A pilot flying over the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, California, in 1942, could gaze down on a peaceful suburban scene of orderly white houses and green park trees giving way to gently rolling alfalfa fields. He might have caught a glimpse of Burbank residents hanging their washing on backyard clotheslines, puttering with their gleaming new cars, or simply strolling the broad, clean streets. Even the keenest-eyed pilot wouldn’t have seen the entire suburb was fake.
Spurred by the bombing of Pearl Harbor the year before, in December 1941, and the shelling of an oil facility by a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara just two months after that, the United States felt an urgent need to protect important West Coast military and industrial assets from possible Japanese attack. Borrowing an idea first employed successfully by the British in the 1940 Battle of Britain, the Army Corps of Engineers moved to disguise the Lockheed plant from air reconnaissance. Col. John F. Ohmer took charge of a program to hide the 340-acre base underneath a massive canopy painted to look like a collection of suburban homes surrounded by fields.
According to Lockheed Martin’s corporate history, Ohmer enlisted the help of “scenic designers, painters, art directors, landscape artists, animators, carpenters, lighting experts and prop men from movie studios in Hollywood, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Disney Studios, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Universal Pictures and others,” most of whom lived not far from the plant. “Airfields and parking lots were painted green and lined with plants to make them look like fields of alfalfa. The main factory was covered with a canopy of chicken wire, netting and painted canvas to blend in with the surrounding grass. And fake trees were erected with spray-painted chicken feathers for leaves, some painted green to represent new growth and some brown to represent decaying patches.“
Ohmer and his crew added convincing touches like rubber automobiles, which were moved every day and “parked” in new locations. Plant workers took breaks to walk down the “streets,” or pretend to take clothing on and off clotheslines. To test his plan, Ohmer asked a War Department general to fly over the fake town at 5,000 feet and report back what he could see. The general reported that “all … he could see was suburb after California suburb.” With the help of local film industry professionals, Ohmer had created a perfect simulacrum of a Southern California town, at least as viewed from a mile away: a fake suburban paradise, even more manicured and manufactured than the real thing.
***
Halloween is a holiday about what is not real. Vampires, ghosts, and zombies, of course, but also rigged Victorian parlor games, manufactured “Druidic” customs, and thirty years of poisoned candy hoaxes. For more than a thousand years, Halloween has inspired legends, frauds, and misunderstandings, all while asking us to consider the real nature of the transcendent, the nightmarish, and the miraculous. At the same time, many of Halloween’s most ardent fans are preoccupied with uncovering an authentic, unspoiled Halloween past. Is Halloween really based on Samhain? How was it originally celebrated? Is it still a real Halloween if your kid wears a store-bought costume? If they trick or treat in a shopping mall? As we shall see, anxiety about the real Halloween is as old as Halloween itself.
My starting place for this project is home haunters, the community of people who create elaborate walk-throughs and displays in their houses, garages, and yards for Halloween night. There are hundreds of haunters associations across the country. I am a member of two, the Southern California Valley Haunters (SCVH) and the larger, more professional CalHaunts. There are also thousands of message boards, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and even printed zines devoted to sharing tips on how to turn PVC pipe, scavenged wooden pallets, and sheets of Styrofoam into elaborate artificial environments. There are tutorials on how to make the best fake marble, iron, and brick, artificially aged with fake moss and water stains and spray-on rust. Fakes for things that are too expensive or cumbersome to buy real, for things that don’t exist in Southern California, or in the 21st-century, or that never existed at all. There are fake atmospheric effects, like thunder, lightning, and fog, and makeup, masks, and prosthetics to create fake scars, severed limbs, and blood. No one is more obsessed with realism than a dedicated haunter, and no one works harder for the cause of Halloween, that exuberant, playful, subversive celebration of the unreal.
