LOS ANGELES – It’s a chance to get up close and personal with some of the most famous monsters in Hollywood.
"I love working on exhibitions about dinosaurs and taxidermy, but horror movies is kind of an early passion of mine," said Sarah Crawford, the Natural History Museum's Senior Manager of Exhibition Design and Development.
Rarely-seen props from the museum’s Hollywood collection sit alongside the real-life artifacts that inspired them.
Turns out the prop bat from Dracula wasn't all that scary.
"They expect a ferocious looking bat with fangs hanging out of the mouth. Instead, there’s this sweet little fox face with rabbit fur glued to it," said Beth Werling, the museum's History Collections Manager.
She says the museum has more in its collections than simply dinosaurs and fossils. It also contains a wide array of Hollywood history.
"We got these props in the 30s, right when these films were made," Crawford explained. "They’ve gone out a lot to other places in the country, even internationally, but they hadn’t been on view to local Los Angeles audience in a long time."
Crawford was one of the creative minds behind the Natural History of Horror exhibit that shares true stories that inspired these monster legends.
"Anytime there was an outbreak of disease, people would blame vampires," she said.
The exhibit invites guests to learn about the science of scary through four classic monsters from early Universal films— The Mummy, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Dracula.
"We selected clips from all four movies that really give you a sense of the monsters’ personalities," Crawford said.
One of her favorite parts of the exhibit is how the discovery of King Tut’s tomb became an iconic movie.
"You get all this sensationalized news reporting about a curse and that’s kind of what translated into the film, The Mummy," she said.
It's a trend that continues even today.
"You look at Godzilla and the atomic bomb. You look at the invention of computers or A.I. Each of those has a horror film that kind of goes with all these new scientific discoveries," Crawford said.
There’s even a chance for visitors to experiment with spooky sound effects of their own at a Foley table while trying to match scenes from Dracula, one of the first horror movies with sound.
In Frankenstein’s mock lab, guests can also throw the switch to see how real experiments brought body parts and the movie to life.
"Frogs were one of the first animals that people were experimenting with and they were using electricity to stimulate their leg muscles," Werling said. "It was really the first thought about replacing human body parts, which of course, we do as a matter of fact today, but two centuries ago when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, it was a horrifying new idea."
As for Crawford, she hopes it gets visitors to think about how science and technology shape our fears.
"They don't have to be scary. There’s a lot we can learn from these creatures and from these stories."
The Natural History of Horror runs through April 19 and is free with museum admission.
For more information, click here.