are you a screamer? (and, no, i don't mean as in sex)

[butters]

now there's nothing much i enjoy more than a great horror movie that can make me jump and squeeze out a singular shriek of delighted reaction, but if i see something dead and messy, or a mouse running, a spider or a car crash happening, a "UFO", a threat coming at me and so on, i'm just not a screamer. Perhaps i should be... perhaps it would have prevented some events in my life, but even now i can't help but feel a bit 'realllllly???' when they show (mainly women) shrieking their heads off and often over something i think is actually interesting or pointless to be screaming about. This isn't about gender, since screamers can be anyone I want to hear from everyone who has something to add.

A whole lot of that is a promotion by older media, where it seems women were only good at being secretaries, femme-fatales, dowdy mums or nubile screamers having discovered a crime scene. Have we, as a society, largely outgrown this cliche or is it still very much alive? I'm happy to say i think we HAVE outgrown the whole women fainting all over the place thing, a product of corsets and diets....

take a dead body: it can be heartbreaking, sad, a surprise, a shock... but also very interesting from a removed point of view. What good does screaming do should i find a deceased person? Call for police or an ambulance, feel sorry for those close to the person and even for the deceased person but there's nothing to be afraid of from a body (if you're not into eating corpses).

so i have nothing against screamers, i just want to understand what it is that makes you scream and why, and for other non-screamers is there anything that DOES prompt a squeal? And is it a thing that non-screamers enjoy juicy horror movies waaaaaaaaay more than screamers? Is there a link between religious observation and being prone to screaming, or is screaming really a thing of the past now?

spill it

 

[TallMan69]

Interesting post. I think it does play with traditional male/female roles and appropriateness of females expressing emotion/fear/surprise/shock etc and men having to be stoic/brave/calm under pressure/above it all. So I think of the classic Scream Queen being Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

The androgynous character played by Chris Tucker (Ruby Rhod) in 5th Element might have allowed for him to be a screamer to Bruce Willis’ macho brave quiet character.

But I can’t think of another male screamer. There probably are but it’s not typically played like that.