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40 days away

Ghostbusters In Concert

Sep 24, 2026 $45+ Cerritos Center for the Performing…

Who you gonna call? Everybody, apparently, because there's a special magic to watching a movie you love on a giant screen while a live orchestra plays every note of the score in real time. Ghostbusters In Concert pairs the 1984 comedy classic with a full ensemble performing Elmer Bernstein's music and Ray Parker Jr.'s inescapable theme, and the effect is pure joy: the jokes land, the proton packs whir, and the whole room sings the chorus without a shred of irony. Thursday, September 24, 2026, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Bring the kids who've never seen it and the adults who've seen it fifty times. It's family-friendly, gorgeously performed, and a genuinely fresh way to experience a film you thought you knew by heart. Come get slimed, the classy way.

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41 Gathering

41 days away

Ohana Festival 2026

Sep 25 – Sep 27, 2026 From $149 25300 Dana Point Harbor Dr, Dana P…

Even the headliners feel close enough to touch here - that is what happens when Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam builds a festival at boutique scale and sets it down against the open Pacific. For three days at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point, ocean breeze and sunset views turn every set into something cinematic, across a lineup that spans rock, folk, Americana, and indie. The site itself is flat and wide open, which makes it easy to move between two stages without missing anything you came for, and the intimacy is the whole reputation - a festival people come back to year after year, not for the scale but for the feeling. Doheny is in Dana Point, about 60 miles south of Los Angeles and 30 miles north of San Diego; shuttle service runs from nearby park-and-ride lots, and hotels and Airbnbs line the Dana Point harbor within walking distance. There is no on-site camping, but the surrounding area has options. Three days of music, ocean air, and community. Ohana Festival returns to Doheny State Beach for its annual run on the Pacific Coast.

New York Film Festival 2026 — New York, NY

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46 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 41 days away

New York Film Festival 2026 — New York, NY

Sep 25 – Oct 12, 2026 Film at Lincoln Center, 165 W 65th…

Eighteen days at Lincoln Center in the fall. The New York Film Festival has been selecting films without competitive categories since 1963 — no awards, just the films the programmers decided mattered this year. The Main Slate premieres at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center — a 1,000-seat hall with some of the best sight lines and acoustics of any cinema venue in America. The post-screening Q&As with directors and cast are NYFF's most distinctive feature: these are not promotional appearances. They are genuine conversations about how films get made, what they mean, and what the filmmakers were reaching toward. The press conference format becomes, in the right moment, something more interesting than either party expected. The festival also programs a parallel section, Convergence, dedicated to experiential and experimental work, and a Revivals series that presents restored classic films alongside the new work. NYFF is for the film enthusiast who treats cinema as the art form it is — not content, not IP, but a form of human expression that requires the kind of attention the festival demands and rewards. It is for the person who wants to see the films that will define the awards conversation before the campaign season begins. It is for anyone who has sat in a dark room and felt something shift in how they understood the world. If any of those sentences describe you, the NYFF calendar is worth knowing. New York in late September is mild — jacket weather, perfect for walking the Lincoln Center campus between screenings. Single-ticket sales open to the public approximately two weeks before the festival; passes go on sale earlier. Film at Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, is on the Upper West Side, accessible by subway (1 train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center). Hotel options throughout Manhattan; Airbnb in the Upper West Side neighborhoods puts you walking distance from the venues. The 64th edition will include films that win major awards, films that define the critical conversation of 2027, and films that haven't been made in the mode before. Knowing which films they are before anyone else is the only advantage the NYFF calendar gives you. Tickets and passes at filmlinc.org.

