Things to do in Los Angeles this Friday

Trick or treating will look a little different this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the whole family together for a drive-through experience to get spooky. Coming to Woodland Hills on October 9, a new Haunt’oween L.A. event promises jack-o’-lantern tunnels, pumpkin picking, family-friendly sights and even a bit of “door-to-door” trick or treating—all socially distanced, of course. The new drive-through event will run through Halloween and comes by way of Experiential Supply, a company that recreates sets and builds immersive activations for big-budget movies like IT: Chapter 2 and Ready Player One. Now, they’re building driveable mini maze paths, a tunnel featuring 1,000 lit pumpkins, a sanitized pumpkin patch station and even two rows of residential streets where costumed, masked characters will hand out wrapped candy with poles and buckets to safely recreate trick or treating. If you want to keep the memory of Halloween going all year round—and don’t we all?—every car gets a photo op and a green screen video to remember the trek. The entire experience runs between 25 and 35 minutes and costs $70 per car. You’ll find it at 6100 Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the site of the former Westfield Promenade. Tickets are on sale now.

Neither experienced from your car nor bent on scaring the gourd out of you, Descanso Gardens’ new monthlong event is bringing some fresh air and family-friendly fun to Halloween. Throughout October, you can take a socially-distanced stroll through the La Cañada Flintridge gardens and its seasonal displays: a hay maze, a pumpkin arch, wooden jack-o’-lantern boxes, a scarecrow trail through a forest and a house made entirely out of pumpkins. And over at the Oak Grove, you’ll find mandalas of orange, white and green pumpkins swirling around the trunks of trees. Halloween is included in regular admission ($15, kids $5), and reservations (and masks, of course) are required. Tickets are currently sold out for weekend dates, but if you can visit on a weekday, that’ll probably make for a more peaceful and leisurely experience anyway; we swung by on a Saturday and found most of the pumpkin photo ops near the entrance area bustling with families, though the farther reaches of the gardens were still uncrowded. You’ll be able to visit Descanso daily from 9am to 5pm, with extended 5 to 8pm hours the final week of October (Halloween night is reserved for Family Plus members).

If you like your haunts with a bit of mystery, a new Halloween event called Fright Farms promises to build on the drive-through format by adding clues and a spooky storyline. From October 26 all the way through November 29, five acres of the SilverLakes Complex in Norco, California, will flip to an immersive experience where you'll solve the mystery of Hillsdale and its recently missing resident, Emma Parker, cruising through creepy terrain all the while. Clues and directions will be broadcast over your car radio, while interactive aspects such as Parker's missing-persons report will pop up on your phone—and naturally there'll be creatures lurking in the shadows.  Tickets run $65 to $75 per vehicle entry and are on sale now, and if this 13+ spookfest is a little too scary, there's a sibling drive-through concept—Not So Spooky Farm—on the grounds, too. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Fright Farms (@frightfarms) on Sep 24, 2020 at 12:00pm PDT

This new event is combining the appeal of a food festival with all the creepiness of a haunted trail—and all from the safety of your car. The Bite LA is a Halloween-themed food crawl complete with virtual campfire and "creature safari," where you'll drive from station to station and costumed ghouls and other dark entities will serve you eight bites along the way. (Still hungry? There'll be additional food for purchase, plus vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options.) Bring your own flashlight for the "creature safari," where you'll shine light into the woods to find the monsters roaming the trees, and at the end, park your cark for the virtual campfire, which includes  scary stories, a themed campfire dessert, and your choice of hot cocoa, cider or coffee. If you're the type who likes to dress up everything, there's also a car costume contest where your decorated ride can help you win prizes. The fun runs Friday to Sunday throughout October, with a few weekdays added, and tickets run $38-$98 per person, depending on how many are in your vehicle with you. Learn more about The Bite LA here.

The park is technically still closed, but Knott’s Berry Farm is still finding a way to make the season spooky. Normally California’s oldest theme park goes all-out for Halloween with haunts and trails during Knott’s Scary Farm, but this year, it’s instead throwing a brand new food festival on just a portion of the grounds. The new Taste of Fall-O-Ween is set to include food stations packed with all the pumpkin-spiced treats, apple cider, funnel cakes, soup bread bowls and other fall fare you could want, plus more eerie options such as frozen “bloody” lemon slime margaritas. And while there will be adult concoctions to purchase, it’s a family-friendly event—so much so that there’s even a children’s trick-or-treating trail.  There’s no admission needed for the fest, but you will need to purchase a tasting card, with five tastes for $35, or $20 for a kids card with three tastes. Find the full story on Taste of Fall-O-Ween here.

