Scream Film Quotes

I would like to be able to say that she broke my heart but I know better. I broke my own heart. I can't say that she did it and get behind that statement in any real way. I know too much. The only one I can blame for my loneliness is myself. Even if I did think that she did it to me I wouldn't feel any better. Tonight I was watching a movie and this actor in the film looked like her when she had a profile shot. She did not break my heart I did. I don't know why I would do something this painful to myself. I wish I would stop it's been months now and I'm still hurting myself nightly. I can avoid it for awhile and then it comes back.

Films might get to you and your subconscious and make a little difference, but when the vigilante drum beats, the mob screams and the conformists go along with it. There have to be people who are non-conformists.

I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low-budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy.

He looks away from me, covering his mouth. “What are you laughing at.” He looks down, but waves his hand at me. “You—your—” I refuse to look down at myself. “My what, Snow?” “Your hair.” I refuse to touch my hair. “You look like that guy, with the wig—” He mimes playing the piano. “Duh, duh, duh, duhhh.” “Beethoven?” “I don’t know his name. With the big wig. There was a film about him.” “Mozart. You’re saying I look like Mozart.” “You’ve got to look, Baz, it’s a scream.

Then again, maybe you couldn't have killed me," he said, crawling out of the stairway. He moved very slowly, like a lizard who had gotten too cold. I heard a whimper from behind one of the closed doors next to the bathroom, and sympathized. I wanted to whimper, too. "I'm not hunting you," I told him firmly, though I stepped backward until I stood in a circle of light at the end of the hallway. He stopped halfway out of the stairway, his eyes were filmed over like a dead man's. "Good," he said. "If you kill Andre, I won't tell-and no one will ask." And he was gone, withdrawing from the hallway and down the stairs so fast that I barely caught the motion, though I was staring right at him. I walked out of his home because if I'd moved any faster, I'd have run screaming.

GONE TO STATIC it sounds better than it is, this business of surviving, making it through the wrong place at the wrong time and living to tell. when the talk shows and movie credits wear off, it's just me and my dumb luck. this morning I had that dream again: the one where I'm dead. I wake up and nothing's much different. everything's gone sepia, a dirty bourbon glass by the bed, you're still dead. I could stumble to the shower, scrub the luck of breath off my skin but it's futile. the killer always wins. it's just a matter of time. and I have time. I have grief and liquor to fill it. tonight, the liquor and I are talking to you. the liquor says, 'remember' and I fill in the rest, your hands, your smile. all those times. remember. tonight the liquor and I are telling you about our day. we made it out of bed. we miss you. we were surprised by the blood between our legs. we miss you. we made it to the video store, missing you. we stopped at the liquor store hoping the bourbon would stop the missing. there's always more bourbon, more missing tonight, when we got home, there was a stray cat at the door. she came in. she screams to be touched. she screams when I touch her. she's right at home. not me. the whisky is open the vcr is on. I'm running the film backwards and one by one you come back to me, all of you. your pulses stutter to a begin your eyes go from fixed to blink the knives come out of your chests, the chainsaws roar out from your legs your wounds seal over your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink the maniac killer disappears it's just you and me and the bourbon and the movie flickering together and the air breathes us and I am home, I am lucky I am right before everything goes black

If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, "Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!

Let go of me,” I choke out, clawing blindly at Teren. The sharp tang of blood suddenly fills my nostrils, and I realize that it is from his wrists, spreading a film of scarlet around us. Somewhere ahead, the silhouette of our ship looms. We are getting closer. “I wish I could,” Teren spits, dripping venom. “There’s nothing I’d like to see more than you in the Underworld, Adelina.” His words spark my fury. He never intended to finish this journey with you. Teren grips my arm again so hard that I scream in pain. He is pulling us both toward the ship, his face set in grim determination. Then I hear him shout, “But I won’t.” But I won’t. My fury wavers, turning into bewilderment.

Screaming. Did I mention the screaming? Screaming is usually associated with horror films and roller coasters. This is why I usually look like I’ve just watched a horror film on a rollercoaster. Kids love to scream. Frightened, happy, bored. They scream. I’ve actually learned to love the sound of a vacuum cleaner. It’s just so peaceful.

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.

Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.

I make my films, Charlie. I do my lighting, place my camera angles and I tell the actors to walk this way and do this, and there you're supposed to cry and there you're in a rage, and we keep on doing it and keep it up like the very devil and we never give up. And then the audience sits there one evening, and if we're lucky they'll cry where we decided they would cry and laugh when we want them to - right. You know all that. That is the whole mystery, Charlie" - Georg Af Klercker in Ingmar Bergman's play "The Last Scream

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.

Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the factory gates in a Mélies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.

I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.

the end, set the cameras to film their own deaths – the screams, the dissolving skins, the ruptured eyeballs and all. How

Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. They did it four times. 'Faster,' said Ang [Lee]. They do it twice more. 'Don't pant so much,' said Ang. Greg [Wise (playing Willoughby)], to his great credit, didn't scream.

I was flabbergasted as it was a distant scream from any catering I had experienced on any film set. I couldn’t help but stare in disbelief at the cast and crew eating together inside a truck so elegantly appointed, while gay Paree buzzed away around us. The whole thing was so wonderful, civilized, and strange that there is a part of me that thinks perhaps I may have just dreamed it all. If so, I’d like to dream it again on every film I make from now on.

In a pie chart of Nick’s personality, Dad Jokes would be, like, seven of the eight slices. He responds to every text in our family group chat with a GIF from a comedic film that is usually Elf: Buddy the Elf jumping up and down, yelling, “Santa’s coming!” if you’re excited; Buddy the Elf bent over a rabid raccoon—“Does somebody need a hug?”—if you’re sad about something. He’ll make the occasional exception, though. Like, if you texted him that your plane had been hijacked, he’d probably send you the scream face from Home Alone.

In movies, war only looks romantic. “Tell my gal I love her…” close-up shot, and fade out. It doesn’t work as beautifully and neat in real life. Flying chunks of human flesh and screaming orphans really put that Hollywood take into perspective and there is nothing clean or sterile about any of it. When people die, it’s fucking horrible.

