Our first encounter with the Fright Gallery was back in 2003, when they presented a professional haunted house attraction titled “Experiment in Terror.” This turns out to have been an anomaly in their Halloween career, which consists mostly of an amateur home haunt in a quiet Burbank neighborhood. Fright Gallery’s unique approach is to stage an amateur [...]

Hollywood Gothique’s 2009 Halloween Haunt Odyssey began with a trek westward, first to the Forest of Mirrors in Woodland Hills and then to the Reign of Terror in Thousand Oaks. After savoring the sinister spooks at both attractions – in as leisurely a manner possible while knowing that darkness and distance in abundance separated us [...]

After beginning our 2009 Halloween Haunt Odyssey – an annual night-time tour of amatuer haunted houses  – with a visit to the Forest of Mirrors in Woodland Hills, we moved on to the Reign of Terror in Thousand Oaks. This attraction is a bit of an anamoly in the Haunt Odyssey, which focuses on amateur [...]

We are back for another installment of our annual Halloween Haunt Odyssey. This is an article in which we round up all the haunted attractions and Halloween events in Los Angeles that we visit on the night of October 31; predominantly, these tend to be Halloween yard haunts, because many of those tend to be open only on Halloween night. This year’s odyssey was small in number but large in quantity, because we toured haunted houses in widely separated geographical areas: the Forest of Mirrors and the Reign of Terror in the West Valley; the House of Restless Spirits and the Eternal Rest Cemetery not far from the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice.

It’s the day after Halloween, and you’re going through major withdrawl pains. What can you do? Get your fix with a handful of Halloween events in Los Angeles that have taken advantage of the weekend by staying open one more day! Not as many attractions have exploited this opportunity as one might have hoped, but there are more than a few: Knotts Scary Farm, Halloween Horror Nights, Boo at the Zoo, Rotten Apple 907’s Burbank Underground, The Vampyre Inn’s Bloody Ball, The Empty Grave, and the Halloween Harvest Festival; plus, a pair of horror themed plays, NEVERMORE and SALLY SPECTRE: THE MUSICAL.

The fourth installment of our video tour through the Haunted Queen Mary’s Shipwreck Halloween event takes us aboard ship and into the House of Horrors. The “House of Horrors” theme is a little generic – basically, anything ghastly or gruesome will do – but, like the Isolation Ward, this is a maze that takes advantage of [...]

You have idled away the Halloween season; your best of intentions have dwindled away to almost nothing, and now you find yourself on October 31 with too little time and too many haunts. You cannot get to all of them on Halloween night, and unfortunately most are not taking advantage of the weekend to stay open an extra day on November 1. What are you going to do? How can you prioritize? Well, it is your great good fortunate that you are reading this article, because we are about to enumerate 2009’s must-see Halloween events in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. These are the best Halloween haunts, rides, and mazes – the ones you will regret missing if you do not make the extra effort necessary to enter their murky portals before the witching hour sounds tonight. Be bold and brave, dear traveller, and as you ride through the night, urged on by ghosts and goblins, do not despair of reaching your final destination before dawn, for remember: “the Dead travel fast….”

Nightmare at Scareview Farms is the new Halloween attraction at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds, replacing Fearplex(which was sold off after the death of owner Bob Koritzke) Located in the fairgrounds’ Big Red Barn (instead of the stadium that housed Fearplex), Nightmare at Scare View Farms offers three mazes, which benefit from the vast expanse of available space, creating wide open environments quite different from the claustrophobic confines of most walk-through Halloween haunts. The results are not as intense as in some scare factories, but they are frightening in a fun sort of way that should appeal to families as long as their children are not too easily frightened (recommended age is over twelve). Also, Halloween fans looking for something besides the usual chainsaw-killer-in-the-corridor approach will appreciate the distinctive approach.

Our third video from the Haunted Queen Mary’s 2009 Halloween celebration is the first one that actually takes you aboard ship – into the Isolation Ward. As the name implies, this maze suggests an insane asylum, and you can bet that the inmates don’t stay in isolation for very long! As with all the mazes aboard [...]