A few hundred people poured through the gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery last Saturday, carrying picnics, blankets and folding chairs.

They moved along a path toward the sound of a Jimi Hendrix song coming from the foot of a high marble mausoleum. “The walk out is a little spooky,” one festivalgoer said of the cemetery after the movies end. Three women broke from the crowd and stepped onto the grass in search of a shortcut. A tall figure moved out of the shadows. “Stay off the graves,” boomed the baritone voice of LaNordo Conn, a 6-foot-4 cemetery security guard who does television and radio voice-overs.

The women gasped and scuttled back to the road.

It was the start of a new season of Cinespia, a film series here showing midcentury movies amid the graves of the Hollywood elite. Since 2002, the series has grown from a gathering of a few hundred people to a Los Angeles institution that drew capacity crowds of 3,000 to the cemetery last August, said John Wyatt, founder and director of the series. Mr. Wyatt projects the films onto a wall of the mausoleum where Rudolph Valentino is interred.

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