The Horror Show! at Somerset House holds a haunted mirror up to British life

“How are we to respond to the present times, when the crisis facing us is unprecedented in its multi-faceted and existential nature?” asks curator Claire Catterall in the book accompanying The Horror Show!, a new exhibition at Somerset House in London. “With horror, of course!” When the world starts to shift beneath our feet, she writes, “the unhinged and otherworldly” become all the more relevant. “Horror not only allows us to voice our fears, it gives us the tools to stare them down.”

Even a form of art that thrives best in darkness and obscurity — one inviting disdain, disapproval and censoriousness — has its season, which is late October. For a brief window of time, before All Souls’ Day on November 2 tries to put the monsters back in their box, horror is let out and fondly indulged, so long as it’s all pretend, tricks and treats and hocus-pocus. This season we get throwaway scary movies such as Smile and Prey for the Devil or Guillermo del Toro’s anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix. But there are also considered, ambitious celebratory projects such as Somerset House’s multimedia exhibition or the British Film Institute’s In Dreams Are Monsters season.

This year is ripe for celebrating horror. It’s the centenary of FW Murnau’s film Nosferatu, the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — itself 125 years old — and arguably the beginning of the horror film as a genre. And it’s 30 years since the Halloween broadcast on the BBC of the profoundly unsettling Ghostwatch — one of the few works to feature in both the Somerset House exhibition and the BFI season — a play that set out to terrify the nation.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, co-curators of The Horror Show!, provide a horror-inflected history of certain strata of British life over the past 50 years. Their first section, “Monster”, tacitly picks up from the themes of The Final Programme (1973), a story about collapsing society and desperate attempts to engineer a messiah (alarmingly of the moment), and foregrounds the gender-fluidity of David Bowie and the angry anarchy of punk. After Guy Peellaert’s album cover lithograph, “David Bowie: Diamond Dogs”, in which Bowie is envisioned as a freak-show half-man/half-dog, the signature work is Jamie Reid’s “Monster on a Nice Roof”, featuring a topiary fiend perched on a well-lit house.

“Monster” contains work from the 1970s and 1980s, followed by “Ghost”, which spans the 1990s to the early 21st century and trades in millennial anxieties and digital phantoms; “Witch” picks up from the financial crash of 2007 and surveys the chaos of the present era (“the long dark age”, as a character in The Final Programme deadpans). Exhibits range from paintings and illustrations through sculpture, film, installations, sonic effects and fashion, as well as preserved cakes (Jenkin van Zyl’s startling but funny “Six Scintillating Sinners (In Vitro)”), ceramics (Serena Korda’s “Geometric Puker” is rather sweet), photos from the set of The Wicker Man, film props (the possum from Matthew Holness’ Possum) and neon signs.

The curators quote the film-maker John Carpenter’s dictum that “horror is a reaction; it’s not a genre”, and horror as a genre practised by film-makers such as Carpenter or writers such as Stephen King is as marginalised at Somerset House as it is in mainstream discourse. This is an exhibition that pays attention to the artist Derek Jarman but ignores Candyman-creator Clive Barker, which I assume must be a conscious choice. Echoes of genre horror are confined to Richard Littler’s Scarfolk works — a time capsule of 1970s spooky grimness, like a situationist take on The League of Gentlemen — and other hauntological items, though quite a few contemporary creatives — Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, Alice Lowe, Ben Wheatley — get a look-in with bits and pieces from Inside No 9, Prevenge and Kill List.

With so many disparate voices, there are inevitable shifts of meaning and intent throughout. Once a subversive notion, it’s now almost the dominant interpretation of horror that we identify with the outcasts: raging in defiance as a monster, fading away as a ghost, working spells of mystic self-defence as a witch. Because of this, few works are unironically terrifying, though Kerry Stewart’s installation work “The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You” — a charity collection boy seen through a pebbled glass front door as if calling to rebuke the thoughtlessly uncharitable — is disturbing.

Old-school monsters, which the audience are expected to hate and fear, feature only as political bogeys: the Spitting Image puppet of a snarling Margaret Thatcher, a photograph of a smiling Tony Blair frozen in an antique frame (not, however, the “demon eyes” poster — a telling horror image from the right of the political spectrum). The “Witch” era doesn’t include contemporary figures in a similar mode, though the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have contributed enough nightmare fuel to the pyre.

For The Horror Show!, horror isn’t so much a reaction as a mask — there are plenty of those on view, from bondage/psycho hoods to witchy goddess faces — which can be put on to conceal or display, to terrify or to inspire. The mask of comedy, which now has its own horror associations since we’ve collectively agreed that clowns are more terrifying than funny, is inevitably also present. The fractured, dissociative, lunatic, pompous or extreme manifestations of horror art are as often hilarious as they are disturbing. Or perhaps, at this end of the “Witch” era, laughing insanely becomes an appropriate response.

‘The Horror Show!’ runs to February 19, somersethouse.org.uk. ‘In Dreams Are Monsters’ runs to December 31, bfi.org.uk