Experience Halloween -- Exploratorium style. Join in costume for a ghoulish grab-bag of tricks and treats as the Exploratorium transforms into a Phantasmagorium of spooky science and frightful fun. In its first annual October 31st Halloween fright night, the Exploratorium digs six feet under the cultural and scientific phenomena behind Halloween and death. This event is open to the public and included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium.

For those with a sweet tooth, we’re serving up an Iron Science Teacher competition where teachers compete before a live audience -- with Halloween candy as the special ingredient -- and offering a sugar skull candy-making demonstration with master confectioner Irma Ortiz.

Also that night see Halloween Night Films, beginning at 7:30pm. They include Shelf Life by Don Bernier(2008, 29 min.). At this film, meet Bay Area resident Ray Bandar. A retired science teacher and lifelong skull collector, Ray has transformed his home into a morbid museum of his life's work. Filmmaker Don Bernier follows Ray from the dissection of fresh corpses on the beaches of San Francisco to the rafters of his basement lined with mammal skulls. In its sympathetic portrait of a lover of the natural world, Shelf Life reveals the importance of death in the life sciences. Ray Bandar will appear alongside the documentary about him, bringing skulls and mummified samples.

In The Ossuary by Jan Svenkmajer (1970, 10 min.), a black-and-white documentary shot in Czechoslovakia's forbidding Sedlec Monastery, an ossuary contains the skeletal remains of some 40,000 victims of war and plagues from the 14th and 15th centuries. Amazingly, the mountains of bones were sorted and rearranged into grisly sculpture by a live-in artist at the end of the 19th century.

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