From Lugosi’s Cape to Art the Clown: Inside the Academy Museum’s Blockbuster New Horror Exhibit

If your idea of a good time is a bucket of popcorn and a terrifying jump scare, clear your calendar. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is officially giving the horror genre the high-art respect it deserves with its massive new exhibition, The Horror Show, opening September 26, 2026. Taking over the fourth-floor Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery through July 25, 2027, this immersive exhibition explores more than a century of cinematic dread. The project has some serious genre royalty behind it, too. Four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe and director Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) serve on the advisory team. As Dafoe puts it: “Cinema in general engages your sense of wonder, but horror can explode it.” Here is your survival guide to navigating the exhibit. Inside the Six Chambers of Dread Visitors enter through a dark, eerie soundscape before hitting a central hallway lined with historic posters. From there, the exhibition branches into six highly detailed, thematic “chambers”: -Gothic: Designed like a shadowed crypt. The crown jewel here is the Academy Collection’s recently restored cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), alongside pieces from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Sinners (2025). -Psychological: A stark, clinical white space that aims to
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