part of this.

I prefer the personality of the Monster Fighters Bat Monsters with their faces honestly looking creepier without bat noses, and I think the texture and coloring of their fur looks great. The Vampire Bat is a worthy minifigure but not my preferred character design.

In the licensed category of vampires, there's Marceline from Adventure Time, and the Cullen family members from the Twilight set. 

Mad Scientists

Mr. Good and Evil is here too, since he's objectively a mad scientist despite being an aesthetic outlier with his non-laboratory design.

The two most directly similar minifigures are the two Crazy Scientists, but there's some welcome variety here. The Studios Mad Scientist and Mr. Good and Evil are both black-haired and have Hyde sides, while the others are grey-haired and have one persona. Dividing the figures that way (Hydes and non-Hydes) makes things more tidy. 

I think Mr. Good and Evil and the Monster Scientist are the two standouts here. I love the former's divided Jekyll and Hyde gimmick and Victorian-gentleman visual aesthetic, and the latter is just delightfully goofy and so different among the crowd.

I'd also like to see women in this crowd (J.B. Watt from Hidden Side is a female scientist with aspects of this archetype, but is too normal-looking and heroic to count for me), and it could be fun seeing a more diminutive scientist with shorter legs. Scientists with cyborg augmentation could be fun, and more figures with more color castings of the flask would be very welcome. 

Frankenmonsters

The Monster Butler counts in both this archetype and the zombies because it's not especially clear which one he is, and he and the character he's based on have elements of both. He's more stylistically similar to the Frankenmonsters overall, but he's grey enough to be a zombie, and is often called such.

I really love the first two to do it. The Studios monster was an innovator with his unique head extension, and it's a prize of a piece for only appearing the one time. I think the rest of his design is good, too, with gears in the head and the visual gag of the zipper closing his forehead. The Series 4 Monster is perfection. He brings in more of Boris Karloff with the sculpt and has a really well-executed face print, pleasing colors, and a great continuation of the forehead gag. The Crazy Scientist's Monster is a fun darker take on the Series 4 design who's less appealing on purpose, but a good take. I appreciate the Monster Rocker now more too, especially with VIDIYO broadening the horizons for LEGO monsters in music and giving him a crowd he fits with. The Monster Butler is a fun figure, and the Creator monster had so much more potential than what he was. Anything different, especially color-wise, could have helped him out.

I'd like to see at least one more Frankenmonster in greyscale tones, though that could run afoul of copyright. At the least, black or grey costumes would be nice, though I'd also love some Frankenmonsters in bright Halloween clothing in purple or orange or magenta. I want more shades of green for the skin, too. Lime and spring green would be great, or even Bright Green or regular green. Returning to the running gag of odd forehead scar closures would also be great. 

I'd like to see a female character in this archetype, too, but it's tricky to work that when Universal Studios has potentially copyrighted the very concept of women as pertains to this archetype. LEGO designing a female Frankenstein monster without treading on Elsa Lanchester could be tricky. I want them to try, though.

In terms of licensed figures, I think only Sally's two Nightmare Before Christmas minifigures count in this category. Sally is described as a rag doll, with it not being clear if her body is flesh or fabric, and she's stuffed with leaves, but is an artificial stitched-up person created by a scientist. I have Sally's first (and superior) minifigure. I guess Thing from Wednesday also counts, given he's a stitched severed hand who was animated by electricity.

Zombies

This group is also fairly uniform, with VIDIYO breaking formula for zombies as well as vampires, though unlike with vampires, Scooby-Doo preceded VIDIYO with a different zombie look. Then again, that's owed to licensed source material, while the Zombie Dancer is the first non-IP zombie figure to fully break from the formula established by Minifigures Series 1. I'm not sure if we'll ever see more zombies in the formula debuted by the Series 1 figure, since it's been ten years since the last unlicensed LEGO zombies who looked like that. The Zombie LEGO Store employee(s) can't appear in my collection, but the head prints there were also slightly divergent.

In terms of a favorite, the Zombie Bride has to take it for me, by virtue of being so genuinely unsettling and icky as a minifigure on top of being a real prize in my collection. 

