Oct. 31 is director Rich Correll's favorite day of the year.
Years ago, while other kids were out gathering treats, 10-year-old Correll was busy creating full-blown Halloween environments in his family's 1937 Paul Williams home: gauzy mazes inhabited by movie monsters, graveyards with zombies, skeletons hanging from trees. Then there was the year he ran a black cable from his house to a neighbor's chimney so a witch could fly between the homes.
You get the picture.
"I used to invite my whole class over and everyone else in the neighborhood," Correll says. "My dad thought I was a bit crazy, but my mom indulged me -- she thought I was being creative."
Today, Correll, who has directed episodes of such TV hits as "Hannah Montana," "The Suite Life of Jack and Cody" and "Cory in the House," continues to create scary Halloween mise-en-scenes. For the last 10 years he's produced Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion party for 1,500 guests, transforming the Holmby Hills pad into "the largest private haunted house in the country" and the surrounding 6 1/2 acres into the land of the walking dead.
But Correll's favorite Halloween event is decorating his own 1926 French Tudor home in Hancock Park that he shares with his first assistant director wife, Beth. "Hugh's party is for adults, ours is devoted to kids and families," Correll says.
And what a party it is. Correll, a noted film historian and collector, uses it to showcase his collection of horror movie artifacts. With more than 1,900 items -- including makeup effects, sci-fi movie memorabilia and 1,700-plus masks and life-cast figures -- he has his very own Halloween prop house from which to select.
"It's the largest grouping of horror movie artifacts in the world," claims Correll, who plans to display his diabolical collection in a new interactive Las Vegas venue, Haunted Hollywood, next summer.
His horror film pieces, valued at $6.5 million, vary in theme from a butler in the guise of Alfred Hitchcock to a T. rex head from "Jurassic Park." Freddy Krueger's hat and prized razor-finger gloves and a full-size Dracula made from a life-cast of Bela Lugosi are among his favorites.
Correll caught the Halloween bug as a child actor. He played Richard Rickover, friend of the Beaver, actor Jerry Mathers, on the popular '50s TV show "Leave it to Beaver." During breaks, show makeup artist Bob Dawn would take Correll and Mathers to Universal's makeup lab, where they watched designers create masks for the horror movies.
