Whether you’re staying home or venturing outside, we’ve got six spooky, interactive and creative ways to (safely) enjoy your Halloween season. Stuff it, ‘Rona.
CHIU’S HAUNTED DRIVE-THRU (Oct. 28 – Nov. 1)
Chiu’s Haunted Drive Thru is an interactive, theatrical Halloween attraction experienced from the (dis)comfort of your car. The event is spread out across three residential houses with attendees driving from location to location—homes are about four minutes apart—drivers tune into an FM radio station and listen to a spooky podcast that narrates the stories and scenes brought to life by actors performing outside their cars and in front of the homes.
The new attraction is the brainchild of Ryan Chiu and features talent from Streamlight Theatre, a local theater company founded and operated by CSULB theater graduates. Together they’ve reimagined the Halloween experience to “save Halloween” as Chiu puts it, and explore creative ways to keep the thespians working through the pandemic.
The event is “COVID-conscious,” meaning guests are required to wear a mask and stay in their cars during the duration of the show. Tickets for the event range from $20-$25. For cars with only two guests, tickets are $20 and for cars loaded with three or more guests expect to pay $25. The event, which starts each evening at 6:30 p.m., runs from Oct. 28 until Nov. 1. For more information and to purchase your tickets, click here.
TASTE OF DOWNTOWN: QUARANTINE HALLOWEEN (Oct. 23)
Brought to you by the Downtown Long Beach Alliance is the Taste of Downtown: Quarantine Halloween livestream. You can tune in and watch (for free) on Facebook from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m Friday, Oct. 23. The DLBA has partnered with local small businesses that have prepared a whole medley of Halloween festivities to check out and even participate with while you watch.
The four hour stream, hosted by the Queen Mary’s commodore Everette Hoard, features Halloween crafts and home decor demonstrations, food and drink tastings, cooking tutorials, live entertainment, tours of haunted sites and lots and lots of ghost stories.
For more information and to watch the live stream, click here.
RELEASE THE BATS 22nd ANNIVERSARY LIVE STREAM (Oct. 23)
Release the Bats, the longest-running club night in Southern California, goes live on Twitch tonight with a seven-hour livestream to help raise money for Que Sera, the local bar that housed the iconic Goth night for 22 years.
Anxious for the well-being of their beloved haunt, which has been forced to stay closed through the pandemic, Release the Bats founders Jenn and Dave Bats wanted to put their platform to a more altruistic use. While the event will be free to watch, Jenn Bats said they’ll be encouraging viewers to donate to the venue’s GoFundMe page of which they’ll have the link pictured on the screen.
“This is kind of all we could do is help promote and help financially when we can. But other than that, this is really scary. And I don’t see an end in sight,” Jenn Bats said.
Expect live DJ sets by co-founder Dave Bats (DJ Dave Bats) and mainstay DJs Shane Dingbat and Dave Graves spinning industrial, Goth, post-punk and hardcore vinyl. Interspersed throughout the show will be unearthed footage of past nights and concerts, taken by Jenn on her digital camera, including some clips of when the club opened back in 1998.
Release the Bats livestream runs from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday Oct. 23. For more information, click here, or watch the livestream on Twitch, here.
THE GASLAMP HALLOWEEN CINEMA (Oct. 23 & 31)
Throughout October, restaurant/music venue the Gaslamp has been showing iconic Halloween movies outside on their patio space as part of their dinner and movie nights. They’ve got a pretty ideal set up for it, with a large parking lot to set up socially distanced tables and a massive, elevated screen to project the films.
Lucky for you, there’s still two showings left this month, with a double-bill of “Hocus Pocus” and “Ghostbusters” on Friday, Oct. 23 and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” on Halloween night.
In addition to buying the movie tickets, which range from $10 to $15, guests are required to make dinner reservations. But know that dinner and other refreshments are not included in the the ticket price. For more information visit the Gaslamp calendar, here.
THE GHOSTS OF CRAVEN MANOR
Jack McCarthy, the puzzle mastermind behind Belmont Height’s escape room game house, Escape Long Beach, has developed a virtual version of the popular gaming phenomenon with The Ghosts of Craven Manor. You and a party of up to seven play a family of mischievous ghosts who haunt an old mansion. Working together your team will try to thwart an exorcist who’s come to evict you from your haunt—rude!
The experience has elements of a role-playing fantasy game where players will interact with characters and their environment over Zoom while a game facilitator acts as different characters, displaying puzzles on the screen.
Tickets are $15-$16 per person and reservations may be booked online. Ghosts of Craven Manor will be available through the rest of the month, seven days a week, until Dec 31st. For more information and to book your reservation, visit the Fantasy Escape Games website, here.
SPOOKY HALLOWEEN DISPLAY HUNT
Check out all of the city’s Halloween displays with this interactive map powered by the Long Beach Post. See all those pumpkins on the map? Each one indicates a house or business that’s been decorated for the season, inviting you to come check out their display from the comfort (and safety) of your car.
It’s only been a couple days since we launched the map and we’ve received dozens of entries so far, with more being added to the map every day, so pick and choose how you’d like to navigate your excursion and get to gawking. If you’d like to enter your own display on the map, click here.