A general view of the atmosphere during The Queen Mary's Dark Harbor at Queen Mary Beach on ...

[+] September 29, 2016 in Long Beach, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for The Queen Mary) Halloween is here. It is something of a national holiday in Los Angeles, the city defined for better or worse by its Hollywood connection.

Los Angeles County is full of haunted hotels and a ship (the Queen Mary ), ghost, vampire and true crime tour s and retro movie palaces unspooling a hundred years of scary movies. Don’t be fooled by the sunlight; Los Angeles can be spooky all year round. Since the first film shot in Hollywood in 1910, the ghosts of film and television stars like Marilyn Monroe are said to wander Hollywood’s homes, streets and watering holes.

Hollywood actors, costume designers, makeup people, stunt performers, writers and producers around the area are part of the creative ferment that makes Halloween, horror, cosplay, ghost stories, sci-fi and the supernatural so popular. Horror is particularly popular in Hollywood because it is the most profitable film genre. The original SAW, for example, cost $1.

2 million to make and delivered an estimated $130 million in profit. And while the Motion Picture Academy doesn’t hand out Oscars to horror films, academy members are quite concerned with life and death. The Academy has been featuring its ‘glory and grief’ In Memoriam section for 30 years, despite the uproar when a beloved star is inexplicably left of.