La Llorona

Universal Studios Hollywood has announced plans for haunted attractions based on "The Thing," "The Wolfman," "Scream," "Hostel" and "House of 1000 Corpses" films as well as shock rocker Alice Cooper and the La Llorona folk legend while continuing to drop online hints about more scare zones and shows for Halloween Horror Nights 2011. > Photos: Halloween Horror Nights 2011 at Universal Studios Hollywood The Thing: Assimilation, a creature-based maze, will be based on the film remake about a scientific research facility overrun by an epidemic.

On July 24, 1769, an expedition of Spanish soldiers were camped out for the night along a creek near a large plateau in what would become Orange County. While there, one of the men lost his prized possession--his blunderbuss, a gun like those carried by the Pilgrims but called in Spanish a trabuco. As a permanent remembrance of this loss, the creek and later the canyon were named Trabuco. The area, of course, became today's Trabuco Canyon.

Would you buy soap from Jeffrey Dahmer or a used car from Ted Bundy? No? Then would you drink milk on the recommendation of a weeping ghost who murdered her children? That's what California milk producers are about to find out. Beginning Monday, the milk board famous for its "Got Milk?" campaign will initiate a $2-million advertising blitz featuring La Llorona, the subject of a Latin American legend about a woman who killed her children, then herself, after losing her husband's affections.

Eighteen years ago, when John Malpede established his theater company, Los Angeles Poverty Department, on skid row, the neighborhood belonged largely to homeless men. Now, 36% of the 6,000 to 8,000 people sleeping on the streets each night are women and children -- an increase, ironically, that mirrors the influx of high-end loft-buyers and redevelopers.

An outdoor setting doesn't necessarily require simplicity of means or concept. But Naomi Goldberg must have felt it does, because she drastically and disturbingly simplified her usually interesting choreography to the point of its becoming threadbare and insipid when her Los Angeles Modern Dance and Ballet troupe introduced her new "Three Tales" Saturday at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

Mexico has had an amazing capacity to absorb and transform the musical and cultural streams that have poured into it from all directions. But the popularity of those transformations, both inside and outside Mexico, have tended to overshadow the rich, multilayered indigenous musics that exist in every section of the country.

Lhasa de Sela: 2010 continued its rough start as this 37-year-old singer-songwriter succumbed to breast cancer. A frequent collaborator with Calexico as well as members of the Montreal indie rock scene, Lhasa was possessed of a dusky-smooth voice that could break your heart in three languages. Her sultry, Spanish-language debut from 1998, "La Llorona," best shows what we lost. Dan Savage's 'Savage Love' podcast: While only for the most mature audiences, this alt-weekly columnist and frequent cable pundit can eat up a road trip's hours with this weekly sex and relationship advice show.

In the folk dance world, it's not common to connect politics to dancing, but Gema Sandoval, who directs Danza Floricanto/USA, admirably tends to give it a try.

Halloween Horror Nights 2011 at Universal Studios Hollywood will veer from its traditional horror movie theme with an Alice Cooper haunted maze that will draw on elements from the shock rocker's theatrical concerts and feature music from his 1975 concept album, "Welcome to My Nightmare. " > Photos: Concept art of the Alice Cooper maze at Universal's Halloween Horror Nights Just like one of the singer's rock concerts, visitors to the Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare maze at Halloween Horror Nights 2011 will encounter boa constrictor snakes, black widow spiders, guillotine decapitations, hangman's gallows and electrocutions inside a sadistic insane asylum.