Hollywood Gothique

News, reviews and videos of Halloween Events in Los Angeles: theme park attractions, professional haunted houses, amateur yard haunts, community halloween haunts, Halloween activities for children, parties, street fairs, and graveyard tours.

So, you’re Halloween high has ended, and you feel your morose soul descending into the abyss of withdrawal. The zombies have returned to their graves. The vampyres have fled to where the ghouls and Afrits rave. The restless spirits have shuttered up their haunted house. The cannibal crazies have disappeared into the maze of the backwoods. The delusions have disappeared, and the ghosts ships have all set sail. What is left? What is left?

I just wanted to take a moment to offer a brief, belated review of this year’s Halloween & Mourning Tour at the Heritage Square Museum this weekend. Heritage Square, which preserves Victorian mansions built in Los Angeles near the turn of the previous century, has offered this self-guided tour every Halloween for the past eight [...]

The House at Haunted Hill
The previous installment of our annual Halloween Yard Haunt Odyssey took us through two terrifying mazes in Burbank, The Backwoods Maze and Rotten Apple 907’s Space Oddessey. Moving on to Tarzana and Woodland Hills, we encounter a trio of Halloween Yard Haunts that are less interested in shocks and surprise than [...]

Our exploration of 2011’s Halloween Yard Haunts began last week with our trip to Boney Island (reviewed here). Next, we move on to Burbank for a pair of Amateur Halloween Events that display enough skill and imagination to rank along side professional Halloween Haunted Houses & Hayrides in Los Angeles.
The Backwoods Maze (1912 North Pepper [...]

Dates: October 21 through November 5
Location: Mountain View Mausoleum and Cemetery, 2300 N. Marengo Avenue, Altadena, California
Wicked Lit’s innovative productions – based on the works of Poe, Lovecraft, Dickens, etc – fully immerse the audience in different times and locations, creating a unique brand of shuddery entertainment, quite distinct from other Halloween events in Los Angeles.

Date: October 30
Hours:

6:30pm to 8:00pm: Red Carpet Arrivals
7:30pm to 1:00am Halloween Launch Benefit

Location: The Conga Room L.A. Live, 800 West Olympic Boulevard # 235, Los Angeles, CA 90015-1366
Link out: Click here
Description: The sCare Foundation – a newly founded non-profit organization whose goal is to alleviate the hardships of poverty and homelessness facing North American youth [...]

Dates: October 14-31
Hours: 8-11pm weeknights & Sundays; 8pm-midnight on Fridays & Saturdays
Theatre 68 doesn’t have the expanse of other Halloween haunts in Los Angeles, but it offers something distinctive that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere: a more personal, intimate variety of horror, with audience and characters engaged up close and personal.

Dates: October 21-31
Hours: 6-9pm Sunday-Thursday; 6-10pm Friday-Saturday
Location: 4602 Morse Avenue Sherman Oaks, CA 91432
After a three-year hiatus, Boney Island is back, and it’s even better than before! The Halloween yard haunt’s skeleton crew has morphed from a carnival into a magic show, but the familiar, whimsical aura still pervades the grounds, making this one of the best Los Angeles Halloween haunts for children.

The caretaker at Fallen Angel Cemetery sent us this video, showcasing the souls of the damned who have been cast down to the nether regions. We don’t usually post videos from outside sources, but this one does a good job of conveying the atmosphere and look of this nifty little yard haunt. The only aspect [...]

Creatures of the Corn at FrightFair
I always knew this gig would make me famous. A few seconds of my video of  the FrightFair Screampark show up in a segment that the local NBC news station recently ran a segment on the Pierce College Halloween Harvest Festival, which is where FrightFair takes place.
Hey, anything that throws a [...]

Dates: October 15-31, 7pm to 1am
Location: 2821 S. Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90018

Description: This amateur Halloween yard haunt – which has been in operation several years now – features scary decorations with a few animatronics, music and sound effects.
On Halloween Night, there are treats for the kids and a few costumed characters delivering a [...]

