Edvard Munch was by no means the only artist interested in blood-curdling cries
“I WAS walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting,” Edvard Munch wrote in his diary in 1892. “Suddenly the sky turned blood red...there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city...I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” The scene inspired Munch’s best-known work, currently on display at the British Museum. “The Scream” exists in four different versions, each with thick, stark lines reverberating with a sound that can never be heard.
Why does the act of screaming fascinate viewers and audiences? Screams are disturbing, an explosion of feeling that is not verbal yet not quite nonsense. They are primal, involuntary reflexes that represent a loss of control. There are many, often contradictory, reasons to scream: fear, shock, pain and pleasure. All can be traced through art, literature and music.
A scream, at the beginning of a novel, jolts the reader awake. “Gravity’s Rainbow” opens as “a screaming comes across the sky”—that of a V2 rocket about to fall on London—whereby Thomas Pynchon instantly evokes the terrors of his wartime setting. When novels end with a scream, the effect is unsettling. Francis Spufford closes “Golden Hill” with the narrator remembering “how good it was,” at a pivotal moment, “to scream”.
Cinema is also famous for its screams. The most important scene of “Psycho” , for Alfred Hitchcock, was that of Janet Leigh in the shower; her scream of terror harmonises with Bernard Herrmann’s jagged score. Steven Spielberg made actors scream as part of the audition process for “Jurassic Park” . When he watched the tapes back at home at night, Ariana Richards’s cry jolted Mr Spielberg’s wife awake, and she ran to check her children were safe. He cast Ms Richards immediately.
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