***
Burbank today is a city of 104,000 people, a suburb of Los Angeles, and the gateway to the San Fernando Valley. The San Fernando Valley, geographically speaking, is the scrubby valley to the north of downtown Los Angeles, a flat basin of dusty live oaks and desultory creeks roughly 260 square miles ringed by a chain of mountain ranges, a caesura between the beach and the Verdugo Hills. There are farms and stables, a theme park, half a dozen movie studios, a sizable though waning adult film industry, native red-tailed hawks and non-native feral parrots, an 18th-century Spanish mission, and in Burbank, the oldest remaining Bob’s Big Boy, where roller-skating waitresses still deliver chili spaghetti to your car on sweltering Saturday nights.
Countless scenes of small-town middle America have been filmed in Burbank, often adding fake fall leaves or a manufactured snow flurry not unlike what Ohmer had conceived. For millions of TV and movie viewers around the world, when you picture a small town in the Midwest, you are in fact picturing Burbank. The website Burbankia mentions one of the most notable, the house where they filmed The Wonder Years, a nostalgic 1980s sitcom about a 1960s Anytown: “They found the perfect spot to encapsulate that retro Anywhere, U.S.A.-feel on a quiet block of University Avenue in Burbank where the vast majority of the homes used on the series are located. Visiting University Avenue is like stepping back in time. The sleepy, tree-lined street looks like it was plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting and the clapboard houses that line the block appear frozen in time from when they were built in the late ‘40s.” (When John Carpenter filmed Halloween in nearby Pasadena in the spring of 1978, the crew scattered hundreds of paper leaves to simulate fall in Illinois, gathering them all up again at the end of every shooting day.)
The city’s charms were promoted by the Walt Disney company in an optimistic 1947 brochure for “the gateway to the San Fernando Valley,” a place where “family life flourishes.” The 16-page booklet, indistinguishable from those that would promote the nearby Disneyland amusement park a decade later, advertised a brand-new old-fashioned town for white families looking to roll back the social changes wrought by the wars, by women’s liberation, the Great Migration, international communism, and immigration, and go back to a world that had never been. Instead of remaking existing American cities in line with that fabricated past, developers constructed rows of pristine, contemporary houses, all artificially aged with nostalgia. By trying to turn back the clock to a mythical American past, the suburbs were a great national cosplay project, a movie set, a painstakingly detailed facade.
Judgmental Maps, a website that labels different big-city neighborhoods with cheeky jokes, calls Burbank “Super Creepy 1950s Looking Area.” There is, in fact, something slightly creepy about Burbank. In sympathy with this uncanny place, Burbank’s residents love creepiness. The city boasts dozens of goth and other dark culture stores, including a year-round Halloween store that now occupies three storefronts along Magnolia Avenue. Within a short walk from my house are a dozen goth businesses, selling everything from 1950s drugstore Halloween masks to antique surgical equipment, preserved bats, and a real coffin. These businesses are joined by the vintage and vintage reproduction stores that cater to the overlapping rockabilly subculture; like stranded movie extras, hundreds of Burbank residents spend every day of their lives in period costumes, from careful Victory rolls in their hair to authentic menstrual belts. From those elements of the city– its nostalgia and its creepiness – Tim Burton, Burbank’s ambivalent native son, created his particular B-movie valentine-aesthetic, a sentimental nightmare as defiantly unreal as the painted canvas backdrop that once protected his hometown.
Tim Burton was born in Burbank on August 25, 1958. His father was a former minor league baseball player who worked for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. His mother Jean ran Cats Plus, a cat-themed gift store that would fit into the Burbank retail economy today, crowded as it is with dozens of improbable stores, including an occult apothecary, a gallery that sells original art by serial killers, a pin-up lingerie boutique, a store that sells authentic historical hats, and a bookstore that only sells books about cars. In Burbank you can find stores that sell comic books, baseball cards, scrapbooking supplies, and model trains, anything a housebound child might have used to entertain himself in 1958.
Burton was a product of the Cold War, a morbid, skittish, self-dramatizing child who grew up believing his own death from above was imminent. He was also an ardent fan of B-movie horror, and grew up on a steady diet of old Universal Pictures classics (anachronistic even at the time, these monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s began airing on television in 1957; the following year, Forrest J. Ackerman’s began publication of his much-loved and highly nostalgic Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine that brought these films to a new audience of young Baby Boomers).
