Every night, starting in mid-September, Diego Linares puts on a serial killer costume and stands in his front yard for three hours. The 40-year-old alternates outfits: some nights he’s Michael Myers, the masked murderer from the Halloween films. Other nights he’s Jason Voorhees, from the Friday the 13th franchise.

His family’s modest suburban yard in Burbank, California, has been transformed into a slasher movie set. Fake mist leaks out of the door of a cabin labeled “Crystal Lake”. Jack-o-lanterns, monsters, corpses and illuminated gravestones jostle for space across the ground. From the roof above the front door, a giant skeleton blinks its digital eyes.

“All this started because I wanted more trick-or-treaters,” said Linares, who describes himself as an introvert.

Burbank, a placid city of 100,000 in Los Angeles county, has become known as the “Halloween capital” of America. Here, the holiday isn’t just one night, or even a week, but a spooky, ecstatic, intensely competitive celebration that can last a month or longer.

Linares is just one of dozens of enthusiastic locals who have turned their homes into DIY haunted houses – transforming Burbank into a destination for Halloween tourism. Residents here spend months – and sometimes thousands of dollars – turning their front yards into miniature Disney-style attractions, complete with elaborate sets, music, lights, animatronic figures, and sometimes even costumed human actors. Some houses accept donations to support their decorations, but none of them charge a fee.

Linares, who puts on his front-yard haunted spectacle non-stop for 42 nights, starting on 19 September and running through Halloween, is particularly hardcore.

On Tuesday, Linares, standing 6ft 6in, and wearing Jason’s characteristic hockey mask, repeatedly emerged from the cabin door holding a bloody axe, which he used to menace visitors standing close to the front fence. He worked the crowd easily – swinging the axe with a gentle swoosh, complimenting family costumes, coaxing high fives from wide-eyed toddlers, even taking off his mask to reassure a tiny girl: “It’s fake – it’s pretend!”

On this relatively slow work night before Halloween, the house still attracted about 500 visitors. The whole experience – photographs, hand-designed stickers, a short walk through a haunted tunnel, hours of crowd-control work from Linares’ sisters – was free.

“We didn’t have a car growing up. I never got to go to Disneyland or Universal Studios. I never got a picture with Santa Claus. I know what it’s like,” Linares said. “This is my making the world a better place.”

It’s no surprise that all of Los Angeles – a city of underemployed actors, stylists and special effects experts – goes hard for Halloween. Griffith Park, Los Angeles’s wilder, craggier version of Central Park, hosts a collection of haunted houses so massive that their fake mist regularly drifts out on to Interstate 5, impeding visibility on the highway.

But Burbank operates on an even higher Halloween level – displaying the kind of skill and ambition that emerges when the neighbor coming to look at your decor is a Disney Imagineer.

“We get people from everywhere. We get international tourists,” said Burbank resident Al Ritch, whose front-yard decor features two skeletons pointing the way to more famous Halloween houses on neighboring blocks: “Pirates” one way, “Pumpkins” another. Both of these houses – “Pirates of Burbank” and “The Pumpkin Cemetery” – have their own social media accounts with a few thousand followers, and fans who return to visit them year after year.

The subculture of Halloween fans who make their own “home haunts” is a phenomenon across the US, with enthusiastic “haunters” gathering for annual conventions on the east and west coasts, in the midwest, and in Texas. But the Los Angeles region “really is unlike anywhere else in the world”, and the city of Burbank “is probably the epicenter”, said Derek Young, the founder of SoCal Haunt List, a website that maps more than 200 elaborately decorated homes from Bakersfield to San Diego.

“This goes so far beyond just putting up lights and maybe carving some pumpkins and putting out candy,” Young said. “These are people who dedicate multiple months of their lives every year to creating these experiences for people to come and see, and a lot of them rival the big theme parks.”

Burbank’s mayor, Tamala Takahashi, said that the creativity and skill of local homeowners should come as no surprise. The 100,000-person Los Angeles suburb is the longtime home of many major Hollywood studios, including Disney and Warner Bros. While other towns might have more on-screen Hollywood talent, “most of Burbank is back of house”, Takahashi said. “We’re the set designers, the costumers, the production managers, the post-production, the special effects.”

