Last week in my Horror Writing course (one of my favorite Topics in Creative Writing classes to teach), we looked at the role of the "scream" in horror. I decided this would be a great way to put the "Friday Shout-Out" exercise -- an idea culled from Coyotebanjo's music teaching weblog and discussed here at Pedablogue in February -- to the test.

Essentially, I began class by calling roll with the requirement that the student had to scream "Here!" to be marked as present. The first few names called were timid in their replies -- they kept looking at the door as if expecting an angry dean or concerned prof to show up at our doorstep. So I shouted at them: "Come on! Belt it out!" showing them that if it was okay for me to cry out, it was okay for them. After a few risky shouts, rewarded by laughter and my own shouts in reply, their cries became louder and louder. "That's more like it! Come on, make my blood-curdle! This is a horror class!" The barks of "Here!" and "Present!" became as thunderous as a Marine's drill team, as shrill and glass-shattering as an audition session for a horror movie 'scream queen.'

It was a lot of fun, and though I did risk annoying some classrooms down the hall (our room is relatively isolated, off in a corner past a stairwell) I could tell it gave the students a sort of purging relief (it had been a deadline day, after all). I dare say that the loudest and best screamer in the class was one of the most quiet students in the class, usually -- she erupted with a cry of the banshee that visibly surprised everyone to great glee.

Mission accomplished.

I feel such expressions can be helpful in teaching "artistic" expression, once the aura of permissibility has been opened up. And because the course was in horror fiction writing, it had relevance. We openly discussed why screams are so prevalent in horror films, and whether or not they generate fear or simply signify it. We discussed how they operate symbolically. We looked into the strategy of representing screams in fiction, noting that people rarely, if ever, actually scream while reading a book. We looked at a story we had read in Stephen King's Night Shift (a text I have taught before to great success) called "The Man Who Loved Flowers," which features a passage regarding the screams that the titular lover tries to quell with his hammer. And near the end of the hour, I read an entire article aloud to the class called "Screams from Somewhere Else" by Roger Rosenblatt -- an eloquent short essay that addresses the primal relevance of the scream in today's modern world:

Civilization is tested by its screams. One has the choice to hear or not to hear; to detect location or not to detect location; to discover cause; to help or not to help. Along the many lines of choice, excuses and mistakes are possible, even reasonable. One is left with oneself and the screams, like two opponents.

I could tell just from their rapt attention that the students were fascinated by the ideas this was raising. I let them absorb the ideas in silence for a moment. Then I asked them to write a fictional scene in which a character is walking at night, and overhears a scream from a dark alleyway nearby. ("What happens next? Go.") It was very productive.

This is but one example, I think, of how it can be beneficial to introduce a little Dionysian fun into the otherwise Appolonian hallways of academe. I'll continue to discuss activities in my horror writing class in the future.

Related reading...

• Teacher's Guide to Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT


• "Scream Musings": a series of aphorisms I wrote in the premiere issue of my newsletter, The Goreletter.


• Things that Make Us Want to Scream: a kindergarten art project using Edward Munch's famous painting (not just for kids!)


• Flash forward to: The Munch Pinata!

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