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From Slasher Films to Vampire Flicks, Horror Movies Are More Popular Than Ever. Relive the Genre’s Scariest Moments—if You Dare—at a New Exhibition
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ latest show features nearly 350 props, costumes and artifacts from such films as “Psycho,” “The Shining” and “Sinners”
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Few images can conjure dread from a movie screen like a long, empty hallway. We know that silent, suppressed terrors are lurking just out of sight, yet we can’t resist the urge to uncover them. It’s only fitting that visitors to “The Horror Show,” a new exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, have to make their way down such a hall before coming face to face with the hundreds of spooky cinematic heirlooms on display.
“We wanted to find something that brings all sorts of different horror films together, something they have in common from different eras, different countries, and the hallway is it,” says Jessica Niebel, senior exhibitions curator at the museum. As visitors move down the hall, which is lined with a century’s worth of posters, they can choose to enter (or avoid) six chambers, each of which celebrates a different category of horror movie: Gothic, psychological, science, slasher, religion and ghosts.
The exhibition arrives with fortuitous timing: In recent years, the horror genre has grown in popularity, dominating 2024’s highest-grossing English-language films and yielding the highest median return on investment compared with all other genres in 2025.
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Last year, Sinners, a fable of vampires and Blues music set in 1930s Mississippi, vaulted horror cinema to new heights of prestige when it garnered an all-time-high 16 Academy Award nominations. This year, the breakout indie hits Obsession and Backrooms shocked the film industry after exploding at the box office despite their modest budgets. (Obsession, a bloody “be careful what you wish for” cautionary tale, has grossed more than $500 million against a budget of less than $1 million, also setting a record.)
Moviegoers are primed for scares, and they can now find them in spades at the Academy Museum, where nearly 350 props, costumes, original posters and other horror artifacts will be on display through July 25, 2027.
Did you know? The first horror movie
- An 1896 short film titled “Le Manoir du Diable,” or “The House of the Devil,” is widely considered to be the first horror movie.
- Directed by filmmaker Georges Méliès, the three-minute short depicts a bat transforming into the devil and conjuring an array of supernatural creatures.
The exhibition’s first chamber, highlighting Gothic filmmaking, features first editions of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, an 1872 lesbian vampire tale that is still subjected to censorship today. As Niebel says, she wanted to acknowledge that horror films (like the many adaptations of Dracula) “have roots beyond the history of cinema.” Still, she credits Bela Lugosi’s iconic black cape from the 1931 film adaptation with shaping “the image we have of Count Dracula until today.”
Niebel calls the cape “one of the crown jewels” of the Academy Museum’s collections. In “The Horror Show,” it’s placed provocatively next to the blood-red armor worn by Gary Oldman’s Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film. Ribbed, with pointy, cat-like ears, the costume (designed by Eiko Ishioka) offers a complete reimagining of the character’s look and illustrates the story’s ability to transform for subsequent generations. “In my opinion, [it’s] one of the best costume designs ever,” Niebel says.
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These costumes aren’t the only examples of vampire couture on display: Hailee Steinfeld’s bloodstained dress from Sinners is also on view, among other ensembles. But the most memorable sights in the Gothic chamber might be the original production design drawings—including pieces by Charles D. Hall and Tyrus Wong—for classic films like The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). However useful these drawings proved to the filmmakers, they’re anything but utilitarian: Lush and gloomy in textured black and white, they could be illustrations from the first-edition Stoker or Le Fanu—works of art in their own right that help visitors understand the painstaking off-screen craftwork that goes into making a movie.
The chamber focused on psychological horror also welcomes visitors with an antique text: a German edition of Sigmund Freud’s 1895 book, Studies on Hysteria. It’s an eerie tone-setter for the items on display, a reminder that the connective tissue between these very different films is the fragility and volatility of the human mind. The room showcases the oldest film-related object in the entire exhibition (the first-edition books are older): a 1920 poster for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent German horror film about an evil doctor who commands a somnambulist under his control to commit murders. Never mind the movie—the poster is enough to give viewers nightmares, depicting the hypnotized murderer dragging his next victim beneath a red sky.
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Things only get creepier from there. Also on view are Jack Nicholson’s ax and red jacket from The Shining (1980), a replica corpse of Mrs. Bates from Psycho (1960) rotting in her chair, Hannibal Lecter’s (tragically ineffective) straitjacket and mask from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and the teacup that hypnotizes Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris in Get Out (2017).
Along with the storybook from The Babadook (2014), Christian Bale’s pinstriped suit from American Psycho (2000) and Kathy Bates’ blue housedress from Misery (1990), many of the items in the psychological chamber appear rather mundane on the surface. But that’s what makes them all the more terrifying: They illustrate that anything can descend into horror when the mind loses its grip.
The collection of objects from the world of sci-fi horror boasts an extreme rarity: a first edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. One of only 500 copies that were printed, it omits the name of author Mary Shelley. “I wish she could see what’s become of her story,” Niebel says, pointing to a century’s worth of different cinematic takes on Frankenstein. “And I feel like in the future, there will be another Frankenstein.” Visitors seeking something less terrestrial in this section will be pleased to find original props from the Alien franchise: a Facehugger that implants its embryo in human hosts, as well as its final form, the giant Xenomorph.
Next up in “The Horror Show” is the slasher, a genre epitomized by such killers as Ghostface from Scream, Halloween’s Michael Myers and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, all of whom stare right at visitors as they enter the room. “We wanted to have a convention of slashers at some point and allow for a confrontation,” Niebel says—and the religious horror-focused chamber allows for much of the same, with a convention (or is it a coven?) of witches awaiting guests’ arrival.