Many of Burbank’s elaborate Halloween houses are “a celebration of movies and cinema”, Takahashi said – homages to shows such as Stranger Things or to the visionary horror director Tim Burton, who graduated from Burbank high school in 1976.

She said that the city’s taste for Halloween mania has blossomed over the past decade or so. “It’s gotten more and more elaborate and exciting. I think we’re at our peak right now,” Takahashi said.

The mayor, unfortunately, is not a big Halloween fan. “It’s a little scary for me, personally,” she said. “I like to watch from afar.”

Hobbyists with ties to Hollywood

Many of the United States’ longtime Halloween destinations – like Salem Massachusetts, home of the Salem witch trials, or Sleepy Hollow, New York, home of Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman – are on the east coast. Their versions of Halloween tend towards the stuffy and colonial: ghosts, witches, Puritan repression.

The west coast’s Halloween capital is much more contemporary – offering an unabashed celebration of Hollywood gore and horror. Burbank’s rise to prominence is just a few years old, driven by TikTok and Instagram influencers posting about their visits to local houses, but also fueled by local creative ferment. Like the artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, or the Beat poets in San Francisco in the 1950s, Burbank now has a critical mass of Halloween artists who are inspiring and competing with each other, pushing their collective creative output to new heights.

Homeowners behind some of the most fantastical local decorations – think full pirate ship sails and rigging atop a roof, or an elaborate animatronic recreation of the Tim Burton horror-comedy film Beetlejuice – say that their ties to the Hollywood set and prop industry are overstated, and that what’s driving the trend is mostly a fanatical level of hobbyist enthusiasm.

Just a few years ago, John Pouncey, whose family has lived in Burbank for 18 years, decorated his house with a modest spooky cemetery in the front yard. Year after year, his family failed to secure even an honorable mention in Burbank’s official city Halloween decorating contest, which has been running for the past decade. So, inspired by the houses that won prizes, he decided to pick a more elaborate theme: Burton’s Beetlejuice, about a ghost couple trying to exorcise the living family who has taken over their home.

“Now, I don’t even care about the competition,” he said. “This just became kind of an obsession.”

Pouncey and his wife, Misty, work in the entertainment industry: she as a costume supervisor, he as a camera operator – a job, Pouncey said, that has very little to do with the elaborate set he has constructed in his front yard, which takes a full six weeks to set up.

His yard is now crowded with animatronic skeletons, some of them powered by small motors, others by pressurized air. Everything is handmade, he said, although “obviously we bought store-bought skeletons”.

The massive skeleton on the roof, which came from Costco, is dressed in a plaid-shirt Misty made from several shower-curtains. Pouncey made its head spin.

“I’m a handy guy” who has watched Beetlejuice “a million times”, he said, and “I see things in the movie that I think would be funny as a prop. And I just, like, immediately know how to do it.”

Another major Burbank Halloween house, “Holiday Fantasies Come to Life”, has rotating, often Disney-inspired themes, and is the home of Arnulfo Padilla, a professional chef. This year, there are pirate sails on his roof, and a Jack Sparrow statue outside his front door. Padilla said he worked through an entire night to arrange the gold loot around Sparrow’s chair.

He enjoyed seeing adult visitors shriek and gasp and point at their favorite details.

“Why not make other people happy, and spread the joy, and make them feel like little kids again?” Padilla said.

Another fan favorite, the Pirates of Burbank, is run by Susan and Dan Hoy. They’re also enthusiasts from outside the industry: she’s a retired member of the Burbank public school district, and he’s a professor of graphic design at ArtCenter College in Pasadena.

“It’s very funny because people think we’re all in the business, and we’re not,” Susan Hoy said. “Some rumors started last year on TikTok, I think, that we’re all prop makers. We’re not.”

Preparations for the Hoy’s pirates display, which is essentially a yard-sized version of Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, started this April, when she started building the skeleton-filled grotto and fountain in her driveway, Hoy said.