Burton shot his first films in his childhood backyard on Evergreen Street, or roaming around the neighborhood with friends, many of them members of his “Graveyard Club.” In the autobiographical collection Burton On Burton, he recalls, “There was a graveyard right next to where we lived, about a block away, and I used to play there. I don’t know exactly why it keeps showing up, except for the fact that, again, it’s part of your soul; it was a place where I felt peaceful, comfortable; a whole world of quiet and pace, and also excitement and drama. It’s all those feelings mixed into one. I was obsessed with death, like a lot of children. There were flat tombs, but there was also this weird mausoleum with weird gates on one side. And I would wander around it any time of the day or night. I would sneak into it and play, and look at things, and I always felt really good there.”
(The graveyard, properly the Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park and Mortuary, still stands; it’s “weird mausoleum” in fact a monument to the pioneers of aviation, now with the addition of a statue commemorating the astronauts who died in Columbia Space Shuttle disaster.)
Burton also designed seasonal window displays for local Burbank retailers with a special emphasis on Halloween. Biographer Ken Hanke says, “In eighth grade [Burton] managed to win a community design away (and ten dollars) with a drawing that graced Burbank’s garbage trucks for a year,” a precursor of the present-day Burbank Civic Pride Committee, which awards prizes every year to the best-decorated homes and businesses for both Halloween and Christmas.
In interviews, Burton holds a rather dim view of his hometown. In Burton on Burton, he says,
I grew up in suburbia and I still don’t understand certain aspects of it. There’s a certain kind of vagueness, a blankness, and I got this very strongly from my family. The pictures my family had on the walls, I never got the sense that they liked them, that they bought them, that somebody had given them to them. It was almost as if they had always been there, and yet no one had ever looked at them. I remember sitting there looking at some of these things going, ‘What the hell is that? What are those resin grapes? Where did they get them? What does it mean?’
Burton’s early work was a reaction to Burbank’s pervasive sense of unreality, but it was also inspired by the same suburban fakery he despised. Speaking of the miniature golf course that appears in his 1984 short stop-motion film Frankenweenie (later expanded and released in 2012), he says, “What was great was that you almost didn’t even have to think about it, because growing up in suburbia there were these miniature golf courses with windmills which were just like the one in Frankenstein. These images just happened to coincide, because that was your life. There were poodles that always reminded you of the bride of Frankenstein with the big hair. All those things were just there. That’s why it felt so right or easy for me to do—those images were already there in Burbank.” Burton would later tell Premiere magazine that Burbank was “a visually wonderful, hellish place.”
In 1994, Burton said, “If you weren’t from Burbank, you’d think it was the movie capital of the world with all the studios around there, but it was and still is, very suburban. It’s funny, the areas around Burbank have gotten less suburban, but somehow Burbank still remains the same. I don’t know how or why, but it has this weird shield around it. It could be Anywhere, U.S.A.” In later years, Burton softened his attitudes towards suburbia. “It’s not a bad place,” he said in a Los Angeles Times interview. “It’s a weird place.”
In his most famous quintessentially film, Edward Scissorhands, Burton went a step further. Edward Scissorhands was filmed in Florida, whose freshly minted developments stood in for the now insufficiently fake-looking suburbs of his native Southern California. “I went there partially as a desire to get away from Hollywood,” Burton explains, “and partially because the type of suburban neighborhoods in California in which the film takes place were built in the fifties and they’ve all got very overgrown now. And Florida just happened to be a place where the neighborhoods were new and had that flavor to them.” In a sort of coup of placelessness, Burton used a Southeastern suburb to stand-in for Burbank, the Southwestern suburb that is in turn a stand-in for Middle American suburbs.
And yet, Burton’s nowhere-land suburb is most beautiful where it is most unreal. In its most magical scene, Edward creates an artificial snow storm for his beloved by shaving ice with his bladed fingers. It does not harden into dirty slicks or melt into filthy puddles, it doesn’t need to be shoveled from driveways or iced off the roads, Edward’s artificial snow drifts gently down like glitter in a snow globe, perfectly lovely and better than real.
