Last Updated on July 13, 2026 by Amber T
While the Academy is still pretty hesitant to award horror films for their excellence, they’re still celebrating the genre somewhere else. The Academy Museum just announced their latest temporary exhibition, The Horror Show, honoring the cultural impact and popularity of our favorite scary movies from across cinema history.
Opening on September 26, The Horror Show will answer the question, “why do horror films matter so deeply to so many people?” Organized by Jessica Niebel, Alexandra James Salichs, and Nicholas Barlow (an appropriate name if we’ve ever heard one), the exhibition will open with a sound installation modeled after the common horror movie hallway trope, before splitting off into six galleries representing some of the most popular horror subgenres: gothic, psychological, science, slasher, religion, and ghosts.
Each gallery will be designed as an iconic setting that fits its subgenre, including crypts, laboratories, and shacks hiding evil serial killers, and explore representations of identity, ability, and sexuality across horror history. Screen-used props, makeup, prosthetics, and archival materials will be on view, including things like Catherine Deneuve’s corpse body double from The Hunger, and the cape Bela Lugosi wore as Dracula.
Other horror films represented in the exhibition include Alien, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Frankenstein, Get Out, Halloween, Midsommar, Misery, Poltergeist, Ringu, The Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, among many others.
And while little ones might be scared by the larger exhibition, the Academy will also be hosting a smaller-scale Zombies! exhibition at the same time, focusing on the history of the horror trope and how they came to be as they appear today. This exhibit also opens on September 26, and features plenty of interactive features for guests of all ages.
The Horror Show will also be accompanied by a swathe of the museum’s signature public programming, including their annual Monster Mash, a John Carpenter film series, a special Museum After Dark event on Halloween night, and a 50th anniversary screening of Carrie featuring star Sissy Spacek in attendance. This comes after they’ve honored the genre with a few temporary exhibits, including their widely-praised Jaws exhibition, as well as events and film series honoring folk horror, women in horror, and more.
The Horror Show will be on display at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles from September 26 to July 25, 2027. For more information and to purchase tickets, you can check out their website.