Dario, I ain’t gonna say how he treats you is right, and I ain’t gonna lie to you and tell you he loves you more than his schlocky films, ’cause we both know that’s bullshit, but one day you’ll realize you can either be defined by him or defined by everything you are that he could never be. So that’s what I gotta say on that. Wanna eat?

When I’m given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person. When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones. I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that’s how I played the part. For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn’t but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious. By comparison, in Chekhov’s Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as “a prig and a bigot … uprightness in boots … tiresome … completely sincere”. His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: “Forgive me, I’m going to tell you plainly.” I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character. It’s exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it’s a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You’re responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I’m in a production I never have a day when I haven’t laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion. Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you’re pretending to feel something that isn’t there, it won’t be believable.

I distinctly heard the blackbird from the top of a spruce tree, and clear as glass I heard the lark high up and several other birds whose song I did not know, and it was so weird, it was like a film without sound with another sound added, I was in two places at once, and nothing hurt. 'Yahoo!' I screamed, and could hear my own voice, but it seemed to be coming from a different place, from the great space where the birds sang, a bird's cry from inside that silence, and for a moment I was completely happy.

The film libraries on some of these channels." Elmina said. "I swear. There was one on last night. I couldn't sleep. After I saw, it, I was afraid ro sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus, 1947?" Eddie, who was enrolled in the graduate film program at SC, let out a scream of recognition. He's been working on his doctoral dissertation, "Deadpasn to Demoniac - Subtextual Uses of Eyeliner in the Cinema," and had just in fact arrived at moment in Black Narcissus where Kathleen Byron, as a demented nun, shows up in civilian gear, including eye makeup good for a year's worth of nighmares.

That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.

Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration.' 'Comprehensive upgrade.' Of what? I want to scream. 'Solutions provider.' Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked. A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: 'You're always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.' Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not.

My favorite scene was my dying scene, when I had to stand up and suddenly in that moment recall my wife and everything I stood for, and I say "My queen, my wife, my love" and I think of all my movies, that is the most powerful moment I ever had. In preparation for each take, I would scream at the ground, clench my fists, and scrape the ground, and cut all my knuckles and rip my nails... I would scream, and scrape, and scratch, and then I would stand and go "GO." And they would film. And it felt so visceral, and so powerful, and the next day, that was my last day of filming, the next day I was leaving Montreal and I went through US IMMIGRATION and the officer asked "what happened to your hands" and I said "I was just scratching the ground" and she took me for secondary questioning, and I missed my flight, and had to stay another day. So the next day I wore gloves.

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it, there was a middleaged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms, little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him, then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood, then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—   Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He

When you’re on the dance floor screaming louder than the amps and dancing to the pulse of the lights, you’re in the bubble. As soon as the bubble bursts, that it, you’re now outside it all. The swinging arms of the crowd become shutting barriers; the lights blind you and force you back; the deafening music becomes a solid wall of impenetrable sound. It’s like you stop being one of the actors and turn into one of the film crew behind the scenes. You just have to stand back and watch in silence; the fake set slides away from you on wheels and you’re left in the dark shadows, waiting for the director to shout, ‘Cut!’ just so you can move again. As soon as you step foot inside a club, you know that you have to keep in that bubble moment; keep drinking; keep dancing; keep mingling. Until one drink too many, exhausted from the dancing, you mingle beyond the last person in the club and fall outside the moment. Then it’s lost forever and you end up sitting next to a sleeping drunk or leaning against a pile of discarded coats.

He knew, without knowing how it had happened, that he lay on the floor, in the dusty space before the altar which he and Elisha had cleaned; and knew that above him burned the yellow light which he had himself perched on. Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of the saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him - he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn. And something moved in John's body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed. This power had stuck John, in the head or in the heart, and, in a moment, wholly, filling him with an anguish that he could not endure, that even now he could not believe, had opened him up; had cracked him open, as wood beneath the axe cracks down the middle, as rocks break up; had ripped him and felled him in a moment, so that John had not felt the wound, but only the agony; had not felt the fall, but only the fear; and lay here, now, helpless, screaming, at the very bottom of darkness.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

One day, on the verge of dying of boredom, Uncle Johnny had had enough. He turned to me and said sternly, “Noah, I’m not gonna sit in here like we’re in an oversized coffin. We’re either opening the door or we’re turning the TV on. Which one do you want?” I rolled my eyes and grumbled for a few minutes before answering, “All right. Turn on the TV.” Without hesitation Uncle Johnny shot up out of that chair and reached up to hit the power button on the TV mounted from the ceiling. No sooner had his butt hit the chair seat than he was right back up again. “Fuck that. I am opening the door, too, because I want it open.” He vigorously emphasized his intention so I didn’t protest. He marched over and swung that door open. I swear he might have even taken a deep breath as if it were fresh mountain air. Then he came back to his chair and sat down. There was a movie on starring Matthew Broderick. I’d never heard of it before but Uncle Johnny was explaining to me that this was a remake and Gene Wilder had played Broderick’s character in the original film. In spite of myself, and my stubborn wish to sit and suffer in silence, I really liked the movie. And I remember thinking, I am really enjoying myself. I even turned to Uncle Johnny and said, “I’m glad we turned the TV on. This is great!” Uncle Johnny just smiled as if to say, “Of course! Finally!” We were right in the middle of the movie when one of my machines started to malfunction. The machine’s beeps drowned out the movie. A nurse came in to fix the problem and it just happened to be the hot nurse I had a crush on. She had short hair, a few tattoos on her arm, and she always wore a bandana over her head. The machine she was trying to fix was plugged in on the other side of the bed, up against the wall. “Oh, I see. Hold on. I have to move the bed out from the wall to fix this,” she said. At this point I was just watching her. She fixed the machine and pushed the bed back up against the wall. She actually hit the wall with the bed and zap! The TV went out! “WHAT?! NO!” I screamed. She couldn’t get it to turn back on. She tried but nothing worked. “Oh no, I’m sorry. We’ll have to get maintenance down here to fix it,” she said with an apologetic look that I met with a glare of disdain. She was no longer hot to me. She was just the nurse who broke the TV. Maintenance didn’t come to repair the TV until the next day. I didn’t get to watch the rest of the movie. In fact, I never saw the end of the movie and I didn’t even know the name of it until years later. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to see The Producers from start to finish.

