The Horror Show opened Saturday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, presenting 396 objects drawn from 167 films. The exhibition runs through July 25, 2027, and includes a sound installation at the entrance followed by a corridor named The Hallway before the first display case.
Senior exhibitions curator Jessica Niebel led the project with an advisory team that included Willem Dafoe, Osgood Perkins, makeup artist Howard Berger, and author Tananarive Due. The show is organized into six chambers, beginning with Gothic, which features Bela Lugosi’s restored cape from Dracula standing upright in a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. This room also displays costumes from Interview with the Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, alongside pieces from Sinners, Blade, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
The Psychological chamber holds the original Psycho storyboards, the jacket and axe from The Shining, the effects head from Misery, and the teacup from Get Out. Science is staged as a laboratory built on Frankenstein adaptations, featuring the facehugger from Alien, the transformation device from An American Werewolf in London, and the bust from The Substance. The Slasher room stands its icons up in full costume, including Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Ghostface, and Art the Clown, along with a Halloween clapper board and Jason’s head from Jason Goes to Hell.
Religion carries the Necronomicon from Evil Dead II, costumes from Hellraiser, Midsommar, and Suspiria, and the plaster cast taken of Linda Blair for The Exorcist. Ghosts finishes the main sequence with the Poltergeist clown puppet, the hand from Talk to Me, the Annabelle doll from Annabelle Comes Home, and the original 1999 Blair Witch Project website running on a period computer. A final room, the Blood Room, sits between the exhibits and the exit, featuring wall-to-wall gore and a video board playing the scenes it quotes.
The exhibition opened with a screening of Halloween, featuring John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis on stage with Berger moderating. This event marked the first date of a Carpenter retrospective titled Prince of Darkness. Tickets for the screening started at $5.