Date: October 29 at 8pm
Location: The Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036
Link out: Click here
Description: Head on over to the Silent Movie Theatre for Halloween fun.
From the website:
If you’ve been a part of the Cinefamily for a while, then you know how monumental our Halloween parties are. It’s our birthday [...]

Date: October 31, 4-7pm
Location: Downtown Burbank, California
Link out: Click here
Description: Downtown Burbank comes alive to the sounds of thousands of costumed kids and oodles of poodles decked to the K-9’s for Halloween. Parents are invited to bring their goblins and ghouls for an early evening of trick-or-treating. Downtown Burbank merchants provide free treats from store-to-store [...]

Dates: October 7-9, 14-16, 21-23, and 28-31
Six October seasons have passed since last we visited the Six Flags Magic Mountain Fright Fest, in the eldritch year of 2005 (review here). That is vast eons of time in the competitive netherworld of Halloween haunted houses and hayrides, and Six Flags has expanded its Fright Fest with more mazes, scare zones, and shows than ever before; we found this year’s event to be much the same as before in terms of its overall impact, but it is bigger and better than before.

Jamie Lee Curtis at last year's Dream Halloween Evening.
Title: October 29, 5-8pm
Location: Barker Hangar 3021 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405-6101
Link out: Click here
Description: Come on down for this magical evening, benefitting the Chidlren Affected by AIDS Foundation. Guests include founder Jake Koberdanz and actors James Lee Curtis, DOris Roberts, and Josh Duhamel.
From the website:
Los [...]

Date: October 29, from 9am to noon
Location: 1095 E. Willow Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90806
Link out: Click here
Description: On Saturday, October 29, Long Beach’s two oldest cemeteries transform into a Living History tour that allows living tourists to stroll about listening to tales of the dead.
From the website:
Amidst old tombstones, tour participants gather [...]

Date: October 29, 6-9pm
Location: Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, 3720 Stephen M. White Drive, San Pedro, CA 90731
Link out: Click here
Description: The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium presents its 6th annual Halloween event, transforming into a world of chills, thrills and gills. We have never been, so you will have to judge for yourself, based on the description from [...]

Date: October 28, 4-10pm
Location: Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum‎ 1419 North Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga Canyon, CA 90290-4275
Link out: Click here
Description: Come on down for a haunted house, ghost stories, pumpkin carving, costume contest and games as the Bucolic Theatricum Botanicum transforms into the haunted BOO-tanicum for the theater company’s first annual Halloween extravaganza. Wander [...]

Dates: October 8 through 31
Location: 702 North Doheny Drive, West Hollywood
Link out: Click here
Description: Mr. Bones Pumpkin Patch offers a variety of kid-friendly activities. Hours are Sunday 9-7; Monday – Thursday 9-7; Friday – Saturday 9-8.
From the website:
Since 1986, our family has traveled from Oregon bringing the spirit of the farm and exuberant joy of [...]

"The Body Snatcher," based on Robert Louis Stevenson
Tonight, Wicked Lit returns to the Moutain View Mausoleum and Cemetery for another October season of immersive theatre productions. Rather like TAMARA, the play staged in the American Legion Hall in Hollywood back in the 1980s, Wicket Lit productions take place in an actual location, requiring the audience [...]

Watch your step – and those hands – as you descend the stairs.
You should go see Delusion, the new Halloween haunted house that just opened in Los Angeles.
No, really. Stop reading this now, and go buy your tickets.
What more do we need to tell you? I mean, you know us, right? Have we ever steered [...]

Date: October 31, 6-11pm
Location: 1547 Garden St., Glendale 91201
Link out: Click here
Description: Mishap Manor is a family-friendly yard haunt depicting an old decrepit haunted house, infested with crows, and with a graveyard in front. Apparently, a few mishaps have befallen some of the past residents. There are a few animated props, lighting effects, [...]

The Theatre 68 Haunted House opened its doors last week. This has been one of our favorite Halloween events in Los Angeles since we discovered it a few years ago. We have not had a chance yet to check out this year’s version, but if it matches what we have seen in the past, it [...]