Spirit Halloween isn’t letting Saturday Night Live get the last word.
The seasonal holiday store took to its official X (formerly Twitter) account to hit back at the sketch comedy show after the season 50 premiere on Saturday featured a sketch poking fun at the store that sells Halloween costumes and decor throughout October.
“We are great at raising things back from the dead,” the post read, which also included a photo of a costume in honor of the SNL‘s milestone 50th season. The costume’s tag read, “Irrelevant 50-year-old TV show” that includes “dated references, unknown cast members and shrinking ratings.”
Spirit Halloween, which is known to pop up in vacant retail stores throughout the spooky month, was responding to the NBC show’s fake ad for the holiday store.
“Times may be good on Wall Street, but on Main Street, communities are struggling,” SNL castmember Heidi Gardner says in a voice-over with a serious tone. “Closed stores, shuttered businesses, empty parking lots. When hard times hit, it’s easy to feel like no one cares.”
“But help is on the way, because when others leave, we show up,” she adds.
Rather than seeing a “dead-end town” or an “abandoned Kmart,” SNL’s Chloe Fineman says, “We see a spirit, a Spirit Halloween.”
Gardner continues in the fake advertisement, “Since 1983, Spirit Halloween has been helping our struggling communities by setting up shop in every vacant building in the country for six weeks and then bouncing.”
Fineman says Spirit Halloween is also “providing vulnerable communities with the things they need most,” such as “wigs that give you a rash, single-use fog machines, and costumes of famous characters tweaked just enough to avoid a lawsuit.”
SNL also mocked the store’s employees and its short-term business model. “It’s not just empty buildings we’re investing in, it’s people,” Gardner says. “By creating six-week jobs for some of America’s hardest hit perverts.”
But by “Nov. 1, we’re gone and all this junk will be in a dumpster,” castmember Michael Longfellow concludes.
Jean Smart hosted the season 50 premiere of NBC’s sketch comedy show with musical guest Jelly Roll.
