A Stalk and a Scream
I remember questioning if maybe I blacked out just for a little bit the first time I saw Scream. I was 13 years old, in 6th grade, and saw it the Friday it came out. Friday, December 20, 1996. I'm pretty sure my mom bought me tickets ahead of time and maybe walked my friend and I into the theater. I had snuck into movies before, but this one was no joke. There was no error to be had here. I was not about to be kicked out of a movie, especially one I had been anticipating this much. Every time the trailer came on TV, I pushed a VHS tape into the VCR and hit record. Any clip with Drew Barrymore was to be rewound. I felt the same way about Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and Casino but that's another essay. This felt exciting; it felt new. I wanted to see the chase, the struggle. I wanted to watch Neve Campbell open her front door and see David Arquette clumsily holding up a Ghostface mask, causing her to yell, to scream. There was something guttural in her shriek, almost pretty and definitely feminine.
When Drew Barrymore peered into her window and the audience saw something black, barely moving, with tiny sparkles of glitter on the other side, when Ghostface whipped his head around, taking up the whole screen, time briefly stopped. The reveal scared me in the best way possible. Did I actually black out? I doubt it, but time ticked again, awakened by an entire theater screaming.
Before long, the slasher craze began. I remember rolling my eyes and refusing to see I Know What You Did Last Summer in the theater because I was already a purist. It borrowed too much from Scream (mostly thanks to Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of both). I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn't hard enough for me. I needed that Wes Craven punch to the gut. I wanted chase scenes that flirted with choreography, only in the way that Wes could do.
My favorite chase scenes always involved Courtney Cox, right up until Scream 6. I'm not sure if they gave her the best chase scenes because her character arc was limited and these seminal horror moments were a thank you to her or for her, I'm not sure. The score by Marco Beltrami, in the Craven originals, coupled with Cox's fluidity, her tiny frame ducking and weaving between accordion-like walls, playing hide and seek with Ghostface, will always feel inspired. It's horror cinema, it's drama, it's being creative, hiding while pursued. It's being wanted, trying to be taken by someone who won't accept no. It's violence, fighting to keep your body intact while another force, perhaps stronger than your own, is attempting to take your autonomy away.
My own body was changing at the time, in ways that were beyond my control. My voice started to deepen, at 13 going on 14, and halfway through, it stopped. It's like my puberty became stuck or stunted and even now, after years of therapy, I'm not sure what happened. When most boys' chests were enlarging, gaining muscle, I started to develop gynecomastia, little lumps forming underneath my nipples. I scoured the internet for answers and all the sites said it was only hormonal, and in time, it would go away. But it didn't.
As my wants and needs and desires to be with another grew stronger, my insecurities solidified to concrete. I would not take my shirt off for anyone. And I started expressing myself less because I hated how my voice sounded. I began a descent, a retreat. I shut myself in my room and wanted to know everything about horror and its expression, renting videos every week from Blockbuster. I knew there was a fight in me, but I wasn't ready to confront it, so I found it in other places, in heroines running for their lives and maybe being okay in the end. I needed to know that it was possible to be okay at the end.
My parents didn't get it. They didn't get much of anything, but I rarely shared with them anyway. One time, I rented Kiss the Girls and I overheard them in the background as they watched.
"What is he into?" they asked.
I felt limp and angry, eavesdropping on their conversation from the kitchen table. I was a young gay boy, unhappy at home, unable to reconcile what was happening within and to my own body, and not able to vocalize it to anyone, even to my best friend, my Scream confidant, who would understand.
A few years later, at 17, fresh from Scream 3 hysteria, I began having dreams that didn't resemble a horror film I'd seen before. I questioned if I was dreaming at all. I'd wake up, inside of the dream, and I saw me, my body, my face. I was 100 percent possessed. In the dream, I would stalk the hallway, walking through the house I shared with my newly divorced Mom, a house much too large for us. She overcompensated after the separation. Neither of us needed a four bedroom home. When I tiptoed through the house, while she was asleep, I wore a giant joker grin on my face. It's as if I was dreaming of my shadow; of all of the things I repressed or was scared of or didn't want to see. This time, I was the villain.
The dreams were so repetitive and almost lucid, and I questioned if they were dreams at all. I thought about setting a camera up in my bedroom to see if I was waking in the night, sneaking around like a smiling demon. I didn't think I was, but it didn't matter. This was an oddity, a self-possession. I think it's why when I saw Robert Blake in all-white makeup, with wide eyes and a wider smile in David Lynch's Lost Highway, I knew that to scare myself was to find a truth. My horror based knowledge was growing even if I felt that I was not, not in the way that I should.
The first time I saw still images of Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, I saw myself and a crazed smile, the same as my dreams, and I thought this imagery of the smiling, possessed man was here before me. Because he exists, because he is me, I can have control. This was not a villain peeking his head around the corner. It was me, ready to meet and greet my own desires, no matter how difficult they were.
I changed my own voice when I was 21. I learned how to speak from my diaphragm. I had phone calls with speech specialists, who didn't tell me much. I thought I'll do it myself. The same year, I had surgery on my chest. It's funny and strange to think of it, but in a way, it was top surgery. I didn't like how I looked or felt and had to say something. My parents paid for the surgery, not covered by insurance. That's when I learned that my family were no strangers to cosmetic surgery and I found out about my dad's liposuction in the 80s. Was it horror that brought me here? I'd like to think so. In each Scream film, three quarters in, Sidney Prescott turns the tables. The killers are no longer hunting. They are fleeing because she takes matters into her own hands.
Since then, I've come out, I've experimented, I got married, and I made a choice to continue exploring who and what I am—yes, a decade of psychotherapy helped. I've not dreamt of that smiling man, of me, of possession, since then. I still seek out horror everywhere, in any way that I can. I think about how the unexpected scares me now; when a villain slowly enters on screen, stepping out from the edge of the frame, the protagonist unaware of what is behind them.
I never found Rosemary's Baby to be particularly scary, except for one part. Towards the end of the film, when Rosemary is in her bedroom calling for help, in the background you see a group of men, coming for her, sneaking into her apartment. What scares me about the scene is not the fact that they are tip-toeing in the background looking like the Pink Panther. It's the fact that they are grinning as they trot because they are having fun being horrific. And isn't that the most satisfying, scariest thing to do—to enjoy your own fear?
