Bela Lugosi’s cape from Dracula has been restored, and it is now standing upright in a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. It is one of 396 objects in The Horror Show, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures exhibition that opened Saturday and runs through July 25, 2027.
The show draws on 167 films and sorts them into six chambers, with a sound installation at the entrance and a corridor called The Hallway before the first case. Senior exhibitions curator Jessica Niebel led it, working from an advisory team that included Willem Dafoe, Osgood Perkins, makeup artist Howard Berger and author Tananarive Due.
The Six Chambers
Gothic is the room with the cape in it, alongside the Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt costumes from Interview with the Vampire, the Dracula costume from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and pieces from Sinners, Blade and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
Psychological 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 and built on Frankenstein adaptations, with the facehugger from Alien, the transformation device from An American Werewolf in London and the bust from The Substance.
Slasher stands its icons up in full costume, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers and Ghostface and Art the Clown in one room, 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 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.
One more room sits between all of that and the exit. The museum calls it the Blood Room, and it is wall-to-wall gore with a video board playing the scenes it is quoting.
Carpenter and Curtis Opened the Screening Series
Halloween played Saturday night with John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis on stage and Berger moderating, the first date of a Carpenter retrospective the museum is calling Prince of Darkness. Tickets started at $5.
Curtis used the evening to revisit a story she has been telling for years: that producer Ray Stark asked her mother, Janet Leigh, to let her audition for Regan in The Exorcist, and that Leigh refused because she wanted her daughter to have an ordinary childhood. William Friedkin dismissed a version of it in 2018, calling it “totally untrue,” and the two accounts have sat side by side ever since. She also confirmed a detail nobody has disputed: The Exorcist frightened her so badly at fifteen that classmates taunted her about it, and she answered by staging an interpretive dance to the theme at a school concert, with a blood pack.
The Programming Runs Into January
The Carpenter series plays through October 25. Monster Mash on October 24 pairs effects demonstrations with a 4K restoration of Horror of Dracula. Museum After Dark on October 31 is an adults-only night built around The Craft. Carrie turns 50 on November 19 with Sissy Spacek in the room. A ten-film Hammer restoration series arrives in January 2027, while Hammer itself is busy putting a new monster on screens.
A companion show called Zombies! opened the same day in the Warner Bros. Gallery on the same dates, aimed at families and organized around how the effect gets done.
“The Horror Show is an exploration of horror’s emotional, cultural, and symbolic power and examines why horror matters,” Niebel said in the museum’s announcement. Dafoe, from the advisory side, said it shorter: “Cinema in general engages your sense of wonder, but horror can explode it.”
General admission is $25, and the galleries are open Wednesday through Monday. Horror has had museum retrospectives before, and a case or two in a costume show. Six chambers and ten months of a fourth floor is a different order of real estate, and the question now is whether the Academy keeps giving the genre that much room once the cape goes back into storage.