Together, Valak from The Conjuring 2 (2016), Madame Blanc from Suspiria (2018), Dani from Midsommar (2019), Pinhead from Hellraiser (2022), Aunt Gladys from Weapons (2025) and Annie from Sinners (2025) offer a collection of recent but diverse takes on the figure of the “witch.” Not one of them wears a hat or holds a broom: Instead, Annie practices hoodoo to protect her community from vampires.
The idea behind this display was to avoid the “patriarchal” view of the witch as “the old hag in the dark forest eating children” and instead show “women who live at the margins of society or are cast out from society because they refuse to live by all the rules,” Niebel says. The first children’s edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and replica documents from the Salem witch trials attest to how eternally these women have lingered in society’s fears.
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The only older archetype in horror is the ghost. Fittingly, the corresponding chamber in the exhibition feels the most sparse, with the negative space suggesting the presence of spirits who are scary because they’re (mostly) unseen. A set of Japanese woodblock prints, however, illustrates just how many different forms ghosts can take when they do appear.
Each of these highlights is worth seeing on its own, but as visitors move down the hallway and through the chambers, a fuller picture begins to emerge: of horror as its own kind of historian, documenting and reflecting humanity’s changing collective fears. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for instance, distills the then-recent traumas of World War I into a plot about a sleepwalker who mindlessly obeys an authoritarian leader’s murderous orders. The film’s original concept art highlights its Expressionist production design, in which twisted, gnarled, jagged roads and buildings evoke a physical landscape that the war has blighted into a hazy fever dream.
A more recent example, the pinstriped suit worn by Bale’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, embodies a critique of the turbocharged corporate consumer culture of the 1980s and ’90s. In the film, Bateman leads a double life as a Wall Street investment banker and a serial killer. His bland office attire stands in striking contrast to Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula cape, but together, the two costumes trace an arc of audiences’ evolving fears. Dracula is supernatural, but Bateman is an everyman; the former represents a fear of death, the latter of everyday working life.
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Meanwhile, vials of poisonous serum from 2024’s The Substance—about an aging TV star who goes to deadly lengths to reclaim her youth—conjure the never-ending litany of beauty products and hacks hawked on Instagram and TikTok. The film captures very contemporary anxieties around body dysmorphia, influencer culture and the pressures of beauty standards bearing down on women.
Angela Marie Smith, a scholar of horror cinema at the University of Utah who advised on the exhibition, views the 1931 versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as responses to the era’s eugenics movement, which asserted that people with supposedly “undesirable” traits, including certain racial minorities, should be barred from reproducing. By 1931, 30 American states had adopted forced sterilization laws targeting such individuals, and the Nazis would soon follow suit.
The three films highlighted by Smith are about figures “who can be marked off as ‘other’”: an “immigrant vampire” preying on the English; a lab-born monster with bolts sticking out of his neck; and the “racialized figure of Hyde, who’s very violent and lustful,” she says. These characters threaten “young women of marriageable age” who fit into a specific mold and are expected to bear children with the same socially acceptable attributes. The movies illustrate “how a discourse that’s been simmering around gets visualized in the form of the monsters as these visible deviant ‘others,’ even as those films also often make their monsters … quite sympathetic and maybe question eugenic ideas as well,” Smith says.
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Looking ahead to the 1960s and ’70s, Smith draws attention to a wave of horror films about pregnancy and birth, coinciding with second-wave feminism and strides toward increased bodily autonomy for women. The infamous All of Them Witches book from 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, about a pregnant woman who fears evil forces threatening her unborn child; the prop baby from 1974’s It’s Alive, about a child who begins committing murders as soon as he’s born; and concept art for the Xenomorph egg from the first Alien movie capture a moment in time when new views of pregnancy were emerging, bringing with them new fears and fascinations. (It should be noted that these three films were all directed by men.)
1992’s Candyman, meanwhile, transferred its source material—a short story set in Liverpool, England, with no Black characters—to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project and made the titular slasher a Black man. The film version follows a white graduate student conducting anthropological research on the Candyman myth, only to discover that the supposed urban legend is true.
Tananarive Due, an author and film historian who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that Cabrini-Green “had a pretty bad reputation at that time. It wasn’t an easy place to live, but in the hands of Hollywood, it became monstrous.” Due, who also advised on the exhibition, explains that Candyman “reflected that era of fear of urban spaces, and specifically fear of Blackness in urban spaces.” While “The Horror Show” doesn’t feature anything from the 1992 film, visitors can see the iconic hook and jacket from its 2021 sequel of the same name.
“The biggest lesson to be learned about horror films is that they truly hold up a mirror to ourselves and to our times,” Niebel says. “I honestly would even venture to say, if you want to find an alternative way to study history, watch horror films over time. You will find out what people were afraid of and what they desired.”
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If horror is indeed a mirror to our times, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the genre’s size and scope seem to be expanding. Amid wars, political instability at home and abroad, and seismic technological changes like the “A.I. revolution,” there’s lots to be scared of these days. “I actually think horror can be really comforting in moments like that,” Smith says, “because it provides a kind of emotional and visceral outlet.”
Due concurs, adding that horror “can be, ironically, quite healing”—and audiences are hungry for that catharsis. “A lot of people are fearful, and even Covid was such a fearful time. We’re still reverberating from that,” Due says. “I think a lot of Americans … really feel a deep sense that the roof is about to cave in on their heads.”
If movie theaters are spared, maybe we’ll be OK.
“The Horror Show” is on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures through July 25, 2027.
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