Does just looking at this cereal box make you green with envy?

Well just wait until you see the milk.

That’s right, boils & ghouls: Cap’n Crunch’s Halloween Crunch has arisen from its annual resting place to haunt your pantry in the absolute best way possible. The base cereal formula is the same as previous years: plain Cap’n Crunch pieces mixed with orange Crunchberry ghosts that are coated in a mystical ectoplasm that turns milk green (this sentence in itself is worth embroidering on a throw pillow).

However, this year’s box art cranks up the spook to a level even Spinal Tap would scoff at. While previous boxes contented themselves with putting the Cap’n on a pumpkin or dressing him up in costume, this year he is literally a zombie! I’m so excited my sentences automatically started italicizing themselves! This is scary! How do I turn this off?

Okay, there we go. That’s better.

For real, though: every time I look at this box I notice another cool detail. The Cap’n’s ragged eyebrows (and let’s be honest, the fact that his eyebrows are glued to his hat has always been spooky). His undead tongue. Even the claw scars on his chest that I can only assume came from a scuffle with Frute Brute. Look out, Halloween Krave: you’ve got a new competitor for “Best Halloween Box Art.”

I suggest you two settle this with a box-ing match.

As you all clean up the tomatoes that you tried to throw at me through your computer screen, I’ll pour a bowl of this neon gold and orange Halloween goodness (I can understand why the idea of orange and black cereal pieces didn’t take off).

The ridged, pointy squares and porous, vaguely ghost-shaped Crunchberries (they look more like used napkins to me—an equally scary sight) are aggressively crispy, as usual. They’re like a bowlful of Gremlins or Ghoulies, but instead of killing you, they just want to cut up the roof of your mouth a little.

The plain Cap’n Crunch pieces have a golden, lightly browned sugar sweetness that leaves behind a buttery kiss of toasted corn and honey when eaten. It can be a little too oily, at times, but since you’ll probably be absentmindedly gobbling this up during a Scooby-Doo marathon or something, that gripe is easy to overlook.

The Crunchberries, on the other hand, have a bright, tropical fruit flavor that continues to defy classification, as Crunch historians from across time have tried describing them as candied cherry, blueberry, or some hodge-podge blend of strawberries, raspberries, and snozzberries. It’s probably the color of these ghosts talking, but I even tasted hints of blood orange (okay, I just wanted to use the word “blood,” too).

If you want to save your tongue from that previously discussed mutilation, you can soften the pieces with milk. But heck, I don’t need to tell you to use milk on Halloween Crunch; you want to see that green milk anyway!

After letting the milk and cereal stew like a nefarious witch’s brew, the vividly green crystals on the ghostberries turn the formerly pristine milk into an authentically emerald lagoon. Just how green is it? I think its green rating falls somewhere between “pea soup” and “Shrek’s bathwater.”

But the taste of this cereal with milk is an event, too. Just like how your childhood self was sure that green ketchup tasted different than red, your mind will try and trick (or treat) you into tasting notes of green apple in the spectral milk that surrounds and gushes out of the soggy Crunchberries like some delicious tropical ooze.

The main frowny face here, as is the case with most Cap’n Crunch, is that once the sweetness of the pieces is munched away, I’m left with gritty husks of overly corny corn and mealy oats. It’s the same kind of disappointment as when you reach into your trick-or-treat bag for some candy, but all you can find is Circus Peanuts (there’s an Alanis Morissette lyric in there, somewhere).

So while the cereal itself is a little too sugary, painful, and corn-y to get especially excited about, Halloween Crunch deserves bonus points for both its gore-geous box and its awesome Halloween gimmick that perfectly encapsulates the eternally youthful magic of the season.

Seriously: if I could get that green milk hooked up to me on a permanent IV drip, I would quite literally die a happy man.

The Bowl: Halloween Crunch (2015)

The Breakdown: It can hurt your mouth, it can give you a toothache, and it’s got enough corn aftertaste to make another darned Children of the Corn sequel, but the fruity honey milk it leaves behind is the stuff Halloween dreams (or maybe happy nightmares?) are made of.

The Bottom Line: 8 discarded Circus Peanuts out of 10

***A huge special thanks goes out to the good people over at Junk Banter for sending me a box of Halloween Crunch! Be sure to check them out if you love reviews of all things junk food!***