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

As he sat up, he heard soft dripping sounds from the bathroom, little plips like water slipping over the edges of the tub and into the floor. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he realized where he‟d last heard that sound. His muscles tight with strain from his earlier exertions, he stood and walked warily toward the half open bathroom door and the tub beyond it. Slipping quietly past the door, he saw that the curtain was drawn, and again the shadowed figure lay behind it. One long, slim, leg dangled from the end of the tub, beads of water gliding down its length and off the polished toes. At the other end he saw a mass of auburn curls, matted deep red near the porcelain of the tub. It was the dream and the vision again, more real now, too strong to deny. Shaking, he moved toward the curtain, gagging on the sickly smell of rust and roses, feeling the thin nylon glide between thumb and palm as he pulled it back to reveal his darkest nightmare and deepest regret. He could see the crimson water now, blood bubbles gliding over its surface and clinging to the legs dangling over the tub‟s edge. When he‟d pulled the curtain completely away from the tub and around to its opposite side, he saw her face. Her eyes were closed and he saw that her lids were bruised and purple against the translucent paleness of her face, drained completely dead white under the makeup she‟d brushed on before she‟d died. Staggering by the sight of her, he knelt by the tub and extended one shaking hand to touch her cheek. It all seemed as if he‟d walked into a horror film and once again he needed to prove to his mind that this wasn‟t real. His hand shook as he lifted it nearer to her flesh, waiting for the corpse, the supposedly dead and buried to move. He touched his quivering fingers to her face, feeling its claylike reality. The sensation caused an immediate shudder of revulsion and he fought not to vomit. Even as the moment came, the sight of her moving in the water startled him and he jumped away from the tub. It wasn‟t an obvious movement at first, only soft breaths moving in and out of her nostrils, but then her chest rose and fell with it and he quaked, feeling unstable where he knelt on the floor. Her eyes opened next and he felt the blood fall out of his face, wanting to scream but too afraid he would cause her to take some action, to reach out and touch him, proving well and forever that he was indeed insane. Scream and you might as well slit your own throat. He swallowed the scream like a rock and stared as her eyes moved slowly in their sockets, locking on him. Slowly, as if she‟d lost control of her muscles, she rose from the tub and looked down at him, smiling. Blood water slid down her bare body, over her neck, down her back and the smooth ridges of her breasts, to slip slowly down her thighs and down over her calves. A puddle spread on the floor, and as it extended toward him he struggled to his feet, skittering away from it. As he watched it spread, he shivered, weak as he started to cry frantic, horrified tears. Breaking down, he looked back up at her face and slipped to the floor once more, his knees incapable of sustaining his own weight. The smile grew wider as she strode to his shivering form, thrown on his side and struggling to rise. The blood water seeped into his clothes, making him sick, a drop of it trickling along the lobe of his ear and into it. And then she leaned down, holding those dim, stained curls of auburn out of her face and tucking them behind her ear. Her lips parted, blue beneath the strong crimson red of her lipstick, and she spoke into his ear with the chill breath of the dead. His eyes grew wide and horrified as she spoke, the hair on his neck rising, sending a maddening shiver of fear through him. “I‟ve returned, Raven.” She whispered “And I want what is mine.” The last thing he saw before his mind, finally, thankfully, shut down was her face in front of his. They were pursed for a kiss.

Michael expected us to work like adults, but he also engineered horseplay in between shots. On rare occasion, he even wasted film. One blazing hot day in the Valley, I said my line, and when he turned to answer, he opened his mouth and a live bullfrog jumped out. This was no prop or product of Hollywood special effects. It was a filthy toad he’d found on the ground in between takes. I screamed in terror, no doubt only slightly less afraid than the poor frog who thought he’d turned into Michael’s lunch.

The place was a wreck, and Nancy insisted that the first thing we had to do was tear up the rotting linoleum in the kitchen. One layer yielded to another, until finally I came to a bunch of newspapers that had been laid over the warped wooden floor to make it level. They were issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936. The papers, nearly thirty years old, were smelly and yellow with age, but otherwise readable. The giant black headlines concerned a child custody trial in Los Angeles. The News banner for August 1 screamed ASTOR’S BABY TO BE JUDGE. Next came ASTOR’S SENSATIONS SCARE FILM MOGULS. And by August 8 it was ASTOR DIARY “ECSTACY” (sic), with the subhead G. S. KAUFMAN TRYST BARED. I began piecing the pages together chronologically.

And just as you are exiting the party with your tearful, screaming, prediabetic child over your shoulder, you are handed exactly what you need for the way home. The treat bag filled with candy. I am pretty sure this is the formula that was used to prepare the young Linda Blair for filming the bed scene in The Exorcist.

Alec deadpanned, “You didn't just 'Call my name', you shouted it like you were being murdered.” An image of the gun going off in my nightmare struck me, but I shook it off. “I would have screeched or at the very least given a high-pitched white-woman scream if I was being murdered. I wouldn't have shouted at all if I knew it would have upset you this much.” Alec looked exhausted as he rubbed his hand over his gorgeous face. “Why a white-woman?” I shrugged, again. “It's usually the white ones who scream the loudest that get killed in the slasher films.

During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite

Why Superbad Worked Superbad worked because Seth and Evan wrote about exactly what they were experiencing at the time. Evan explains, “At the time, all we knew was that we really wanted to get laid, we weren’t getting laid, and we weren’t supercool.” It pays to write what you know. Seth started doing standup when he was 13 years old. He adds: “That’s something that came from standup comedy. There’s a comic named Darryl Lenox who still performs, who is great. I remember he saw me perform. . . . I would try to mimic other comedians like Steven Wright or Seinfeld, like, ‘What’s the deal with Krazy Glue?’ and he said: ‘Dude, you’re the only person here who could talk about trying to get a hand job for the first time. . . . Talk about that!’” Lessons from Judd Apatow EVAN: “I would say the biggest thing we learned from [Judd] is ‘Don’t keep stuff to yourself.’ You’re surrounded by smart people. Bring them in. Get other people’s opinions. Share it with them. And most importantly, emotion is what matters. It’s an emotional journey. . . .” SETH: “. . . I remember one time we were filming a scene in Knocked Up and improvising, or maybe it was even 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the direction he screamed at us—because he screams direction from another room a lot, which is hilarious—was, ‘Less semen, more emotion!’ I think that is actually a good note to apply across the board.” TIM: “You also mentioned that every character has to have a wound of some kind.” EVAN: “That’s a big Judd-ism.” TF: Judd recommended they read The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri (Evan: “If you’re a writer, 60% of it is useless and 40% of it is gold.”), which Judd said was Woody Allen’s favorite writing book.

