Gallery Four — The Nineties and After

The last gallery is the one where horror starts talking about itself. Scream puts a mask on a poster and expects you to recognize it as a reference rather than a threat. The Blair Witch Project sells a film with almost no image at all. The Sixth Sense sells one with a boy and a sentence. By the end of this run the poster is doing something the earlier ones never had to do — competing with a trailer, a television spot, a website and, before long, a streaming thumbnail. That it still matters at all is the argument of this book in miniature. The images we hang on our porches every October were designed to sell tickets, and they outlived the tickets by a century.