Imaging techniques such as speckle correlation and wavefront modulation are efficient and important to overcome the scattering effect caused by inhomogeneous media. However, the field of view of these techniques is limited, and the dynamic scattering media degrades the image quality due to the dependence on the memory effect. The shower-curtain effect is a common effect that is not limited by the field of view and the dynamic scattering medium. In recent years, with the development of various computational imaging techniques, the shower-curtain effect has been applied to different scattering scenes to overcome the scattering effect, combined with other imaging recovery methods, and has shown some unique advantages compared with traditional scattering imaging techniques. This paper summarizes the evolution of the physical model of the shower-curtain effect based on the modulation transfer function, analysing the influence of optical depth and aperture sizes. The applications of the shower-curtain effect and the Fourier domain shower-curtain effect in the field of scattering imaging are depicted. The difference and relationship between the Fourier domain shower curtain effect and other imaging techniques based on a phase iterative algorithm are discussed, and the possibility of combination with other computational imaging techniques is proposed.