For a man who makes his living at this time of year selling zombie heads, monster hands and maggot masks, Nick Peek is delightfully normal.

Looking at him you’d never think he is, in effect, Dorset’s Mr Halloween but he must be because his eponymous Christchurch store is bursting with all manner of spooky, scary and downright bizarre merchandise.

How about a Chucky Doll head? Or an animated gravestone? The old sheet-with-two-holes Halloween routine has definitely had its day...

“I couldn’t honestly tell you how many products we carry,” says Nick, as we traipse along cobwebbed aisles, festooned with face paint, werewolf gloves, Devil tridents, paper bat garlands and Bride of Dracula wigs.

“All I know is that it’s in its thousands,” he says. “Every year you think it can’t get any bigger but it does.”

Nick’s Halloween starts in late November when the big trade shows in the USA and later, in the Far East, kick off. “When you go there you certainly realise we are about 10 years behind America; they have full-sized T-Rex heads that jump out, plastic skeletons, and the shops go wild,” he says.

He describes one store whose grimy-looking Halloween window invited shoppers to peer into a grotty, abandoned bedroom. “They must have had some kind of pressure trigger on the window because the minute you leaned on it, this thing launched itself out of the bed and hit the glass. People were jumping in the air!”

Peeks haven’t quite broken this level yet, but they are constantly upping their Halloween game. As Nick shows me yet more costumes and joke knife-through-the-head accessories, my own head begins to spin.

What is his weirdest product?

He thinks for a minute and then walks me to the body bag, designed for you to lie in quietly before scaring all your friends.

“The only trouble is that it’s a bit hot inside,” he says.

He’s also rather fond of the ‘cocoon corpse’ a kind of wrapped-up skeleton which would look rather fetching looped in the corner of a Halloween pub.

He is careful, he says, to keep these things away from the Happy Halloween goodies that beguile the little visitors; “You don’t want them to be terrified by Halloween, just to feel excited.”

Although his biggest seller is the face-paint: “In the past we’ve run out of it,” he also does a roaring trade in fake blood; there are bottles and bottles on sale along with gruesome fake zombie bites.

Accessories have always done very well but the latest must-haves are the scene-setters, he says.

These are plastic sheets printed to look like ‘Wicked Wood’ (Scooby-Doo-style panelling), ghosts and spirit invasions, or, if you prefer, a Dexter-style blood spatter pattern (bloodied footprints and meat-cleaver bunting are extra).

Then there are Creepy Curtains which you can clip up at the windows for Disney-esque horror appeal.

Funnily enough, though, of everything they sell it is the Zombie Clown wall decoration that is the most horrible. He even scares Nick. As his staff prepare their costumes and Peeks gears up for some of its busiest days of the year, he looks forward to the Big Day.

“Last year I got home and my wife had put our baby, Ava, in a little pumpkin costume,” he says. “For me I think Halloween will get bigger and bigger.”