While Halloween decorating can easily become expensive, Hoy prides herself on pulling off her stunning display on a budget, using donated wood and paint, costumes bought from thrift stores and objects found on the street. Her grotto is mostly discarded boxes and cardboard. Her kraken tentacles are decorated with slices of pool noodle. The most expensive item in the display is a ship’s wheel, purchased for $100 on Craigslist. Her animatronic skeletons are powered by several windshield wiper motors, and one rotisserie chicken motor.

“We discovered motors three years ago and we haven’t looked back,” she said.

Young, the SoCal Haunt List founder, said the “haunter” community does a lot of skill-sharing and DIY tutorials to help keep down the costs of their over-the-top decor. Still, the costs of costumes and props quickly add up.

Linares estimated that he spends at least $1,000 a year on candy, and another $1,000 to make hand-designed themed stickers to hand out to visitors. A quality full-body costume with a molded character mask can easily total $1,500, he said. “But I love doing it. It makes me feel good,” he said. “I’m not into sports or cars. I’d rather do this.”

Linares’s sisters said their brother can’t stop buying new props, no matter how many he already has. A pile of fresh-from-the-store skeletons and new plastic pumpkins were stacked next to his living room couch. The skeletons were originally $45, Linares said, but he got them on sale for just $15.

With their Halloween fame only continuing to grow, homeowners and city officials in Burbank said they are feeling some of the strain of viral success. Popular Halloween houses are drawing so many visitors to Burbank that they’re causing snarls of traffic in quiet residential streets, making local parking a nightmare, and leaving behind significant quantities of trash. The houses with the biggest lines are now attracting street vendors selling hot dogs and churros from the sidewalks.

Last year, one of the city’s most famous viral haunts, the Burbank Clown House, attracted an estimated 15,000 visitors on Halloween night alone – an unsustainable level of attention, according to Gary Lane, one of the house’s creators, even though the city had started providing police officers to help with crowd control.

The Clown House, co-created by Lane and his twin brother Larry, both 51, and designer Michael Bowen, 52, became famous online and on local television news for its stylish mixture of horror and dark comedy, and for its live costumed clowns – including on the roof. Lane recalls turning off the house’s lights at 10pm on Halloween last year, and watching visitors stay outside for hours: “You saw a sea of dark shadow heads until 1am,” he said. When the crowds finally left, they spent another two hours picking up garbage along the street. The total amount visitors donated that night, he said, was just $89.

“We kind of knew that was the end,” Lane said.

This year, after multiple attempts to find an alternative commercial venue fell through, the Clown House has gone dark for the season – with only a single symbolic clown decorating its lawn, and promising a return in 2027, Lane said.

Linares, the serial killer impersonator, said the continual growth of the crowds outside his house worried him. “It’s getting out of hand now,” he said. “This is getting nuts with social media.”

Burbank’s biggest Halloween houses have formed a group chat to share information, which allows them to share tips and give each other a heads-up about badly behaved visitors. “It’s so tea. I love it,” Susan Hoy said.

My own recent tours of Burbank’s Halloween houses, on the Sunday and Tuesday nights before Halloween, were dazzling, disorienting, and frankly overstimulating. There was a Burbank witch trial, a skeleton Mardi Gras, a papier-mache Alice in Wonderland, an X-Files spaceship dangling from a tree. The positivity on the crowded sidewalks was overwhelming: adults gasping and cheering at each new effect, and eager to offer praise and ask the homeowners questions. Children dashed by in costume: couples posed for photos together. As I approached a third hour of touring on Tuesday night, wandering through the fake mist drifting through Burbank’s suburban streets, I found myself staring at a skeleton riding a dinosaur, which was spitting a stream of real water towards a fake giant spider.

“This Halloween theme is a little confusing to me, too,” I heard a nearby skeleton say in a recorded voice.

Alissa Carroll, who lives 45 minutes away in Simi Valley, brought her boyfriend and his visiting parents to Burbank for the night on Tuesday, where they toured nine different houses, finishing up at Sherill Watts’s popular Circus of Nightmares house just before 10pm.

Carroll, who is from New Jersey, argued that her home state “had more of the Halloween spirit”, and said she thought more houses put up some kind of Halloween decorations there. But for the intensity of Halloween decor, there was no competing with southern California.

“It’s like: wow,” she said.