[‘Tis the season for all things spooky and sinister, so expect SunBreak Music Editor Tony Kay to be throwing on his informal mantle of Resident B-Movie/Horror Film Evangelist frequently this month-ed.]

Just in time for the Hallow-days, EMP vaults squarely into the exquisite abyss of horror cinema with Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film, the museum’s latest exhibit. The presentation opened October 2, and happily it gets an awful lot right–whether you’re a horror hardcore or a shuddering terror neophyte.

Exhibit curator Jacob McMurray scored a major coup by securing some highly-qualified help. Veteran B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman, American Werewolf in London director John Landis, and Hostel director Eli Roth cherry-picked the influential horror movies forming the presentation’s nucleus, and these guys know their stuff. Corman’s got nearly sixty(!) years of experience as a producer/director of genre flicks to draw from, and Landis and Roth are both dyed-in-the-wool fanboys with encyclopaedic knowledge to back up their filmmaking chops (no pun intended).  Masters of Horror co-creator and film director Mick Garris also served as a consultant.

The broad demographic of these men reflects positively in Can’t Look Away, which chronicles the last one-hundred years of horror cinema’s evolution with a resolutely even hand. Seldom does the twain of expressionistic silent horror afficionado and Saw-loving gorehound meet in geekdom, but EMP’s creation does its best to trace those pathways coherently, without feeling like it’s pandering too extremely to any one demographic. The horror timeline along one exhibit wall follows cultural and historic shifts that coincided with the releases of many of Can’t Look Away‘s selected horror movies. And the helpful monster classification chart on one wall is as funny as it is creepy.

The memorabilia on display covers a huge swath, with something to make most any fan salivate among the couple-dozen items. It’s hard not to be awed by the oldest piece–the original, unbound typewritten manuscript for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (initially titled The Un-Dead). And if it’s flashy-scary you want, the original Alien costume from Alien and Freddy Krueger’s blade-encrusted glove beckon.

Seeing some of the items, up close and under glass, alternately demystifies and inspires an onlooker. I cultivated a deep and abiding love for the Universal Golden Age horror flicks of the 1930’s and ’40’s as a kid, so viewing the iconic cane head ornament from the 1941 version of The Wolf Man feels like the horror-nerd  equivalent of peeking at the original Dead Sea Scrolls. The piece looks like what it is–a humbly-carved wooden figure of a wolf, no longer than two cigarette lighters–but it spins a dark spell that defies its modest origins.

Kudos to the exhibit’s designers, who get a lot of visual mileage out of atmospherically-backlit slats of black foam.  In a wonderfully geeky touch, they’ve also created giant wall mounts that look like plastic trays from old monster model kits. Kiosks in the middle of the exhibit showcase mini-documentaries on a handful of the selected films, with the exhibit’s famous consultants (as well as other filmmakers and journalists) waxing rhapsodic and academic about each movie’s genesis and impact.

The interactive portions of Can’t Look Away include a Scream Booth and an incredibly fun Philip Worthington installation called Shadow Monsters. In the latter, museumgoers watch their silhouettes morph into sometimes whimsical, sometimes horrific distortions of themselves. It’s the kind of headtrip that could keep a stoner fixating on the shadow of his right hand for hours.

Can’t Look Away‘s minimal faults seem rooted in the exhibit’s time and space limitations. A few of the props on display look cool, but aren’t given context to justify their presence (yeah, the split-skulled demon from Constantine looks great, but it’s a prop from an unremarkable Keanu Reeves flick, for God’s sake). And the mini-documentaries screening in the kiosks are so good, they make you wish there were a lot more of ‘em.

All told, though, McMurray and his team have crafted a solid exhibit that ably balances genre basics with die-hard geek fodder. And that’s a special effect as impressive as anything you’ll see in any horror film.