The 17th Door — Buena Park (Haunted Attraction 2026)

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42 days away

The 17th Door — Buena Park (Haunted Attraction 2026)

Every Saturday · Next Sep 26 8420 On The Mall, Buena Park, CA 9…

You signed a waiver. The door closed behind you. And now the room is rotating and the wind is hurricane-force and someone — something — just touched your shoulder from a direction that shouldn't exist. The 17th Door is one of the most intense haunted attractions in the United States. This isn't a haunted house with jump scares and fog machines. This is theatrical, physical, interactive horror — rotating rooms, earthquake effects, hurricane-force winds, and scenes designed to make you question whether you actually want to keep going. A waiver is required. They mean it. Select nights, September 26 through November 2, 2026. 8420 On The Mall, Buena Park, CA 90620. General admission from $35. Send this to the friend who says nothing scares them. Then ask them about it on November 3rd.

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24 Gathering

43 days away

The Horror Show — Academy Museum

Sep 27 – Jul 25, 2027 Academy Museum of Motion Pictures,…

Standing close enough to see how a scare was built does not ruin the scare. It does the opposite. The practical effect, the sound design choice, the lighting decision that makes an image frightening rather than merely dark, horror is the most technically demanding genre in film, and looking straight at its machinery is a different way of loving movies you have watched in the dark for twenty years. The Academy Museum keeps the physical history of cinema, the props, the production archives, the paper evidence that the films you love were made by real people solving real problems in real rooms. That institutional weight lands hardest on the genre most often denied it. Original props, behind-the-scenes materials, restored footage, and curation built around the craft problems horror filmmakers solved with nothing but ingenuity. Give it longer than you think you need, and give the building a minute too. Go with whoever first showed you the movie that scared you into loving all of this.

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39 Gathering

52 days away

Screamfest LA Horror Film Festival

Oct 6 – Oct 15, 2026 TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, 6925 Holly…

The scariest thing you'll see this year might be a film so new that the person who directed it is sitting three rows behind you, watching your shoulders to see if the jump lands. That's the specific thrill of the oldest, largest horror festival in the country: for ten October nights on Hollywood Boulevard, the next wave of the genre screens for the first time, in the same theaters where the classics met their first audiences. Screamfest has a real track record — it premiered Insidious, Rob Zombie's Halloween, and The Haunting in Connecticut years before they hit wide release — which means the thirty-plus features and shorts here aren't afterthoughts, they're what horror is about to become. The room is exactly what you'd want: Hollywood Boulevard at night, everyone around you loving the genre completely and unironically, the director walking up for the Q&A while the credits still roll. TCL Chinese 6 Theatres, Hollywood — October 7–16, 2026. Festival badges cover all ten days, or buy single tickets and pick your nights. The October air and the marquees on the Boulevard handle the rest.

Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

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57 days away

Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Oct 11, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

Thirty newspaper bags. Six water guns. A roll of toilet paper you will throw at the exact right moment. And Patricia Quinn — Magenta herself — standing on the Balboa Theatre stage in the flesh. The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening is one of those events that exists in its own category. It's not a movie. It's not a concert. It's a participatory ritual that's been running for half a century and shows no sign of slowing down, because every generation discovers it at exactly the right age and never fully recovers. The Balboa Theatre showing features the original cast member Patricia Quinn live and in person, making this more than a screening — it's a pilgrimage. Costumes are encouraged. Props are required. The callback lines are non-negotiable. If you don't know them yet, the person sitting next to you will teach you before the opening credits end. Sunday, October 11, 2026. 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, San Diego.

San Diego International Film Festival 2026

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60 days away

San Diego International Film Festival 2026

Oct 14 – Oct 18, 2026 Reading Cinemas Gaslamp 15, 701 Fi…

What you remember from a festival this size is not on the screen. It is the moment the lights come up and the person who made the film stands out of the row behind you and turns out to be a nervous human being answering questions. Bigger festivals cannot hand you that. Here you get a week of films that played Venice or Toronto or Sundance a few weeks earlier, screened downtown within walking distance of each other, with directors and cast actually in the building afterward. International competition titles, American documentaries, shorts programs, and features with local roots. The evenings turn social, premieres bleeding into parties until the entire arts scene of the city is in the same few blocks for the week. Downtown San Diego in October, passes or single tickets, trolley to the door. See one film alone and one with somebody. The second is the one you will still be arguing about in December.

