The Monster Maker Gets Named

Six themed galleries, organized less like a chronology of horror films than like chambers in a haunted house, open at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on September 26, 2026, under the title The Horror Show. Original prosthetics, creature designs and makeup concept art sit alongside costumes and props from a century of the genre, from Frankenstein's various screen incarnations through Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Thing, The Fly and the recent body-horror hit The Substance, in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery.

Among the advisers named on the exhibition's team is Howard Berger, the Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup artist whose career runs from creature work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer through the Academy Award he shared for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His presence on the advisory list, alongside filmmaker Osgood Perkins and actor Willem Dafoe, signals where the exhibition wants credit to land: not only with directors and writers, but with the people who built the faces that made the films frightening in the first place.

Craft as the Genre's Real Author

Jessica Niebel, the Academy Museum's senior exhibitions curator, has described the show as an exploration of horror's emotional, cultural and symbolic power, one that examines why the genre matters so deeply to different communities rather than treating it as disreputable spectacle. Amy Homma, the museum's director and president, has called the result an immersive and thrilling journey through horror's history, both emotional and experiential. Read together, the curatorial language makes a specific bet: that the genre's cultural weight has always run through its craft department as much as its scripts, and that a prosthetic artist deciding how a wound gapes or how a transformation reads under low light is making an authorial choice, not executing someone else's storyboard.

That framing is reinforced by the exhibition's ties to living practitioners rather than only archival material. It coincides with a fiftieth-anniversary screening of Carrie with Sissy Spacek in attendance and a retrospective devoted to John Carpenter, both of which keep the show anchored to filmmakers and, implicitly, the makeup and effects artists who built their monsters, rather than treating horror purely as a settled historical genre.

The Argument's Weak Joint

The harder question is whether an advisory credit is the same thing as authorship, or a more comfortable stand-in for it. Berger's name on a list of advisers confirms the museum wanted a working prosthetic artist's judgment shaping the exhibition. It does not, on its own, guarantee that the wall text in front of any single prosthetic will name the specific hands that sculpted it, applied it, or solved the mechanical problem of making it move convincingly on camera. Willem Dafoe, also credited as an advisory team member, has said cinema in general engages a sense of wonder while horror can explode it, a popular form born of modest resources with a strong independent streak. Osgood Perkins, also advising, has called horror crucial to culture and to an evolving understanding of what it means to be alive. Both are genuine, on-record statements about the genre's value. Neither is a guarantee that the craftspeople behind any specific prosthetic get named rather than folded into a director's or a studio's credit.

That gap between advising and being individually credited is the same one that runs through most museum treatment of makeup and effects work, and The Horror Show does not resolve it so much as put it on the table. Berger's presence on the advisory roster is a start. Whether the finished galleries actually attach his name, and the names of his peers, to the objects on the wall is the test worth checking in person after September 26.