Unibrow Radio: A Ghost in the Gallery, Pt 4—The Academy Museum

A few years ago, I started making my way through Rolling Stone’s list of the 101 greatest horror movies of all time. For a horror lover, there were a surprising number of movies I hadn't seen, along with classics I hadn’t watched since I was a child. From Midsommar to The Birds, and An American Werewolf in London to Get Out, it’s an interesting exercise to evaluate the various ways fear finds us.

Of all the films I revisited, the movie that surprisingly scared me the most was A Nightmare on Elm Street. Really, Freddy Krueger? He's so well-known and frequently referenced that it almost feels silly to be scared of a man in a striped sweater and fedora. And yet, I found him terrifying. I think what bothered me most was the idea that you're never safe. It doesn't matter how far you go, or how hard you try to get away from him. Eventually, you have to go back to the one place where he can always find you: your dreams.

I also couldn’t help but feel sorry for the children on Elm Street, who are forced to pay the price for their parents' sins. It’s not fair to have to carry the burdens our parents leave us, but we do it anyway. We inherit a world shaped by choices we had no part in making, and then somehow become responsible for fixing what was left behind. Climate change. Economic debt. Generational trauma. That is what the horror genre does best: turn the very real things that haunt us into monsters, nightmares, and haunted houses we’re forced to venture into.

On this episode of The Unibrow Radio, we continue our Ghost in the Gallery series, where we look beyond the art inside our beloved cultural institutions to the things that can’t quite be explained. But today, we do things a bit differently. I speak with two of the minds behind the Academy Museum’s new exhibition The Horror Show: Assistant Curator Nicholas Barlow and THI Moving Image Lab Curatorial Fellow Bradford Nordeen.

Bringing together over 200 years of storytelling, The Horror Show explores why horror films matter so deeply to so many of us. The objects alone are worth the visit. From Alien and The Ring to The Exorcist and The Conjuring, the exhibition brings some of cinema’s most iconic nightmares into the museum. Together, we talk about why we love to be scared, what horror tells us about ourselves, and the stories behind some of the exhibition’s most fascinating objects, including Annabelle, the cart used to wheel Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and, of course, Freddy’s infamous bladed glove.

Luckily, Freddy’s glove stays at the museum. Your dreams, however, are another story. ––Shaquille Heath

You can learn more at the ⁠academymuseum.org.