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60 days away

San Diego Gulls vs Ontario Reign

Oct 14, 2026 $20+ Pechanga Arena San Diego, 3500 Spo…

Every good hockey team needs a rival it genuinely can't stand, and for the Gulls that is the Ontario Reign — the LA Kings' farm club, a short drive up the freeway, and the kind of opponent that turns a regular Wednesday into a grudge match. AHL hockey at this level is a beautiful contradiction: the players are one call-up away from the NHL, the tickets cost less than a movie, and the hitting is somehow harder than the big league because everyone is fighting for a job. Pechanga gets loud and mean when the Reign are in town, the SoCal hockey diaspora out in force, beer cold and chants sharp. Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 7pm, Pechanga Arena San Diego. Come for the rivalry, stay for the specific joy of a well-timed hip check, and discover that the best sports deal in the county has been hiding in the Sports Arena this whole time.

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61 days away

Newport Beach Film Festival 2026

Oct 15, 2026 THE LOT at Fashion Island, 999 New…

Most festivals make you choose between the movie and the party. This one flatly refuses, and that refusal is the entire personality of the thing. Eight days on the Orange County coast, hundreds of screenings, and a nightly ritual nobody else runs the same way: the country spotlights. Irish night, French night, Latino night, Pacific Rim night — each anchored by a film and then walked straight into a party, so a screening becomes an evening and the evening becomes three conversations you did not plan on having. It is prestige cinema with sand in its shoes. International work that will not surface anywhere else nearby, the people who made it standing in the room, and the particular coastal glamour of toasting a movie under string lights when it ends. Send it to the friend who believes a great film deserves a great party. They have been waiting years for somebody to agree with them out loud.

Coming Soon

62 days away

Boy Harsher at Hollywood Palladium

Oct 16, 2026 $40+ Hollywood Palladium, 6215 W Sunset…

Some bands sound like a movie you have not seen yet; Boy Harsher sounds like the one already playing behind your eyes at three in the morning. The duo of Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller took darkwave out of the basement and made it cinematic -- pulsing, sensual, faintly terrifying -- and their live show has become the rare underground act that can now fill the Palladium without losing an ounce of its menace. Expect strobe, sweat, and a room full of people who found the exact soundtrack to their inner lives. It is a genuine scene event, the kind that turns strangers into a congregation for ninety minutes. Come alone and leave part of something. Or bring the person these songs remind you of. Either way, wear black and prepare to move.

Scream Diego 2026 — Halloween & Horror Convention

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54 Gathering

63 days away

Scream Diego 2026 — Halloween & Horror Convention

Oct 17, 2026 DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Die…

A horror panel tucked inside somebody else's general convention always feels like being let in through a side door. This is the other thing entirely — a whole weekend built by people who wanted to be in a horror room and stopped waiting for permission to have one. You can tell from the guest list. The names here come from the films themselves, not from adjacent franchises with a horror-shaped marketing angle, and that single detail tells you exactly who the weekend is for. The floor runs both days: vendors, artists, and an artist alley carrying original work, prop replicas, and merch that never surfaces at the mainstream shows. The people filling it pre-order the special editions, know the director's full filmography, and hold real opinions about the best practical effect of the last decade. Two days in October, in a Mission Valley hotel with real function rooms, in the one month the whole city is finally in the right season for it. If you take horror seriously, you already know who you are texting about this.

