How the Academy Museum's horror exhibit doubles as a fundraising test

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens "The Horror Show" on Sept. 26, a genre-wide exhibition on horror cinema, in its fourth-floor Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery. The show runs through July 25, 2027, organized into six themed chambers — Gothic, Psychological, Science, Slasher, Religion and Ghosts — that trace more than a century of horror filmmaking through original props, costumes, production materials and interactive displays.

The exhibit arrives as the museum, overseen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and housed in the renovated 1939 May Company Building on Wilshire Boulevard, works out how to turn its exhibition calendar into both paying visits and donor support. Its federal tax filings show the nonprofit that runs the museum has posted multimillion-dollar deficits in its two most recent fiscal years, covered largely by contributions rather than ticket sales.

A Century of Horror Under One Roof

The exhibition was curated by a team led by senior exhibitions curator Jessica Niebel, with assistant curator Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant Alexandra James Salichs and Bradford Nordeen of the museum's Moving Image Lab. Visitors move from an introductory sound installation through a corridor called "The Hallway" into the six chambers. Films represented span "Dracula," "Frankenstein," "The Horror of Dracula," "Alien," "Halloween," "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "The Exorcist," "The Silence of the Lambs," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Poltergeist," "Misery," "Ringu," "Ju-on," "Midsommar," "Get Out," "The Blair Witch Project" and "The Shining," according to the museum.

The show ends with a "Blood Room" installation on how films create their blood effects, and it carries a content advisory recommending parental guidance. Niebel said The Horror Show "is an exploration of horror's emotional, cultural, and symbolic power and examines why horror matters so deeply to many different types of communities." An advisory group assembled for the project includes actor Willem Dafoe, filmmaker Osgood Perkins, documentarian Ariel Baska, Oscar-winning makeup artist Howard Berger, author Tananarive Due and film scholar Angela Marie Smith. Dafoe said horror "can explode" cinema's usual sense of wonder; Perkins called the genre "crucial to culture and cinema" and described the show as a "hallway of limitless doors."

A Gallery With a Track Record

The Katzenberg Gallery, on the fourth floor of the Renzo Piano-designed museum, opened to the public on Sept. 30, 2021, with a Hayao Miyazaki retrospective of roughly 300 objects, many never before shown outside Japan, that ran through June 5, 2022 — the first North American museum retrospective devoted to the filmmaker.

More recently the gallery held "Jaws: The Exhibition," which ran from Sept. 14, 2025, to July 26, 2026, and was the museum's first show built entirely around a single film. "The Horror Show" takes over just two months after "Jaws" closes, trading one movie's production history for an entire genre's. A companion exhibition for younger visitors, "Zombies!," opens the same day in the adjacent Warner Bros. Gallery and runs on the same schedule through July 2027.

Who Is Paying for the Scares

The museum credits Hammer Films and John Gore Studios with "leadership support" for the exhibition, with additional backing from Dave and Tara Dollinger, the theater chain Regal, and Kimberly V. Strauss. General admission is $25 for adults, $19 for seniors and $15 for students; children 17 and under and museum members get in free, and a discounted "Last Looks" rate applies after 4:30 p.m.

Membership includes free general admission, invitations to members-only events and discounts at the museum store and restaurant, and the museum lets a ticket's cost count toward an annual membership. Programming tied to the exhibit gives the museum ticketed events to sell across a ten-month run rather than a single opening night: a John Carpenter retrospective starting Sept. 26, a Halloween "Monster Mash" on Oct. 24 built around a 4K restoration of "Horror of Dracula," a Museum After Dark screening of "The Craft" on Oct. 31, and a 50th-anniversary screening of "Carrie" with Sissy Spacek on Nov. 19. The museum store will also sell horror-themed apparel, toys, collectibles and books tied to the show.

A Museum That Runs on Donations

The Academy Museum Foundation's most recent federal filing, for the fiscal year ended June 2025, reported $71.4 million in revenue against $85.4 million in expenses, a shortfall of about $14 million, according to ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. The prior fiscal year showed the same pattern: $77.7 million in revenue against $92.3 million in expenses, a $14.6 million gap.

In both years, contributions supplied the large majority of income — 86.6% of revenue in fiscal 2025 — while program services brought in $8.3 million, under 12% of the total. The foundation held $652.5 million in total assets, $434.4 million in liabilities and $218.1 million in net assets as of that filing. Those reserves rest substantially on founding gifts: $50 million from Haim and Cheryl Saban, whose name is on the museum's main building; $10 million each from Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose names mark the gallery now hosting "The Horror Show"; and $5 million from the Shirley Temple family.

Turning Programming Into Philanthropy

Museum director and president Amy Homma said the exhibition team built "an immersive and thrilling journey through the history of horror films" meant to draw both longtime horror fans and newcomers to the genre. That kind of dual appeal matters for an institution whose earned revenue — tickets, memberships, the store — covers only a small share of its operating costs. The museum, organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, describes its mission as preserving the history and artistry of moviemaking for the public, a mandate its donor base is asked to underwrite year after year.

The museum's other major fundraising vehicle, its annual gala, raised more than $12 million in 2025 while honoring Penélope Cruz, Walter Salles, Bruce Springsteen and Bowen Yang, according to the museum's own announcement. Whether "The Horror Show" moves attendance or membership figures the way past marquee exhibitions have will not be clear until well into its run, but a nonprofit that depends on contributions for the bulk of its budget has an obvious interest in a show built to fill both a gallery and a gala guest list.

Related coverage: How Philanthropy Actually Works in Entertainment.