The film we were watching is filled with explosions, screams, buildings crumbling onscreen like a shatter of dust on a dirt road. There is a scene in the last third of the film where a vessel of limited capacity is suddenly available. Getting on it ensures your ticket to survival, or freedom — whatever the end game is. “Women and children first, women and children,” the men call out. There are several things happening here. First, male expendability in terms of sacrifice; violent heroism, Secondly, female expendability, but on a more sinister level: an ambiguous group of fertile women is called freedom and then never permitted any other name or purpose. Although they will have escaped, in this new other life they are expected to reproduce nations and values, culturally, symbolically, literally. This, I think, is why they have been allowed to survive.

It’s Fae on Fae, man, what are you thinking?” he asked with a frown and I could only glower as I looked back to the fight, forcing myself to remain still. It might have made me ache to hold back but he was right, I couldn’t get involved in a fight between two Fae. And if it had been anyone else, I never would have considered it. But Roxy always made me want to break the rules. “You jumped up, crown touting, cock sucking, whore!” Mildred slammed her fist into Roxy’s face again, not even bothering to use magic as she screamed insults in her face which included way too many references to me being her beloved. “What’s the matter, Mildred?” Roxy snarled. “Is it just that you can’t suck cock properly with that mis-matched jaw of yours or is it that you know Darius is only marrying you because his father is forcing him to?” “When I take my beloved to the bedroom he will be screaming so loudly that he won’t even remember the name Vega!” Mildred howled as she punched Roxy again. “Yeah, screaming in horror,” Roxy spat and I almost fucking laughed aside from the fact that she was about to get her face smashed in by that beast of a girl. “We’ll see if he’s so tempted by you when I’m done pulverising that pretty face of yours and I cut your perky tits off for good measure!” Mildred howled. “Not the tits!” Tyler Corbin gasped from the other side of the crowd as he filmed the whole thing. My heart pounded. Roxy might have been tough, but Mildred was four times the size of her. She needed to fight back with magic if she was going to stand a chance, but as she swung her head forward and cracked the bridge of Mildred’s nose with a savage headbutt, I got the feeling she wasn’t going to use it. Roxy swung a fist into Mildred’s throat to follow it before driving her knee up between her legs as hard as she could. “Ooo right in the vag!” Tyler called and a laugh caught in my throat. “Yes, Tor!” Darcy screamed as she pushed her way to the front of the crowd. “Show her how we fight where we come from!” As Mildred reared back, Roxy lunged forward, rolling them over so that she was on top before swinging her fists down into Mildred’s ugly face with a brutality that made my heart race. She was wild and vicious, blood pissing down her face from her own injuries as she used my stolen rings to batter Mildred again and again. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t end up with Dragons imprinted all over her face from her own injuries as she used my stolen rings to batter Mildred again and again. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t end up with Dragons imprinted all over her face from the shape of the jewellery. Mildred gave as good as she got, punching Roxy in the sides, the chest, even trying to bite her fist as she punched her. “Holy shit,” Seth breathed as he nuzzled against my arm. “This would be so hot if it wasn’t, you know, Mildred. But if I imagine her being literally any other girl then I’d be so turned on right now.” I swallowed a lump in my throat as I refused to agree out loud, but he was right. There was something about Roxy as she fought like that, her lip curled back with determination and absolutely no mercy in her. They might have been fighting like mortals having a bar brawl, but with a crown on her head and blood painting her flesh, I didn’t think she’d ever looked more like the Savage King’s daughter before. She really was a Fae Princess. And I liked it. Mildred cursed and screamed, throwing fists like sledgehammers so hard that I was pretty sure I heard ribs cracking, but Roxy wasn’t going to give in. She swung her arm back one final time and with a scream of rage, she hit Mildred so hard in her pug face that she blacked out. A laugh tumbled from my lips before I could stop it and Roxy looked up at me with a wild determination in her eyes as she grinned like a damn warrior. (Darius POV)

The story was okay, but the acting bothered Andrei. Sometimes he would watch a scene and then it would go to the next; Andrei would blink, bewildered at the time that had passed. The film just went by. Scenes would jump to the next but his mind was the same. Why? He noticed that the lead actress in her later years was extremely gorgeous, except some sharp concentration in him blocked out her beauty. This seated heart screamed for the movie to shatter him. And it drew upon him that this was another film that the world was not bothered by of its acting. In fact, they did not even see it. In its short scenes, audiences were hypnotized for an average of five to eight seconds by an actor’s beauty and if the editor timed it right, and with enough spectacle, movies could get away with doing nothing. Gorgeousness stimulated the mind. “Wow, they are so beautiful,” the audience was forced to think—and then by jumping to the next beautiful part fast enough there was something called a movie. And the movie seemed to use the actors’ appearances to drive most of the scenes. And many actors in different scenes sort of just stood there, handsome, and whispering. That was their strategy—mumbling murmurs of breath and rasp. Their indecisive bodies were unnaturally still, as though they had close-ups when the shot was wide. All of the actors’ voices were dumbly lowered to a safe natural cadence while in an unnatural situation and yet seeming real, no actual thought needed to be shown. 'Beauty is good,' says the industry. 'Sell that. Sell beauty! Make it beautiful. Ugly stories about beautiful people. It naturally turns a crap film into a decent one. The people are left with a good impression, as though having watched something fascinating. Make sure to let the camera sit on those beautiful people and their faces will give the audience something impossible to understand and give us runtime while they gaze. But having ugly people in it, people that look like people, actors that look like their audience—er, that’s not so profound,' says the industry. It was why the scenes moved without Andrei knowing: nothing was done by its actors.

A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.