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63 days away

D6 Fall Festival

Oct 17, 2026 Verne Goodwin Mira Mesa Senior Cen…

Some neighborhoods have to build their own gathering place because the map never bothered to hand them one. Mira Mesa and the Convoy corridor did exactly that, and this is the autumn version of it. Same team as the night market, so the food-truck rows and vendor booths are what most people come for, and then it wraps all of that in everything a fall evening should have: a movie in the park, a trunk-or-treat, pumpkin decorating, live performances, and the particular warmth of an immigrant community that turns out in force for its own. It runs into the evening and it is free. You will watch three generations of one family split a single plate and stay until the movie ends, because nobody wants to be the one who suggests leaving. The senior center on Mira Mesa Boulevard, an October evening, no admission. If you grew up out here, you already know exactly who to send this to.

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63 days away

Riptide Film Festival 2026 — Torrance

Oct 17, 2026 James R. Armstrong Theatre, 3330 C…

Last year you shot something you're still not sure is good. You showed three people. Two said it was great and one said nothing, which is the one you keep thinking about. Riptide Film Festival is the South Bay's answer to that silence. It screens indie and high school filmmakers at the Armstrong Theatre in Torrance — a venue just small enough that the filmmaker is sitting three rows from the audience reaction. No publicists, no red carpet, no entourage blocking the bar. Just the work, projected large, in front of people who came because they wanted to see something they hadn't seen before. The festival celebrates filmmakers at every stage — first shorts alongside polished independents — and the Q&As afterward are the kind where someone in the audience asks the question the filmmaker was afraid no one would notice. It's the South Bay film community in a room together, discovering each other. Saturday, October 17, 2026. James R. Armstrong Theatre, 3330 Civic Center Dr, Torrance 90503. riptidefilmfest.com.

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

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21 Gathering

🌎 Nation's Best 63 days away

Spirited Away 25th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

Oct 17 – Oct 21, 2026 Varies by theater Fathom Events Theaters Nationwide …

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.

Coming Soon

63 days away

Boy Harsher at The Sound

Oct 17, 2026 $40+ The Sound, 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd…

Down in Del Mar, on a Saturday in October, the fairgrounds' newest room goes pitch dark for the duo the whole darkwave scene bows to. Boy Harsher does not do polite; the duo makes music that feels like a beautiful anxiety attack, all analog throb and whispered dread, built to be experienced loud and in the dark with a crowd that gets it. The Sound is an intimate, sharp-sounding venue, which means none of the cinematic detail gets lost. For San Diego's synth and goth faithful, a Boy Harsher night this close to home is not a maybe. Get there early, stand close, and let the bass rearrange your ribcage. This is a band that literally made its own horror film, and live it shows. Some shows you attend. This one attends to you.

Coming Soon

64 days away

Blind Runner

Oct 18, 2026 South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Ce…

In a prison visiting room, a man teaches his wife to run. She is losing her sight, and he is training her to move fast through a darkness she cannot navigate yet, toward a freedom neither of them is sure exists. That is the premise, and it does not let go of you. Amir Reza Koohestani and the Mehr Theatre Group perform it in Persian with English supertitles — three Iranians, one of them training a blind woman to run the Channel Tunnel, staged with the spare beauty Koohestani is known for. This is the kind of international work most of the country never gets to see in a room. Urgent, political, and human before it is any of those things, trusting an audience to sit inside something real without being told how to feel about it. South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Go with the person who wants the whole world on one stage.

Coming Soon

67 days away

AFI FEST 2026

Oct 21, 2026 TCL Chinese Theatres, 6925 Hollywo…

There is one week a year when the boulevard that sells cheap souvenirs the other fifty-one becomes the center of the movie universe. Not figuratively. The films everyone will be arguing about in winter are screening a few feet from the handprints. The actual pleasure is narrower than that: sitting in that enormous auditorium as the lights go down on a film nobody has decided about yet — before the critics fix its meaning, before the trophies tell you what it was. The year's most talked-about titles arrive here months ahead of wide release, in the same complex where the studios stage their own premieres. Around you: the obsessives, the awards-season trackers, and the students who moved to this city for exactly this. A week in the fall at the TCL Chinese Theatres on Hollywood Boulevard. Send it to the friend whose Letterboxd reviews you actually read all the way through.

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