Sweden's Studio Barnhus is one of dance music's most beloved oddball labels, home to Axel Boman and a roster of producers who make house music that's playful, warm, and a little weird in all the best ways. When the crew throws a rare Los Angeles warehouse party, the underground house faithful come running, because these are the DJs who remember dance music is supposed to be fun. Saturday, September 5, 2026, at a downtown LA warehouse space on South Anderson Street. Come for the quirky, soulful, all-night house grooves, the low-lit warehouse vibe, and a crowd that lives for exactly this kind of no-frills, all-heart party. Bring your dancing shoes and an open mind. This is the deep, joyful, back-of-the-store house scene the flyers only whisper about. Come lose yourself till late.
You have been homesick for twenty-five years for a place that was never real. A bathhouse lit gold over black water. A train that only runs one way, across a flooded world, into the dark. Spirited Away gave you that homesickness the first time you saw it — and this October, for one week only, its 25th anniversary and the finale of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026, Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece comes back to the big screen where the ache belongs.
There is a particular silence that falls over a theater full of people who love the same film. The lights drop, Joe Hisaishi's first piano notes land, and a room of strangers stops breathing at the same moment. Ghibli Fest runs both the subtitled original and the English dub, with a piece of surprise content before each show. But the real event is the crowd — parents who were kids when this came out, now holding the hands of kids seeing it for the first time; longtime fans catching a detail they'd missed on every laptop rewatch; someone two rows back crying quietly and not caring who sees. Even if you've seen it a dozen times, you have not seen it like this.
If Spirited Away is a film you carry around inside you, this isn't a question — you go. Projected, at scale, with sound that fills the room, is the version it was made for. It's rated PG and open to almost everyone, though No-Face and the spirit world can frighten very small children — parents of under-sevens should know that going in. This is not a movie to leave on in the background. It's two hours built to move you, in a room full of people who came to be moved alongside you.
Tickets run through the official Ghibli Fest and participating theater box offices, and the anniversary finale sells out earliest of the whole festival — buy ahead. Choose your format on purpose: the dub is the gentle way in for young kids, the subtitled original is what the purists want. Come early for the pre-show content most latecomers miss. Go on a weekend evening if you can, when the theater fills all the way up and the silence gets deeper.
Some films you own and still leave the house for. At twenty-five, Spirited Away is less a movie than a place people keep returning to — and going back together, in the dark, is how you remember why it marked you. One week in October. Then the train pulls away again.
Floating cities, ancient robots, a girl drifting down out of the sky — Hayao Miyazaki opened Studio Ghibli with Castle in the Sky and never once talked down to the child or the adult watching. Forty years later that film is a quiet faith with millions of devotees, and once a year Studio Ghibli Fest pulls them out of their living rooms and back into a theater. Castle in the Sky on the big screen at AMC Burbank is the chance to see Laputa the size it was meant to be, with strangers who gasp at the same frames. This is the screening you text to the one friend who 'doesn't do anime' but would be undone by this exact film. SoCal's anime community treats Ghibli Fest like a seasonal pilgrimage — dubbed and subbed showings, a full house, the score filling a real room. Saturday, August 22, 2026, 3:00 PM at AMC Burbank 16. Tickets and full showtimes via GKIDS / Fathom Events.
Sep 3, 2026
$70+
100 Universal City Plaza, Universa…
Being genuinely terrified next to your best friend is its own specific kind of fun — screaming, grabbing an arm, then laughing so hard you can barely make it to the next maze. Halloween Horror Nights turns all of Universal Studios into that feeling after dark: elaborate haunted houses built with movie-studio budgets, this year including the final season of Stranger Things and the Cenobites of Hellraiser, plus scare zones where the monsters follow you and a Terror Tram through the fog-choked backlot. It is horror as a group sport, the most immersive haunt in the country, engineered to make a thousand people scream in unison. Select nights September 3 through November 1, 2026, in Universal City. Round up the friends who scream the loudest and go get the wits scared out of you together — the terror is the point, but the real thrill is surviving it as a group and reliving every jump-scare over late-night tacos afterward.
Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood opens September 12th — from $79 for the experience of having something genuinely chase you through a fog machine in the dark while a stranger next to you screams loud enough to embarrass themselves. This is not a haunted house. This is a park that goes dark.
From September into November, the studio backlot stops being a tourist attraction and becomes something that operates on a different frequency. The production design in these haunted houses is built by people who make the actual films — that's not marketing copy, it's why the scare lands differently than a local attraction. You walk through hallways that feel exactly like a set and can't locate the moment the line between attraction and something else disappeared. The crowds are part of it: strangers flinching in unison, the particular laugh that comes out of people when they're scared and then relieved, the way a group of friends who thought they were too old for this clings to each other by house three. Go with people you trust. Or go with people you want to know better. Fear is surprisingly efficient at both. Grab tickets early — peak October nights sell out. This is not the event where you negotiate on price the week of.
The gate opens and you're walking onto a backlot that made movies for a hundred years, except tonight the set is real and the stars are the people behind the pass-through windows. The seventh annual L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market takes over Paramount Pictures Studios on Monday, September 22, 2026 — one ticket unlocking unlimited tastings and drinks from over 120 of Los Angeles' most obsessive restaurants, all of them cooking like they know every other kitchen in the room is watching. This is the night the city's food scene stops being a map and becomes a single room. The chefs you've read about are three feet away, plating something they've been testing for weeks. The ones you haven't read about are the reason you'll leave rethinking everything. Fiesta Friday Night Market runs 8 PM to 11 PM, 21+ only. Paramount Pictures Studios, 5555 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Tickets at lafoodbowl.com. The dress code is whatever you wear when you're about to eat more than you planned.
No clean villains, a forest worth bleeding for, a war between industry and nature with no easy side — Princess Mononoke is the Ghibli film adults reach for when they want to prove the studio makes serious art. The 4K remaster is the reason to finally see it the size it deserves. Princess Mononoke in 4K at AMC The Grove, part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026, is event-tier for the Ghibli-and-arthouse crossover crowd: the people who'll argue about San and Lady Eboshi in the lobby afterward, who have opinions about dub versus sub, who treat this as a sacred text. This is the screening you plan a whole evening around — the 'we are absolutely going together' kind. A restored print, a full house, Joe Hisaishi's score in a real theater. Saturday, September 26, 2026, 3:00 PM at AMC The Grove 14, Los Angeles. Tickets and full showtimes via GKIDS / Fathom Events.
Every day· Next Nov 24
✨ New
Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 U…
A 65-foot tree, nightly snowfall in a city that averages 292 days of sunshine, and a small green creature who somehow became the patron saint of people who love Christmas despite themselves.
Grinchmas returns to Universal Studios Hollywood from late November 2026 through early January 2027. The Who-ville set transforms into a living holiday village with the iconic Grinchmas tree lighting ceremony, snow that falls from nowhere on the Universal City Walk sky, Who-ville characters in full costume roaming the streets, and holiday shows that make adults feel things they'd rather not admit. Included with park admission.
Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608.
You don't need kids to go. You just need to remember what it felt like to believe that a character with a heart two sizes too small could grow it three sizes in one night.