Excerpted From Chapter One “Rock of Ages” floated lightly down the first floor corridor of the Hollywood Hotel’s west wing. It was Sunday morning, and Hattie Mae couldn’t go to church because she had to work, so she praised the Lord in her own way, but she praised Him softly out of consideration for the “Do Not Disturb” placards hanging from the doors she passed with her wooden cart full of fresh linens and towels. Actually Sundays were Hattie Mae’s favorite of the six days she worked each week. For one thing, her shift ended at noon on Sundays. For another, this was the day Miss Lillian always left a “little something” in her room to thank Hattie Mae for such good maid service. Most of the hotel’s long-term guests left a little change for their room maids, but in Miss Lillian’s case, the tip was usually three crinkly new one dollar bills. It seemed like an awful lot of money to Hattie Mae, whose weekly pay was only nineteen dollars. Still, Miss Lillian Lawrence could afford to be generous because she was a famous actress in the movies. She was also, Hattie Mae thought, a very fine lady. When Hattie Mae reached the end of the corridor, she knocked quietly on Miss Lillian’s door. It was still too early for most guests to be out of their rooms, but Miss Lillian was always up with the sun, not like some lazy folks who laid around in their beds ‘til noon, often making Hattie Mae late for Sunday dinner because she couldn’t leave until all the rooms along her corridor were made up. After knocking twice, Hattie Mae tried Miss Lillian’s door. It opened, so after selecting the softest towels from the stacks on her cart, she walked in. With the curtains drawn the room was dark, but Hattie Mae didn’t stop to switch on the overheard light because her arms were full of towels. The maid’s eyes were on the chest of drawers to her right where Miss Lillian always left her tip, so she didn’t see the handbag on the floor just inside the door. Hattie Mae tripped over the bag and fell headlong to the floor, landing inches from the dead body of Lillian Lawrence. In the dim light Hattie Mae stared into a pale face with a gaping mouth and a trickle of blood from a small red dot above one vacant green eye. Hattie Mae screamed at the top of her lungs and kept on screaming.

Congress should make it so that all sex scenes in all films should be provided with a screaming baby sound track. That should help take away all the fun and may show a major decrease in unwanted pregnancies without having to provide birth control to anyone.

The tagline for Alien said: In space no one can hear you scream. But the film had audiences screaming for decades after.

Lucas lifted his head to look around and saw that dozens of people were dead or wounded; and that cops were flowing in from everywhere, that fifteen civilians were filming the chaos with their iPhones, that two TV crews were already working it, and that people everywhere were screaming in pain . . . He and Bowden knelt next to Jubek and Jubek’s eyes were open and he said, “Hurt,” and Lucas could hear more clearly now and said, “Hang on,” and Jubek almost laughed and said, “I’m trying, dumbshit. Get me something . . .

as alexander hamilton who shared my name with one phillp skylar my mother, and my father eliza who i told to steal my identy in the war, iam nothign more then proud of the work on my deathbed writing again. i always surive true imoratlity and amenia disorder wtih life like reborn disorders cant be cured. but as alexian smith the former princess diana and smauel sabery you just seem unread. unscripted. and missed the point of the burnings of heart and bon fires in reetribution to racism in state and notion. You miss the point of what occured or whatever relaxed to it. I dont hate having multiple personaltiis. or living forever in stupid wayward ideas. that donald bloke has a diosrder called idiocy where hes accidently racist and you liked him for that. no i still dont hate you as avery pines. and no matter what occured when i was tortured in stupid situations, worst then a single one and counting somehow creepily for all of them, because my dad was and i was not. you must understand the history of why it was a town you now never knew of the name of. and why it was occurance and why it was the stories of it. And why nobody knew the musical hamilton was about my father alexander of americas presdient and me the secretary of state. my real name is adam snowflake. and if you loved a dam thing i ever wrteo from death note to creepy stalkings or the kingdom diaries or lspds, and what i built at disney naimating snow white and aruara and filming hawkuseris abotu my lack of faith as scince lik ebuilding jeeus you would know i never often resented it after highschool. and its better to remember a dead name as dead. i am not the evil events that defined me. but i am all the pain of them. and that is my wolrd. And you are ar acit for demanding i be things liek civil war or holocuast. and you are a racist slutty loser like i and bad king actors were steryped to be. and no matter what ever occured or how casuality is evil when in office. i want you to know no matter what i study or why i dress. its th history of me being an emo teenage fagot, and my mother was abusive as reya. and just interputed me to scream her ass off as reya fine an adbucter when orphaned. its easy to blame a color when the person is faceless. did you know im half that story. and did you know in the way i looked like the one you liked? When you have a boogie man, its so easy to hate the things you try to stop. Fuck you ukraine im jewish. and i know what you took. and while i didnt go. Oh god can i never go by frank again as someone in a clsoet room who surived that. and i want you to know as adam i will never be what you did to me. but oh god did you amke it look liket he people from russia fuck you royal.

After too many direct hits, all broadcast on live TV, the camera men and show producers, unable to tell the difference between this fight and the staged, blood-splattered events of previous programs, continued filming as Lawler, Jackie Fargo, and Tojo pulled Jerry off of the now totally beaten and bloodied Galento. Once Jerry had been adequately subdued and restrained, Fargo looked to the corner of the studio and saw Roy coldly watching the proceedings. “You son of bitch, you’re behind this!” Fargo screamed at Roy. Jerry saw Fargo screaming at Roy and immediately judged Roy guilty as well. He managed to free himself from Tojo and Lawler, ran across the studio, and grabbed Roy by the collar. “I’m going to kill you, you old man!” Jerry screamed. Fargo, Tojo, and Lawler all restrained Jerry once again, but he kept screaming. “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you Roy Welch. I’ll kill you for this!

I couldn’t skip what happened next or fast-forward through it. I knew what was coming and wanted to rewrite it and film a new scene, but I wasn’t the director of my memories. There was nothing I could do but scream.

Video stores invented a new kind of independent director that became so pervasive it instantly became a caricature: the fiscally insolvent, vociferously unglamorous dude (and it was always a dude) who used his video store experience to build an encyclopedic, unorthodox, pretentious cinematic worldview. The 1995 coming-of-age comedy Kicking and Screaming includes a minor character who manages a video store while preparing to direct his own feature film, yet plans to continue working in the video store after his movie is released so that he can properly stock it on the shelves.