Fake snow— whether particles of shaved ice, soap bubbles, or polymers— is a mainstay of California Christmases, but otherwise fake atmospheric attractions are the prerogative of Halloween. Today homes across America unload fog machines, Styrofoam tombstones, and spooky recordings every October, but these home haunts, as they are called, got their start in Burbank.
***
In August 1969, Disneyland opened their much-anticipated Haunted Mansion, an attraction that took almost twenty years from initial conception to opening day. The ride was a tremendous sensation and spawned thousands of amateur imitators throughout Southern California and beyond. Four years later, the Southern California Old West-themed amusement park Knott’s Berry Farm, located just eight miles from Disneyland, hosted a one-day Halloween event, Knott’s Scary Farm. More genuinely frightening than Disneyland’s goofy ghost ride, Knott’s Scary Farm was likewise a tremendous success, and spawned a number of other Halloween park makeovers, including Los Angeles’s Universal Studio’s Halloween Horror Nights. These were soon joined by Halloween-specific events that ran only throughout the month of October, leasing space from farms, parks, and untenanted commercial real estate for attractions like haunted hayrides and corn mazes.
Halloween expert Lisa Morton explains, “Another factor contributing to the rise of this relatively new industry was the slow death of physical and makeup effects in Hollywood films as they are replaced with digital effects; the legion of un(der)employed film artists found profitable work in a haunted attractions,” some turning to year-round employment in the Halloween industry.
Two years before Disneyland opened their Haunted Mansion—and nine years after Tim Burton was born just a few miles away—Burbank resident Bob Burns put his interest in monster movies and Hollywood props to good use, creating one of the first full-fledged home haunts. In 1967, he transformed his living room into a mad scientist’s lab, including a neon transformer that wrecked havoc with his neightbors’ TV reception. He “probably could have gotten killed in the process,” Burns recalled. “I didn’t know it at the time, but those things are pretty powerful.”
Burns’s day job was as an editor for a local Los Angeles CBS affiliate, KNXT, but he devoted more and more of his energies to his hobby. In 1969, for a show based on This Island Earth, “Burns’ team created the inside of a spaceship with a big porthole overlooking the surface of Metaluna. [Tom] Scherman did the Metaluna backdrop, and created the fantastic shapes and walls for the spaceship interior out of just anything that happened to be lying around—paper doweling, egg cartons, etc.”
In 1972, they moved the show from the living room to the backyard to accommodate more and bigger effects. He created a Jekyll and Hyde effect with red makeup and a light with two gels, one red and one blue/green. Under the red lights, his red monster makeup was invisible, but when the lights shifted to blue, it stood out in sudden and shocking relief. In 1974, Burns recreated scenes from The Exorcist by having his wife Kathy levitate over the bed on a cantilevered platform designed by an engineer friend, and hidden beneath her flowing nightgown. Burns recalled, “[Kathy] laid down on her end of it and Al and his friend Morey Winegart pushed down on the other end. But they pushed it down so fast, Kathy shot up in the air like shed been shot out of a catapult. She went about six feet up and came down in the driveway!” Kathy was uninjured, and for the show’s run, Kathy and her stand-in were securely strapped to the platform.
In 1975, in an homage to The War of the Worlds, he built a 35-foot rocket that appeared to have crashed into the side of his house: “The guys built a fake wall onto the back of my house for the rocket to ‘crash’ into. They even matched the paint. It looked so realistic that many people thought that I had done it for real.” It was this year that the first charter bus arrived, bringing interested visitors from all the way from Orange County, 40 miles away.
Over time, word got out and Burns was joined by industry professionals. A 1980 profile of Burns in Starlog magazine recounts, “In 1976, when Burns re-created the 1960 film The Time Machine in his yard, he used the original machine and was even vistied by the fim’s producer George Pal. His recreation of Alien in 1979 (the same year the film was released) featured Star Trek actor Walter Koenig as the doomed starship captain.” Fox Pictures even agreed to lend Burns some of the original movie props and sets for his haunts, which were by this time drawing 3,000 visitors a year.