Licensed zombies are out there. There's the Zombie Taxi Driver from Ghostbusters and some voodoo zombies from Pirates of the Caribbean, though I don't care to own the latter given how iffy the films' portrayal of Caribbean culture seems to be. There's also Minecraft zombies and variants therein. I guess the Geonosian Zombies from Star Wars could count, too, but they're far removed from classic horror. Marvel zombie figures also exist, with zombie versions of Captain America and Doctor Strange. Two licensed zombies I'd really like to see would be Batman's foe Solomon Grundy and Billy Butcherson from Hocus Pocus--the one key character left out of the Hocus Pocus set, with Billy even being cut from the cast that the original Ideas fan design proposed. Another Disney minifigures series with redone Sandersons and Billy might be fun, and more worth it to me than the set we got.

Swamp Monsters

This one is only a category here because I let in a licensed figure. Otherwise, it's two LEGO IP figures with one (the LEGO Movie 2 figure) being a non-horror remake of the first figure. Otherwise, there's no other fish monsters in this horror mold.

Spooky Kids

This is a nice little group. The Spooky Girl felt more like a direct nod to The Addams Family with maybe a note of Japanese horror creepy girls too, while the next two feel more based on her than a greater established aesthetic. Both boys have fangs I don't really think they need, and the Spider Suit Boy is quite goofy and his scared face doesn't work for me. I still like all three as their own little series, and I welcome more greyscale spooky figures in their collection.

What Do I Most Want to See Going Forward?

* A licensed LEGO Universal Monsters theme or collector set with all of the monsters in it (Phantom, Monster, Bride, Mummy, Dracula, Invisible Man, Gill-Man, Wolf Man). If this is how we have to get LEGO figures of certain untapped archetypes (Phantom, Bride monster, Invisible Man), then I want it, and I'd love official minifigures of those classics regardless. Greyscale or color; doesn't matter. 

* LEGO released a new 1x1 tall bell piece with a frilled lower edge, which has been used for white flowers in the Botanicals theme and for a small form of Z-Blob in the Dreamzzz sets. 

I am begging for them to combine the eye printing of Z-Blob and the white cast of the flowers to make this piece into a little mini ghost for a microscale model.

* 1x1 garlic bulb piece. It would add to the food elements but would also very easily work as an architectural flair in various colors as well as trimming a monster-hunting scene perfectly. 

* A late minifigure homage to Monster Fighters by adding a character to the old theme's canon in the Minifigures line, or else a proper sequel theme to Monster Fighters akin to the way Ultra Agents followed the Agents line. 

* Werewolves in any color but dark grey or medium brown, and female werewolves. 

* Respect on the mummy's horror name. Get 'em out of the cheapest sets next time you do a monster-mash theme, LEGO.

* A pink blob humanoid using the VIDIYO slime mask. 

* A proper spooky lady mad scientist.

* A scary scarecrow, scary toy, and scary clown character done in fully-realized form.

* A full modern remake of Willa the Witch (with all the Fright Knights nostalgia revival precedent, this honestly feels like an "any day now" or "when, not if" kind of thing and I'll be legitimately shocked if one doesn't drop in 2026.)

* LEGO Addams Family or Munsters minifigures. I'll also accept minifigure Wednesday releases.

* More cryptids. A Flatwoods Monster and Mothman would be great.

* A reuse of the Bogeyman's mold with all its potential for different face prints. Would be a shame for that to be a one-off sculpt.

I'm not sure where spooky LEGO is going to go in the future, but I've always got my eye out and I'm excited to see what happens. I just pray that whatever "smart LEGO" is supposed to be never touches this genre before it crashes and burns because I would hate to see any horror LEGO figures ruined by a bad gimmick. 

I do have a post about LEGO Wednesday in the works, and I'd have squeezed it into this series (and gotten a perfect 13 posts!) were my post not delayed by a parts order. Wednesday isn't strictly Halloween or really super horror-classic anyhow, so that post can come whenever. Stay tuned.

Have a happy Halloween, whenever you celebrate--Halloween is year-round for the right people! I hope this LEGO series was fun!