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

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.