103-Year-Old Hollywood Insider Recalls Her Scariest Childhood Halloween

The niece of Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg about the kind of Halloween run that will make Tinseltown historians green with envy.

From 1921 through 1936, she lived right by the studio and celebrated each year’s Halloween growing up as sort of a combo Hallow’s Eve/birthday, because the latter falls on October 20 (per the headline, she just turned 103). One year, she and her family went the extra mile on the home front, and it paid off:

“I called the Universal Property Department, and they came up, and they rigged everything up for Halloween, you know? All kinds of spooky stuff… They did a beautiful job with lighting effects and everything—very spooky, you know?” The same men who had helped to make Universal the home of horror throughout the 1930s proved their talent that day, too, Laemmle laughs, because “as we were going...

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