Drew Barillas

Alivia Hunter

Halloween has come and gone, but the costumes remain. If all goes according to Alivia Hunter's plan, this year's zombies and ninjas and red devils will re-emerge next year on different bodies. A go-getting former social media marketing consultant, the 42-year-old Hunter runs Los Angeles Costume Swap. Halloween, for her, has become a year-round preoccupation.

Last year, laid up in the hospital recuperating after a car accident, Hunter was casting about online for somewhere to volunteer or otherwise devote her considerable energy. She came upon the nonprofit sustainability organization Green Halloween.

A more ideal match could not have been made. Hunter is the type of person who, one year, decided to give out books to trick-or-treaters instead of candy. She owned about 300 books at the time and figured she'd get rid of every single title she could bear to part with. "Books?" people teased her. "Kids are going to egg your house." Well, kids didn't. Instead, they lined up for more. "Can I have two books?" one kid asked.

"Honey," Hunter replied, "you can have three just for asking that question."

Green Halloween recruited her to organize its costume swap event. Two hundred people showed up to the first one, in Mar Vista. It was, she says, "total chaos."

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Liz Ohanesian

LACMA's Muse Costume Ball has become one of the hot ticket events for Halloween in Los Angeles, a night spent wandering through the museum halls with costumed people every bit as eye-catching as the work hanging from the walls. This year, the ninth annual fete also served as a sneak preview for "Stanley Kubrick," a large retrospective of the late, legendary filmmaker's work, which opens to the public today. With Kubrick's films giving the party an instant theme, there was no shortage of awe-inspiring costumes.

The droogs were out in force, popping in and out of ultraviolent poses whenever a camera came near. It's expected that A Clockwork Orange, a film that inspired so many band names, would be the most popular point of reference at the event. Alex, the character made famous by Malcolm McDowell, is already a costume party staple. Eyes Wide Shut, the last film Kubrick directed before his death in 1999, inspired just as many costumes at the ball, with cloaked figures and Carnival masks dotting the line at the bar. But that wasn't all -- The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lolita and even Barry Lyndon provided the source material for many of the costumes at the event. One guy, dressed as Danny from The Shining, rode in on a Big Wheel. He was accompanied by two girls dressed as the Grady twins. Unfortunately for Dr. Strangelove fans, I didn't see Major T.J. Kong ride in on a bomb.

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Courtesy of Blackout Haunted House

Entering the Blackout experience

Imagine (1) somehow finding yourself among a group of apprehensive "fresh fish" being badgered and browbeaten by a brutal prison guard as he processes you through a penitentiary populated by Hannibal Lecter-esque psychotics and the lobotomized victims of grizzly, Mengele-like inmate experiments.

Or perhaps (2) on your way to the Magic Castle, you took the wrong freeway exit and ended up at its downtown, Twilight Zoned twin, a long-abandoned vaudeville complex of dank, subterranean dressing rooms and eerily empty theaters featuring performers with homicidal, hair-trigger tempers performing ghastly renditions of sleight-of-hand standards such as sawing a woman in half -- but without the sleight of hand.

Or maybe (3) the downtown elevator you're on makes an unexpected stop on a dimly lit lobby decked out in black tarpaulin and roaring with a menacingly throbbing machine hum. Your desperate search for an exit only takes you deeper into a labyrinthine, sensual inferno in which you fall under the absolute control of mostly unseen sadistic psychotics, who bind and blind you while running, pushing and prodding you through a harrowing gauntlet of sexual abasement and humiliating physical and psychic tortures.

Now imagine paying for the privilege.

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Image courtesy of Blumhouse of Horrors

What happens when the producer of frightening films like Paranormal Activity and Insidious takes over a sadly underused historic theater in downtown Los Angeles for the Halloween season? You'll find out tonight when Blumhouse of Horrors, from film producer Jason Blum, opens to the public at Variety Arts Center. The haunted house extravaganza will run at the vintage venue through November 3.

A few days before the event was set to open, I met up with Blumhouse of Horrors' production manager, Josh Simon, at the rambling theater on Figueroa Street. Crews were working to finish up the last of the big scares that visitors will experience.

"It's definitely an around-the-clock operation," says Simon of the last minute preparations. "The logistics of this are that we're only operating for the month of October and the first part of November," he explains. "There's no delaying. This has to happen."