By bringing Nikkie to power, Yeroen had carved out an influential role for himself. With Luit’s death, however, his leverage evaporated. All of a sudden, Nikkie didn’t need the old male anymore. Finally he could be boss on his own, or so he must have thought. Soon after I had left for America, however, Yeroen began to cultivate a tie with Dandy, a younger male. This took several years, but eventually led to Dandy challenging Nikkie as leader. The ensuing tensions drove Nikkie to a desperate escape attempt. He actually drowned trying to make it across the moat around the island. The local newspaper dubbed it a suicide, but to me it seemed more likely a panic attack with a fatal outcome. Since this was the second death on Yeroen’s hands, I must admit that I’ve always had trouble looking at this scheming male without seeing a murderer. A year after this tragic incident, my successor decided to show the chimps a movie. The Family of Chimps was a documentary filmed at the zoo when Nikkie was still alive. With the apes ensconced in their winter hall, the movie was projected onto a white wall. Would they recognize their deceased leader? As soon as a life-sized Nikkie appeared on the wall, Dandy ran screaming to Yeroen, literally jumping into the old male’s lap! Yeroen had a nervous grin on his face. Nikkie’s miraculous “resurrection” had temporarily restored their old pact.

Most screams heard on television and in the movies are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well used it has a name, the Wilhelm. Originally created for the 1951 film Distant Drums, the scream was used in 1977 by Star Wars film sound designer Ben Burtt, who named it after character Private Wilhelm from the 1953 movie The Charge at Feather River. To date, the Wilhelm has been heard in more than four hundred films and shows, including the book-related movies The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Planet of the Apes (2001), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019).

But Britain, where I've lived for seventeen years, feels unreal too. I can't quite trust in the clean water that flows from the tap; the full supermarket shelves, the orderly parks and gardens. I feel as though it's built on a lie, on hidden or delegated suffering. As though I'm in a luxurious cinema watching a film, in a city where war is raging, and over the music of the opening credits I can hear, faintly, the screams and explosions filtering through, into the cosy velvet auditorium. And there's enough truth in this, historically, to prevent me from dismissing it as mere trauma response on my part. Britain's comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can't admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn't think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.

Some imaginative Rebels play with their idea of their identity. One Rebel reported: “When I need to do repetitive chores, everything in me screams ‘Noooo.’ So I play a game I call ‘As If.’ I enact being somebody else or doing stuff while being filmed: e.g., I enact being a perfect butler, cook, interior designer, famous poet, cool scientist…sounds cheesy, but it works.” One Rebel combined the strategy of identity with the Rebel love of challenge: “To get things done, I trick my mind with a dare. I tell myself, ‘I’m a Rebel who can stick to a routine and follow through.’ This challenge excites me. It’s rebellious to be a Rebel who can do disciplined things that you don’t expect.

Get the work rolling, involve actors contractually, build sets, collect props and costumes, expose negative, and so get the studio in deep. Once money in some significant amount had been spent, it would be difficult for Harry [Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures] to do anything except scream and holler. If he suspended a film that had been shooting for weeks, he’d be in for an irretrievable loss, not only of money but of ‘face.’ The thing to do was to get the film going.

i started to feel less embarrassed about all the weird things i did, like suddenly singing songs with absolutely no context, and my bottomless database of random encyclopaedic facts and that one time i started a four-hour-long text conversation about why cheese was a food. i kept teasing him for having such long hair until he said one day, quite decisively, that he actually wanted it to be long, so i stopped teasing him after that. we played video games or board games or watched youtube videos or films or tv shows, we baked cakes and biscuits and ordered takeaway. we could only do stuff at his house when his mum wasn’t in, so we were at my house most of the time. he’d sit through me screaming along to moulin rouge and i'd sit through him reciting every line from back to the future. i tried to learn the guitar using his guitar, but gave up because i was shit. he helped me paint a night-time cityscape mural on my bedroom wall. we watched four seasons of the office. we sat in each other’s rooms with our laptops on our legs; he kept falling asleep at random times of the day; i kept persuading him that just dance sessions were a good idea; we discovered that we were both very passionate about monopoly. i didn’t do any homework when i was with him. he didn’t do any uni reading when he was with me. but at the heart of it was universe city. 

i started to feel less embarrassed about all the weird things i did, like suddenly singing songs with absolutely no context, and my bottomless database of random encyclopaedic facts and that one time i started a four-hour-long text conversation about why cheese was a food. i kept teasing him for having such long hair until he said one day, quite decisively, that he actually wanted it to be long, so i stopped teasing him after that. we played video games or board games or watched youtube videos or films or tv shows, we baked cakes and biscuits and ordered takeaway. we could only do stuff at his house when his mum wasn’t in, so we were at my house most of the time. he’d sit through me screaming along to moulin rouge and i'd sit through him reciting every line from back to the future. i tried to learn the guitar using his guitar, but gave up because i was shit. he helped me paint a night-time cityscape mural on my bedroom wall. we watched four seasons of the office. we sat in each other’s rooms with our laptops on our legs; he kept falling asleep at random times of the day; i kept persuading him that just dance sessions were a good idea; we discovered that we were both very passionate about monopoly. i didn’t do any homework when i was with him. he didn’t do any uni reading when he was with me. but at the heart of it was universe city. 

But Britain, where I’ve lived now for seventeen years, feels unreal too. I can’t quite trust in the clean water that flows from the tap; the full supermarket shelves; the orderly parks and gardens. I feel as though it’s built on a lie, on hidden or delegated suffering. As though I’m in a luxurious cinema watching a film, in a city where war is raging, and over the music of the opening credits I can hear, faintly, the screams and explosions filtering through, into the cosy velvet auditorium. And there’s enough truth in this, historically, to prevent me from dismissing it as mere trauma response on my part. Britain’s comfortable indulgences—its infrastructure, its economy, its food supplies—depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can’t admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn’t think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.

The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010. In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian. I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.