Looking for a Halloween adventure that's suitable for all ages? How about an immersive, interactive treasure hunt for the booty of dread pirate Bluebeard?  The team behind the creepy and mystery-laden Fright Farms drive-through is giving guests another option, one that's a little less scare and a little more adventure. During Not So Spooky Farm, you'll follow the Jack-o-lantern–headed Stingy Jack to drive through Jurassic Park, a hedge maze, a castle and more, picking up candy clues, and watching the storyline as you go thanks to QR codes on your smartphones. Each vehicle costs $65 to enter and receives adventure kits and supplies for the 35-minute journey ahead. Tickets are on sale now.  

So a blood-red disco ball, a bunch of booze and some puppets show up at your door. Nope, it’s not the setup to a joke, it’s just part of what you’ll receive in this delightfully outlandish package from Of the Night. For its Dracula’s Disco of the Night, the delivery entertainment service is dropping off party packs for two that include rosé, tequila and beer; non-dairy ice cream; fangs, body glitter and fake blood; a disco ball, a tinsel curtain and fake spiderwebs; and bat puppets. The whole thing is inspired by the Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s Dracula performance (and 10% of the proceeds will benefit the Highland Park puppet theater), and there’s even an add-on option for a puppet performance ($100). You’ll find two delivery dates, October 23 and 30, with service available for most of Central L.A.

Pinkies and protection spells up: One of L.A.'s top tea houses is getting spooky all month long with a Halloween-themed afternoon tea service. All four locations of Chado Tea Room—that's Hollywood, DTLA, Torrance and Pasadena—are getting in the mood with a set menu that includes Halloween-inspired iced tea; your choice of pumpkin soup or pumpkin spice salad; four Halloween-inspired finger sandwiches in the shapes of ghosts, pumpkins and beyond; scones with cream and jam; macarons; butter cookies; and one pot of pumpkin spice chai, all for $28 per person. Want to avoid the ghouls and monsters roaming the streets? You can even get Chado's Halloween menu to-go. Book your reservation here.

New name, sort-of-same beloved literary event: Bibliophiles typically flock to the USC campus for this L.A. Times-curated event, which has now added “Stories & Ideas” onto its bookish title. But after postponing the in-person book fair, it’ll now be held virtually. So while you won’t be able to roam stalls from booksellers, you’ll still be able to catch four weeks of streaming readings and panels. This digital edition is set to host 25 events over four weeks, starting October 18, with a lineup of writers, poets, artists and storytellers that includes Ayad Akhtar, Jerry Brown,Maria Hinojosa, Marlon James, Natalie Portman and Marilynne Robinson, among others. Check the website for the full lineup and schedule.

One of our favorite spooky cultural events is back, and this time it's going partially virtual. Every year Haunted Little Tokyo turns the area into a ghoulish maze of Halloween-themed pop-ups, walking tours and performances spotlighting the 136-year-old neighborhood. Little Tokyo Historical Society and Go Little Tokyo team up for some seriously spooky events that pay tribute to the area and Japanese culture, and given everything that is 2020, now some of those events are even taking place online. This year you can take virtual ghost tours, go trick or treating IRL, eat a feast from some of the neighborhood's best restaurants, and even embark on a family friendly online adventure. On October 23 from 4 to 6pm there's the Quest for Candy, A Haunted Little Tokyo Virtual Mystery Adventure where kids can look for clues to find candy and save Little Tokyo ($13), and on October 24 from 5 to 6:30pm you can take a guided virtual ghost tour through Little Tokyo's haunted and historical buildings ($10). From October 25 to October 31, MOCA will be flipping to the BOO-SEUM over on the museum's Instagram account for themed works of art and tales of history. Wish you could sip your way through spooky season? On October 30 at 7pm, take part in an online cocktail demo complete with your own drink kits ($50), and if you're more of an explorer you can roam through Japanese Village Plaza during a candy scavenger hunt on Halloween from 4 to 7pm (free).   Lastly, you can nosh and drink your way thr

Trick or treating will look a little different this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the whole family together for a drive-through experience to get spooky. Coming to Woodland Hills on October 9, a new Haunt’oween L.A. event promises jack-o’-lantern tunnels, pumpkin picking, family-friendly sights and even a bit of “door-to-door” trick or treating—all socially distanced, of course. The new drive-through event will run through Halloween and comes by way of Experiential Supply, a company that recreates sets and builds immersive activations for big-budget movies like IT: Chapter 2 and Ready Player One. Now, they’re building driveable mini maze paths, a tunnel featuring 1,000 lit pumpkins, a sanitized pumpkin patch station and even two rows of residential streets where costumed, masked characters will hand out wrapped candy with poles and buckets to safely recreate trick or treating. If you want to keep the memory of Halloween going all year round—and don’t we all?—every car gets a photo op and a green screen video to remember the trek. The entire experience runs between 25 and 35 minutes and costs $70 per car. You’ll find it at 6100 Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the site of the former Westfield Promenade. Tickets are on sale now.

