Hollywood Gothique

Every October 31, our annual Halloween Haunt Odyssey offers a round-up of the best amateur yard haunts in Los Angeles and the surrounding area.

The final installment of our 2011 Halloween Yard Haunt Odyssey takes us to a pair of old favorites, both restless and eternal, and also ventures into previously uncharted realms of mishaps and darkness. The wide spectrum of approaches – from shivers to shocks, from simple to sophisticated – is a remarkable testament to the impressive variety [...]

After Burbank, Tarzana, and Woodland Hills, the next leg of Hollywood Gothique’s 2011 Halloween Yard Haunt Odyssey takes us from Los Angeles all the way to Simi Valley. The little bedroom community seems quiet and safe, but you never know what sort of hidden terror lies just beneath the placid surface – until now…

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 21-31
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 fourth and final installment of Hollywood Gothique’s 2010 Halloween Haunt Odyssey traverses Torrance, where we visit Revenge of the Ninja and the Haunted Shack. We had long dreamed of extending our annual tour of yard haunts and amateur Halloween attractions to the South Bay area of Los Angeles, and we are glad we finally made it this year; unfortunately, several that we hoped to see were not in operation this October. The Realm of Terror in Torrance, after skipping 2009, had promised to return for 2001; alas, the promise proved false. The Beacon Street House in San Pedro, which had offered a street fair and walk-through maze for the past few Halloweens, scaled back this year to a dance party, held on October 30 – the day before we made the trip down South. We certainly hope these events will be resurrected next Halloween. Despite their absence, our 2010 sojourn to the South Bay yielded tricks and treats a’plenty, and we anticipate a return visit next year. Click through for the details

Part 3 of Hollywood Gothique’s yard haunt tour includes visits to CrestaFallen Cemetery in West Los Angeles, the Eternal Rest Cemetery in Venice, and the House of Restless Spirits in Santa Monica. The combination of atmosphere and just plain fear makes for a fascinating variety of Halloween horror.

Part 2 of Hollywood Gothique’s 2010 Halloween Haunt Odyssey offers a trio of atmospheric yard haunts in Woodland Hills and Tarzana: Fallen Angel Cemetery, the Haunt with No Name, and the House at Haunted Hill.

Hollywood Gothique’s 2010’s Halloween Haunt Odyssey – an annual tour of amateur yard haunts – begins in Burbank, which seems to have become the bleeding, beating heart of Halloween in the San Fernando valley. Within an easily drivable distance are no less than four worthwhile haunts, with several other decorated yards also in the area: Spider-Lights, the Backwoods Maze, Nightmare Junction, and Rotten Apple 907’s Nightmare at the Museum. Click through for details.

Finally, after an unforgivably long delay, we are back to wrap up this year’s edition of our annual Halloween Haunt Odyssey. Atypically, our final stop was at not an amateur yard haunt but a professional Halloween haunted house: the Vampyr Inn’s Bloody Ball, a new Halloween attraction in West Hollywood.

Rotten Apple 907 has consistently crafted an entertaining amateur event that exceeds the usual definition of a “Halloween yard haunt,” but 2009’s theme, Burbank Underground, takes a quantum leap to a whole new level. From the moment you glimpse the exterior, you know you are in for something more than the same old trip through the looking glass.

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.

NOTE: Hollywood Gothique’s annual Halloween Haunt Odyssey is a sort of unofficial tour of yard haunts in Los Angeles, many of which are open only on October 31st. Each year, we hit a few old favorites and search for some new discoveries.
Yesterday, in Part 1, we laid to rest our impression of the local yard haunts that [...]

As usual, Halloween in Los Angeles has turned out to be crowded with more bats than we could possibly squeeze into a single belfry. Having scrambled to as many Professional Haunts and Theme Park Haunts as we could in the early weeks of the season, now in the final days of October we turn our attention [...]

You’ve heard me say it before: there are too many yard haunts to get to all of them in a single Halloween night. That’s why we snuck out early for Part 1 of our 2007 Halloween Haunt Odyssey, in which we visited Boney Island, Malice in Wonderland, and House at Haunted Hill. Then on October [...]

Many yard haunt are open only on Halloween Night or maybe one or two nights before, but some of the more extravagant ones get a jump on the competition. Earlier this week, we made a trip to the 10th and final year of Boney Island in Sherman Oaks, which began this year’s haunt on October [...]

This Halloween, Hollywood Gothique eschewed its usual haunts and set off on a voyage of discovery, seeking out new and different amateur efforts. In the process we made several exciting discoveries (if, like Columbus, we can use the word “discoveries” to mean places that are not really new but just new to us).
With Hallowed Haunting [...]

In last year’s Haunted House Odyssey, we described our tradition of spending October 31 seeking out amateur yard haunts — those houses that, free of charge, entertain their neighbors with elaborately decorated yards, full of tombstones, fog, skeletons, and other spooky denizens of the night.
This year, we made a point to stop by some old [...]

This Halloween, per our usual custom, we skipped the professional haunts and went on a long odyssey, searching out amateur attractions put on by people who simply love putting on a show for the sheer fun of it. In a big city like Los Angeles, so much is expensive We hit several old favorites and [...]