The Los Angeles Times reported that one early contender to helm the sequel was none other than filmmaker David Lynch! This was years before he would perfect his surrealistic imagery with the likes of Twin Peaks. At this point in his career, Lynch was still a fresh commodity in Hollywood, having only helmed the bizarre midnight movie Eraserhead and unsettling biopic The Elephant Man. The degree to which Lynch was connected to Halloween II remains a mystery. Carpenter would ultimately choose Harvard grad Rick Rosenthal to direct the film. This was to be his first feature directing experience.

feature horror film was built component by component. Of the 1,100-plus silent horror films he lists as made between 1896 and 1929, the majority are shorts. (And most of them are lost films, including gems such as 1915’s A Cry in the Night, which features “a winged gorilla under the control of a mad scientist.” This screams for a remake, does it not?)

The world has gone silent and black and white, like a 1920s film, and the subtitles say someone is screaming. I thought I was on the train, but no, I'm tied to the tracks. I thought there was a villain, but no, I tied myself here. I thought the ropes must be tight, but no, I could get up, I could go. The train bears down, and I thought I would save myself, but no - the subtitles say someone is screaming. But my mouth is open, and nothing is coming out.

The producer soon approached Carpenter with the idea, who expressed interest in helming the production. Carpenter would agree to a modest salary of $10,000 to write, direct, and score the project. There were several conditions to his involvement, however. First, he would have complete creative control over the film. Second, he would receive above-the-title billing. Third, his then-girlfriend Debra Hill would be hired to co-write and produce. These were rather bold demands given Carpenter’s relative inexperience as a director and Hill’s complete inexperience as a producer. Even so, Yablans took a leap of faith and agreed to all conditions.

Unlike its countless imitators, there is no gore to be had in the 1978 film and almost no blood. Carpenter would instead prefer to leave those grisly details entirely to the viewer’s imagination. It’s all too easy to dismiss a mutilated body as being fake from the comfort of a theater seat. Of course, it’s fake. But when a filmmaker withholds those visuals, your mind may involuntarily fill in what you’re not seeing with something even more horrific. It’s much harder to dismiss what you see inside your mind’s eye. By avoiding such graphic violence, Carpenter is able focus on building tension through suspense. This is one of Halloween’s best qualities and yet also the one its own sequels tend to replicate the least. More than a few have

I am also in love with you, Bellatrix Adle Garden. I just thought it apt to inform you that my sentiments run deeper for you than the ocean and I could write you a ballad, a memorial, a film or all of them to express my undying, everlasting love for you if you would just give the chance and cue. My body screams its love for you. Every inch of me, every little atom in this infected and infectious body. I am in love with every ounce of being this intrinsic, mortal, fragmented body has to offer. I cannot live any other way

You can stop laughing at any moment, Bailey! This shit isn’t funny!” I chastise her. “You wanted it! You demanded it! Oh my fucking god, I’m going to pee myself!” she spouts in between bouts of laughter while she’s rolling around on her side of the bed. “You could have been more insistent with your warnings, you know!” I pout at her. “Oh god! I need to video this shit! Where’s my phone?” “You make one move towards your phone, I’m taking you out!” I holler at her. This shit definitely does not need to be filmed! Fucking Bailey is laughing too hard to respond. Insensitive witch! “Just get this shit done! Now, woman!” “Oh my god. Oh my god. Okay, okay. Calm down. Okay, let’s finish,” she finally quits laughing long enough to answer me. She gets to her feet and ambles to my side of the bed before she starts roaring again. After another moment of her laughing at me, she calms enough to stand up straight again. I scowl at her but it doesn’t erase the tears of laughter that are still coating her cheeks. “Okay, Ax. Only a few more strips to pull and then we’re done. Are you ready?” “Fuck no, I’m not ready! Who the fuck is ever actually ready to have their asshole pulled off with strips of cloth coated in wax? Huh? Who? Tell me now, Bailey! Do you actually know anyone who has ever answered that question with, “Why, yes, I am ready for excruciating pain, bring it on, girlfriend?”[...] “Thank every fucking god I know that Bailey refused to wax my ball sack like I first asked. Holy mother of all that is holy, if she had applied wax to them, I would have left it there until I died. No way is anyone pulling wax off of the twins. I am already pretty sure I’ll never get another erection just thinking about that kind of pain. I have a whole new respect for drag queens. They are tougher than I will ever be and I have no problem admitting that fact. “Holy fuck! What the ever loving fuck was that for? Oh my fucking god!” “Owwwwww! Make it stop!” I scream at Bailey when she rips a strip of wax and hair from my ass crack without warning me first. The evil witch is laughing too hard to stand so she’s now leaning her forearms across my back while I twitch my ass right and left trying to get the burning to stop. I can feel her tears landing on my back. Holy shit, I’m never sitting down again! “Holy mother of god! Fucking hell! Owwwwww! Woman, I hate you! Owwwwww! It burns like the fires of hell!” I shout as the last, thank god, strip is torn from my body. My colon may have just been removed also. I flop myself down on the bed and yes, I hide my face and allow a tiny tear or two to drop onto my pillow. Don’t judge me until you’ve been in this predicament!

Each of us is a massive composite figure. We are constantly filtering a barrage of sounds and visual images. Newspapers headlines scream to gain our attention. The radio blasts out its top forty. Billboards proclaim the newest film stars. Fashion magazines tell us how to dress and act. Each day sprouts its insider news tidbits. Each news day the media mashes another international or domestic crisis into our mental pulp and soufflés the macramé of political scandal or social untidiness into edible sound bites for us mentally to digest. Inside each of us resides shavings from this visual and electronic onslaught. An unseemly deluge of external stimuli shapes our ego formation.