Neither experienced from your car nor bent on scaring the gourd out of you, Descanso Gardens’ new monthlong event is bringing some fresh air and family-friendly fun to Halloween. Throughout October, you can take a socially-distanced stroll through the La Cañada Flintridge gardens and its seasonal displays: a hay maze, a pumpkin arch, wooden jack-o’-lantern boxes, a scarecrow trail through a forest and a house made entirely out of pumpkins. And over at the Oak Grove, you’ll find mandalas of orange, white and green pumpkins swirling around the trunks of trees. Halloween is included in regular admission ($15, kids $5), and reservations (and masks, of course) are required. Tickets are currently sold out for weekend dates, but if you can visit on a weekday, that’ll probably make for a more peaceful and leisurely experience anyway; we swung by on a Saturday and found most of the pumpkin photo ops near the entrance area bustling with families, though the farther reaches of the gardens were still uncrowded. You’ll be able to visit Descanso daily from 9am to 5pm, with extended 5 to 8pm hours the final week of October (Halloween night is reserved for Family Plus members).

Join Grand Park and the Music Center for 12 days of virtual celebrations. You’ll find arts workshops, digital ofrendas and storytelling online, as well as in-real-life art installations at the neighboring Downtown locations. Self-Help Graphics & Art—which hosts its own Day of the Dead event—has curated 11 large-scale altars for socially distant viewing, with audio tours available online.

New name, sort-of-same beloved literary event: Bibliophiles typically flock to the USC campus for this L.A. Times-curated event, which has now added “Stories & Ideas” onto its bookish title. But after postponing the in-person book fair, it’ll now be held virtually. So while you won’t be able to roam stalls from booksellers, you’ll still be able to catch four weeks of streaming readings and panels. This digital edition is set to host 25 events over four weeks, starting October 18, with a lineup of writers, poets, artists and storytellers that includes Ayad Akhtar, Jerry Brown,Maria Hinojosa, Marlon James, Natalie Portman and Marilynne Robinson, among others. Check the website for the full lineup and schedule.

We might be passing go-in-the-pool season, but sit-by-the-pool season isn’t going anywhere. You can do just that—and eat dinner and watch a movie while you’re at it—during this poolside screening series at Downtown’s JW Marriott. Each $45 reservation includes one appetizer or snack, one entrée and unlimited popcorn.

Just like old times, you can catch movie screenings and comedy shows from smack dab in the middle of the Sunset Strip—but this time around, you’ll be watching both from your car. Andaz West Hollywood is screening a mix of ’70s L.A. classics alongside tales of counterculture and rebellion during this drive-in series in partnership with civic engagement group YEA! Impact. Hungry? Each event comes with the option to order off of the Andaz menu (think sliders, beer and cocktails, plus traditional concessions like hot dogs, popcorn and candy). You’ll find each screening atop the third level of the hotel’s open-air parking garage.

Catch drive-in screenings outside of a 91-year-old theater with the Hollywood Hills as your backdrop during this new series. The American Legion Hollywood Post 43 will host up 30 cars a night, seven days a week during the veterans organization’s new drive-in (with films digitally projected onto a 38-foot screen and transmitted via your car radio). Each reservation includes popcorn, soda and candy, and you can also choose to donate to the theater so that it can add a 35mm projector to its new outdoor setup.

Spending an afternoon at the L.A. Zoo (which is open again with timed reservations)? Stick around into the evening for this weekend series of drive-in screenings. Each weekend has a different theme (“Animal Adventures,” “The Brillant Betty White” and “Hair-Raising Halloween”) with family-friendly flicks on Fridays and Saturdays (think Zootopia and The Lorax) with some slightly more adult movies on Sundays (Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Lake Placid). Tickets $40 for up to two guest or $55 for three or more; prices start at $100 for the final Halloween-themed weekend when the screenings include photo ops, treat bags, trivia challenges and a pre-show video presentation with some of the zoo’s animals.

This annual film festival—now in its 36th year—simultaneously celebrates and launches the careers of Asian and Asian-American filmmakers. For this virtual edition, the fest expands to five weekends with streaming Q&As and movies from more than 225 filmmakers.