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Liz Ohanesian

Peaches Christ and Elvira at Elvira's Haunted Hunt

See also:
*Elvira's World: Our 2010 cover story
*Top 5 Elvira Moments on YouTube

A block-full of people descended upon Elvira's Macabre Mobile last night as the Mistress of the Dark pulled up in front of Los Feliz's Vista Theatre with fellow midnight movie authority Peaches Christ in tow. Cameras flashed, crowds swarmed and they emerged from the vehicle with big hair and bigger smiles. But, for every bit of grim glitz these two divas of dread brought to the Vista's red carpet, they were here for a decidedly unglamorous cause. They were here as the champions of independent film frights.

Elvira's Horror Hunt is a first-year film contest/festival helmed by the legendary late-night movie hostess and Peaches Christ, the famed drag performer renowned for her Midnight Mass movie screenings in San Francisco. They put together the contest in connection with HorrorHound Magazine. Submissions were judged by the duo, as well as performers Sybil Danning, Bill Moseley and Joe Bob Briggs. The grand prize-winning entries in both the film short and feature-length categories were screened at the Vista for a special event presented by Stan Lee's Comikaze Expo, the pop culture convention taking place this weekend.

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Andy Keown

The Winning Costumes: Northcutt, left, with Hirsch

Daniel Hirsch loves all things Halloween and last night he got one more reason to do so. At West Hollywood's world famous Halloween Carnaval, he and his partner, Amy Northcutt, won the best costume prize at WeHo's first annual Project Masquerade contest.

Designed and hand-made by Hirsch and Northcutt, the winning costumes featured two spot-on replicas of scary characters from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Hirsch came to life as the three hitchhikers and Norhcutt dressed as the psychic Madame Leota.

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Siran Babayan

It was raining men in West Hollywood Saturday night as the city organized its first Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day. Leave it to WeHo to declare a Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day and Motley Crue Day in the same year. And only in WeHo will you find a scantily clad dancer outside a yogurt shop performing for families with kids in tow.

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She Wants Revenge performs at LACMA costume ball

The LACMA Muse Costume Ball is one of Los Angeles's hottest Halloween tickets, and with the wildly popular Tim Burton exhibit in its final days and KROQ jumping on board, Saturday's sold out Dead Man's Ball came with an especially large amount of hype.

The attendees were dressed in professional-grade costumes that could have come out of the movies -- many probably did. There were a few over the top French 18th century costumes, Vikings and even a River Song who purchased her costume right from the Dr. Who costume department.

There were themed drinks, catering, costume contests and an over-the-top photo booth the size of a small room with a Baphomet, a coffin and assorted skulls and horns throughout. The décor included sets and performers from Sypher Arts Studios and entertainment from Sneaky Nietzche, She Wants Revenge, KILLSONIC, DJ Dex and DJ Jeremiah Dead.

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Yes. Yes it is.

OMFG! Halloween starts this weekend! Even though CVS put out the candy and the knickknacks right after Labor Day, you still waited 'til the last minute to get a costume, didn't you? Only recent temperate climate transplants that have been waiting for the palm trees to change color (they don't) before they recognize that it's fall can be let off the hook for procrastinating (but not for their poor understanding of science). You've all had plenty of time -- so what do you do? Where do you go?

We spoke to three awesome costume shops, Ozzie Dots in Los Feliz, The Costume Shoppe in Glendale, and Robinson Beautilities in Culver City (and a bunch more terrible ones) to get an idea of what Angelenos were wearing this year on All Hallows Eve. In all honesty, Halloween doesn't end for most people in this town, so we thought that we might hear some great ideas and some fantastic costumes.

Turns out, as Christian from Robinson Beautilities informed us, "There's a lot of superheroes...always lots of pirates, and lots of recent movie characters...like Drive and Black Swan." Even the folks at the Costume Shoppe said that it has been a pretty conservative year full of "cowboys, indians, pirates...that sort of thing." Seems somewhat banal for Hollyweird, doesn't it? What about the oddballs, the weirdos, and the downright awful train-wreck costumes?

We may have to ride out the weekend to get the full spectrum, but we took a completely unscientific survey of costume salespeople to get an idea of the absolute worst ideas they've seen so far...here are seven (with suggested improvements):

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