The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles has turned its galleries over to the genre that cinema's gatekeepers long dismissed: horror. "The Horror Show", on view through July, takes a broad look at why scary movies have held audiences for a century, and argues for the genre's place in film history rather than outside it.

The exhibition begins with a single object — the original cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning's "Dracula" (1931), which the museum acquired from the Lugosi family in 2019. From there it assembles costumes, props, concept art, film posters and scripts drawn from horror classics such as "The Shining" and "Psycho", contemporary landmarks including "Midsommar" and "Get Out", and less celebrated titles such as "Tales From the Hood" and "The Stuff".

The show also reaches beyond film itself. A woodblock print by the 19th-century Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, showing a sorceress summoning allies in a ruined palace, is among the works on view, placing horror's imagery in a longer visual tradition. Senior curator Jessica Niebel and her team drew on the museum's own collection as well as loans from dozens of lenders to build the display.

Horror, the exhibition suggests, has always been a way of facing what frightens us — death, the unknown, the forces outside our control. By gathering the genre's artefacts in a museum setting, "The Horror Show" treats the jump scare and the monster as seriously as any other subject in film history, and invites visitors to reconsider a form that was long filed under vulgar entertainment.