According to Starlog, “The Fox executives who saw the show were so impressed by Burns that when he approached the studio about returning the props, he was told to keep them—not only the ones he had borrowed, but others from the movie. Within a few days, a hauling truck was in front of his house and unloading a 12-foot model of the Nostromo used in the film.“
Burns hosted his last home haunt in 2002, at the age of 67. By that time, there were dozens of professional-quality haunts in homes throughout Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, some drawing thousands of visitors throughout the month of October. Though some haunts ask for a small donation to cover expenses, and others collect money for charity, all are amateur labors of love, not profit-making enterprises like those founded by Knott’s or Disney. Burns himself never charged a penny, even as he spent thousands of dollars to entertain his neighbors and later to donate to charitable causes.
In Burns’s memoir Monster Kid Memories (which he dedicated to his intrepid wife Kathy), he tries to explain his love for Halloween, which he calls “a kind of national celebration of make-believe.” As a young boy in Burbank, he was bullied for being a skinny new kid with a thick Oklahoma accent and “all the dressing-up was partly an escape mechanism, I’m sure.”
Then one Halloween my mom and dad got me a Mickey Mouse costume, with a mask made out of stiffened cheesecloth and the pants with the tail and the two big buttons on the front. It wasn’t anything special, it was just something my folks found in a store. Before I wore it for Halloween, though, the teachers had all the kids come to school dressed in our Halloween costumes and we had a parade around the schoolyard to show them off. I came as Mickey Mouse, and what happened was really weird: For that one day, I was the Pied Piper of the school. In the schoolyard, everybody followed me all over the place. I think I could have led ‘em off a cliff, if I wanted to. (And there were a few I wanted to!) But it was very odd: Dressed as Mickey Mouse that day, I felt like I was somebody different, totally different, and everybody not only accepted me, they thought I was cool. And, of course, after Halloween, things went right back to ‘normal’ and I started getting beat up again! Why the Mickey Mouse was so popular, I still can’t say, but that one day in the schoolyard, it was like I was the King Mouse and everybody treated me really well. That, I now believe, set me subconsciously thinking, ‘Hey, this is how I can escape into something else and not be laughed at, not be put upon.’
***
“In 2019, black plastic is unacceptable. Walls—that’s what makes your haunted house.”
In the front row, a man in an all-white suit heavily splattered with fake blood nods solemnly and takes notes. This is “Terror 101: Critical Steps for a Successful Haunted House” at Midsummer Night’s Scream, a Los Angeles-area Halloween fan convention held in the late summer. The speakers are Bruce and Mary Stanton, who run Reign of Terror, one of California’s largest and most successful independent haunts. Reign of Terror started as a home haunt in the Stanton’s home in Thousand Oaks in 2000. The haunt grew to encompass the entire 1,500-square-foot house as well as most of the yard. After a decade at home, the Stantons tried a series of permanent spaces, finally taking over a former 25,000-square-foot warehouse space above a Gold’s Gym, where they set up a 115-room haunted house with nine different themed mazes: Containment, Miner’s Revenge, The Haunted House, Casa Blood, The Asylum, Quarantine, Infected, Inbred, and Fun House. But while the 48-year-old Bruce, who works days as a regional sales manager for a company that sells dental implants, has now ascended to the big time, “Terror 101” was pitched to small-time haunters constructing their fantasies with limited space and budgets.
Stanton explains that amateur haunters in Southern California face steep competition, both from the large number of other amateur haunters and from professional theme park offerings. Instead of plastic sheeting, Stanton recommends building modular, interlocking internal wall panels that can be erected either inside your real house or outdoors. Reign of Terror has about 1,000 such panels, but a modest home haunt might start with as few as four. He has a lot of advice on how to build these panels and how to attach them to one another (“always bolts, never screws”). Standard panels are 8 feet wide, but he recommends going to 10 feet if you can. Ten feet exists just outside of the limits of your peripheral vision; those extra two feet create a much more immersive feeling, without visible edges, “to put them into an environment where they forget they’re in your yard or your garage.”
