Inside the ritzy LA neighborhoods turning Halloween into a Hollywood horror movie

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There are two kinds of people in Los Angeles: people who decorate for Halloween, and people who live north of Montana in Santa Monica and apparently have access to the Warner Bros. prop department.

Every October, the streets around 16th and Georgina become a destination for people who want to see what happens when expensive real estate meets an unlimited enthusiasm for fake corpses.

In most neighborhoods, a pumpkin and a plastic skeleton will do. In Santa Monica, you begin to suspect somebody has hired a production designer. (Which, given where we live, is entirely possible.)

Los Angeles is uniquely equipped to take Halloween too far: We have actual prop builders, special-effects artists, costume designers, set decorators and makeup professionals living among us.

In another city, your neighbor might be an accountant. In Los Angeles, your neighbor might have spent six seasons making monsters for television. Now he’s retired, has a garage full of equipment and is apparently prepared to make Halloween everybody else’s problem.

This is not decorating; this is an unofficial branch of the entertainment industry. And because this is Los Angeles, there are multiple ways to experience it, each requiring a completely different outfit and parking strategy.

In Santa Monica, families head north of Montana to admire the elaborate displays and collect candy. In Venice, people can trick-or-treat along the canals, where the decorations compete with waterfront real estate and the occasional boat.

While in West Hollywood, Halloween is less about candy and more about becoming a person who requires three hours of theatrical makeup and cannot sit down in their costume. WeHo’s annual Halloween Carnaval takes over a mile of Santa Monica Boulevard, filling the street with elaborate costumes, music and enough creative ambition to staff a small television network.

The city expects thousands of people to show up dressed as everything from horror villains to pop culture references that will be completely incomprehensible by Thanksgiving.

That’s the thing about Halloween in Los Angeles: We don’t just celebrate it. We produce it.

This is a city where people will spend six hours creating a costume inspired by a film that grossed $14 million and then be genuinely offended when nobody recognizes it.

Somewhere, a makeup artist is attaching prosthetics in a bathroom while their roommate explains that the costume is actually a commentary on late-stage capitalism.

Meanwhile, I am considering whether wearing black and saying I’m a witch counts as an outfit. (It does. I have decided.)

Of course, Los Angeles has always had a complicated relationship with horror: We manufacture nightmares for a living. Universal Studios can sell you a professionally produced evening of terror, complete with elaborate sets, performers and people whose entire job is to chase you with a chainsaw. (Personally, I don’t need to pay somebody to frighten me: I live in Los Angeles — have you seen the cost of gas? I can achieve the same level of terror at the pump without anybody chasing me with a machete.)

Yet, for all the absurdity, there’s something genuinely wonderful about what happens to the city every October: People get out of their cars. This alone should qualify as a Halloween miracle.

Families walk residential streets they might never otherwise visit. Neighbors stand outside their houses. Strangers admire one another’s handiwork. Children travel in packs, collecting candy and occasionally confronting a 12-foot skeleton.

For a few hours, Los Angeles becomes something we spend the rest of the year insisting it isn’t: A walking city. In a place where crossing town to see a friend requires advance planning, traffic calculations and a small act of emotional commitment, people willingly travel across neighborhoods to look at fake gravestones.

We complain that Los Angeles lacks community, that everybody stays in their own little bubble, that nobody talks to their neighbors. Then October arrives, somebody plugs in a fog machine, and suddenly the entire block is outside. Maybe that’s the real magic.

The displays are extravagant, yes. Some are ridiculous, and some probably cost more than my first car, but they’re also an enormous amount of work undertaken largely for the amusement of other people.

In a city where entertainment usually comes with a ticket price, a parking fee and an invitation to upgrade to VIP, somebody has turned their front lawn into a haunted attraction and invited the neighborhood to enjoy it for free.

So this Halloween: I’ll head north of Montana, admire the Hollywood-grade horrors, maybe wander through the Venice Canals and appreciate the fact that West Hollywood has managed to turn an entire boulevard into a costume party.

Then I’ll return to my own house, where I’ll place one small pumpkin on the porch. Possibly two.

Mary Kay Holmes is a Los Angeles writer covering culture, modern relationships and the increasingly absurd business of being a person.

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