BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:Halloween can’t come too soon

In the bosom of Burbank’s Magnolia Park lies a small village with a haunted graveyard, which some call a theme store, but is more properly known as Halloween Town.

A new addition to the city’s shopping, the Halloween store sells everything from costumes to capes, masks to makeup and party supplies to pose-able 8-foot vampires.

The interior decorations of the shop are impeccable, making the area look like an evil, little village with vaulted, black ceilings that give the illusion of a dark night sky above macabre, cottage rooftops with dimly lighted windows and worn shingles.

“This place is great because we were actually able to make it the way we envisioned it to be,” co-owner Wayne Toth said. “Now it actually looks like a Halloween Town.”

Toth lent his 20-plus years of experience with creature effects and set designs with different studios to the store to give it the gloomy feel of a town like Sleepy Hollow, the legendary hamlet haunted by the Headless Horseman.

He and his wife, Jackie Ahumada, both of Burbank, own the store together and have been in the business of selling Halloween and horror wares for more than 10 years.

For the past five years they have owned shops that offer October’s most well known holiday items on a year-round basis. Before then, the couple operated seasonal stores that only stayed open for a few months around the holiday.

The move to Burbank has offered them more space, Ahumada said, and room to be creative with their store during the Halloween season when they compete with fly-by-nights that sell things in bins instead of behind a counter.

“What’s different about our store is we really like this stuff,” she said. “We’re into it. Here, we really try to help people. It’s more of a boutique.”

The store has a front area with party supplies, gothic and horror film T-shirts and original props from director Rob Zombie’s remake of the classic “Halloween” for which Toth did makeup effects.

There are separate rooms for men’s, children’s and women’s costumes, as well as a large wall of wigs and masks from the frightening to funny.

A wall of props, costume additions and accessories holds fangs, mustaches and many different kinds of applicable flesh wounds, all available throughout the year for the eager Halloween enthusiast.

“Look at that,” said Louis Urbina, of Burbank, presented with a long, black, velvet pirate’s coat, his eyes wide as a child’s in front of a mound of free candy.

“He loves to dress up every year,” his wife, Tyrin Urbina, said. “That’s his thing. Every year he changes.”

The Urbinas were shopping with their children, George, 12, and Tony, 9 — who are also big fans of the holiday, Tyrin Urbina said, and like to get a jump-start on the festivities whenever they can.

And the store presented an ample variety of decorations and costumes for the family, she said.

“It will be nice for me to not have to make their costumes this year,” she said. “They also have all the year-round stuff and they have done the store beautifully.”

Past an archway on the right side of the shop is an old-fashioned parlor with portraits of colonial folk who morph into monsters when looked at in the right direction.

Velvet paintings of horrific images line the wall along stairs that lead to the loft area of the store where the women’s costumes are kept.

“It really puts people in the mood for Halloween,” Toth said, standing in the parlor area with grim faces all around him and the butler’s voice from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride gurgling grimly through overhead speakers.

“We try to be a one-stop shop,” he said. “To have pretty much everything a person would need.”