From construction, his talk moves on to safe, practical electrical design, then to audio and lighting effects (“nobody needs a 1,000-volt strobe light”), and finally, to the use of security cameras both for safety and to set up better, more responsive scares. He offers advice on avoiding common problems, like how to mask the sound of the air compressors. He recommends small retailers who work with haunters, people like Bert Zelten at minispotlights.com, “a Halloween guy for Halloween guys.” I took four pages of notes on all his technical recommendations, even those I didn’t really understand, in case I someday needed to know something about subwoofers or low-voltage boxes or vampire plugs (“big on the Christmas scene”).
The simplest haunts are front-yard displays or outdoor walk-throughs that lead trick or treaters past various frights on their way to the front door. More ambitious haunts may incorporate the inside of the house as well, covering their real walls with bed sheets or black plastic tablecloths. Reign of Terror is known for its rigorous attention to detail. Every surface is textured; even the sound effects come in layers, the chainsaw whine front and center, the far-away sound of screams barely audible from down the hall. Scares come from everywhere and not just at eye level, unlike most haunts, but also above your head and at your feet. Stanton and other haunters are starting to experiment with scents, too, rot and blood and wet earth and gasoline.
Though haunters are obsessed with realism, the scenes they create have no real-world equivalent. They are less a faithful imitation of a real antecedent than a wholesale fabrication. That is to say, Reign of Terror marshals all their beautiful details not to imitate a real Victorian insane asylum, but to imitate (and surpass) all the other fake Victorian insane asylums you’ve ever seen in movies or on TV. After going to Reign of Terror, a real Victorian insane asylum would almost certainly be a disappointment. These front-yard displays are the only place you will ever find a pirate ship eternally slashed by lightning, a gothic mansion forever adrift in slow-spreading fog. A real UFO crash site, should you come upon one, would be spoiled by a stray piece of litter or a neon fast food sign competing with the saucer’s unearthly glow, but Bob Burns’ crash site was only perfect, exactly as you imagined it should be.
***
Burton depicts Ed Wood, the 1950s B-movie auteur and subject of Burton’s most critically acclaimed movie, as another gentle innocent, like Jack Skellington, Edward Scissorhands, or Victor from Frankenweenie. Wood and his associates have the can-do attitude of Halloween haunters, counting pennies and making do with a giant fake octopus that lost its motor. The scene where Ed and his girlfriend Kathy sit at the kitchen table painting miniature UFOs could have come straight from Bob Burns’s memoirs.
“That cardboard headstone tipped over,” complains one of Woods’s backers from Plan 9 From Outer Space, “This graveyard is obviously phony.” But Wood understood that his audience wanted wasn’t strident realism but a set that was evocative of his dreams and their own.
Over the years, Burton gained control over his work but lost control over how it would be received. What was original and irreverent in the 1980s is now its own codified genre of market-tested goth pop, immediately recognizable from the black and white stripes to the signature Tim Burton font. Where his mother’s Cats Plus once stood there are now novelty gift shops selling innumerable product tie-ins from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, and The Corpse Bride. Burton’s work, a reaction against Burbank’s stifling artificiality, has become virtually synonymous with the role-playing of mall goths and Bats Day cosplayers and with Halloween itself, a fake reengineering of a largely imagined pagan ritual. In fact, when Halloween magazine launched in 1994, Tim Burton was featured as their first “Champion of Halloween” in the inaugural issue.
In his unauthorized biography of the director, Ken Hanke writes that when Burton worked on nostalgic homages like Frankenweenie or Ed Wood, he never went back and rewatched the originals on which his movies were based. What he was trying to capture, Hanke explains, was “the idea or the memory of the earlier film rather than a literal re-creation.” Burton’s movies are about the feeling of the old monster pictures. Fake leaves are about the feeling of fall. Burn’s haunts were about the feeling of an elementary school costume parade when you were briefly young and free and invincible, and the world was better than it ever really could be.
***
Next week, we journey back to the earliest origins of Halloween, the ancient (?) Celtic (?) festival (?) of Samhain (?)!
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