Lugosi’s Cape and a Facehugger, the Academy Museum Opens The Horror Show
Nearly 400 objects fill six galleries, from the Dracula cape to the Poltergeist clown, through next July.
The Academy Museum has turned down the lights on its fourth floor. The Horror Show opened on Saturday, September 26, in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery, and it runs through July 25, 2027, which covers one full Halloween season and then some.
Senior Exhibitions Curator Jessica Niebel organized it with Assistant Curator Nicholas Barlow across six themed galleries, Gothic, Psychological, Science, Slasher, Religion and Ghosts. Time Out counted 396 objects covering 167 film titles.
The relics are the draw. Bela Lugosi’s cape from Dracula (1931). Jack Nicholson’s jacket and axe from The Shining. The facehugger from Alien. The Poltergeist clown and the Annabelle doll. The slasher gallery lines up the costumes of Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Ghostface and Art the Clown, and the original 1999 website for The Blair Witch Project is running on an interactive computer.
Opening night belonged to John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis, who introduced Halloween in a conversation moderated by the makeup artist Howard Berger. The screening launched the museum’s Prince of Darkness series devoted to Carpenter.
Programming ahead includes a 50th-anniversary screening of Carrie with Sissy Spacek and a retrospective of Hammer Films.