Don Wallace found himself floating in the air, his scattergun on the ground below. The flames died as suddenly as they had begun, but his arm was a mass of charred flesh. Still screaming, he struggled with his one good hand to pull his revolver out of his shoulder holster. He was horrified when it seemed to take on a life of its own and slowly pointed itself at him. His own finger found the trigger and compulsively settled over it. Shea made a sound in her throat. This was a scene from a horror film, yet she couldn’t look away. A huge black wolf burst from the underbrush, running flat out. It leapt into the air, its gleaming jaws closing around Wallace’s leg. Bones snapped like twigs as the wolf pulled the man to the ground and thrust its fangs at his exposed throat. Shea was released from the mind hold and scrambled to her feet, rushing at the wolf tearing at the struggling man. “Jacques! No! You can’t do this!” For one bizarre moment the wolf turned its head to look at her, and time stood still. She recognized Jacques’ icy eyes and felt his triumph raging in her mind. Gregori yanked her arm as he emerged from the woods running, still half wolf, half man, changing as he ran. “Come on, we have no time. Damn it, Shea, I need you. You are a doctor, a healer. Come with me.” He did not release her arm, and she was forced to sprint with him up the steps into the cabin. Gregori shoved Slovensky’s body out of the way with a boot. “Listen to me, Shea. We will have to do this together. Raven has shut down her body as much as she dared. Mikhail is keeping her and the child alive, but she is very weak, and the child is in trouble. You have to repair the damage done to Raven, and I will save the child.

I'm in the film business remember , and if this were a movie , this is the part where the audience would be screaming for the woman to get out of the house . So that's exactly what I'm doing .

This is what she becomes because of me… what do you think of here… do you like her or heat? Are you going to hate her for this? ~*~ ‘They don't leave. They bring in their food from the outside, from quite far away sometimes. It gives their guard something to do when they're not out annihilating mavericks. Or protecting Volterra from exposure…’ ‘From situations like this one, like Marcel,’ I finished her sentence. It was amazingly easy to say his name now. I wasn't sure what the difference was. Maybe because- I wasn't planning on living much longer without seeing him. Or at all, if we were too late. It was comforting to know that I would have an easy out. ‘I doubt they've ever had a situation quite like this,’ she muttered, disgusted. ‘You don't get a lot of suicidal angels.’ The sound that escaped out of my mouth was very quiet, but Olivia seemed to understand that it was a cry of pain. She wrapped her thin, strong arm around my shoulders. ‘We'll do what we can, Bell. It's not over yet.’ ‘Not yet.’ I let her comfort me, though I knew she thought our chances were poor. ‘And the Ministry will get us if we mess up.’ Olivia stiffened. ‘You say that like it's a good thing.’ I shrugged. ‘Knock it off, Bell, or we're turning around in New York and going back to Pittsburgh.’ ‘What?’ ‘You know what. If we're too late for Marcel, I'm going to do me damnedest to get you back to Mr. Anderson, and I don't want any trouble from you. Do you understand that?’ ‘Sure, Olivia.’ She pulled back slightly so that she would glare at me. ‘No trouble.’ ‘Scout's honor,’ I muttered. She rolled her eyes. ‘Let me concentrate, now. I'm trying to see what he's planning.’ She left her arm around me, but let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. She pressed her free hand to the side of her face, rubbing her fingertips against her temple. I watched her in fascination for a long time. Eventually, she became utterly motionless, her face like a stone sculpture. The minutes passed, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought she'd fallen asleep. I didn't dare interrupt her to ask what was going on. I wished there was something safe for me to think about. I couldn't allow myself to consider the horrors we were headed toward, or, more horrific yet, the chance that we might fail-not if I wanted to keep from screaming aloud. I couldn't anticipate anything, either. If I were very, very, very lucky, I would somehow be able to save Marcel. But I wasn't so stupid as to think that saving him would mean that I could stay with him. I was no different, no more special than I'd been before. There would be no new reason for him to want me now. Seeing him and losing him again… I fought back against the pain. This was the price I had to pay to save his life. I would pay for it. They showed a movie, and my neighbor got headphones. Sometimes, I watched the figures moving across the little screen, but I couldn't even tell if the movie was supposed to be a romance or a horror film. After an eternity, the plane began to descend toward New York City. Olivia remained in her trance. I dithered, reaching out to touch her, only to pull my hand back again. This happened a dozen times before the plane touched down with a jarring impact. ‘Olivia,’ I finally said. ‘Olivia, we have to go.’ I touched her arm. Her eyes came open very slowly. She shook her head from side to side for a moment.

Fleming could not keep a tight rein on most of his actors because the queerness of their characters defied a realistic approach. He could, and did, keep a tight rein on Judy Garland. And it is Garland’s obvious belief in what is happening to her that keeps the film credible. “You believed that she really wanted to get back to Kansas,” says Jack Haley. “She carried the picture with her sincerity.” The first confrontation between Fleming and Judy Garland came late in November when she first met the Cowardly Lion on the Yellow Brick Road. John Lee Mahin was on the set that day, and the moment stuck fast in his memory. “She slapped the Lion and he broke into tears. And she was to continue bawling him out. But Lahr was so funny that she burst into screams of laughter instead. Vic was patient at first. She went behind a tree. I could hear her saying, ‘I will not laugh. I will not laugh.’ Then she’d come out and start laughing again. They must have done the scene ten times, and eventually she was giggling so much she got hysterical. She couldn’t stop laughing. And Vic finally slapped her on the face. ‘All right now,’ he said, ‘go back to your dressing room.’ She went. And when she came back, she said, ‘O.K.’ And they did the scene.

Could it be that the man over there, gesticulating with a cocktail stick, is screaming on the inside, ‘Why did I start this story? There’s no punchline. How can I bail out? These people must hate me. Make your excuses and leave NOW!’ See that woman over there, passionately describing why she loved the latest Star Wars film? Is she really paddling wildly and thinking, ‘They know I haven’t seen it, I’ve only read the synopsis, but I thought it would help me fit in. I am not even sure Chewbacca is in it.’ See that guy over there, throwing his head back in laughter as he eats a devilled egg? He doesn’t know what he’s laughing about, and he just imagined throwing himself out of that open window. I wonder if the secret of the social human is to tactfully conceal the fact that you’re screaming on the inside. Or am I just projecting my scream onto others?

Raising my bandaged fists, I stepped through them to the doors of the church, lifted the heavy knocker and struck three times. I was irritated by these timid people in their well-pressed suits and flowered dresses, with their polite religion. I was tempted to break down the doors and drive them into their pews, pen them there while I performed some kind of obscene act in the aisle—press the blood from my hands against their bleeding Christ, expose myself, urinate in the font, anything to shake them out of their timidity and teach them a fierce and violent dread. I wanted to scream at them: ‘Birds are gathering here in Shepperton, chimeras more marvellous than anything dreamed of in your film studios!

Exploitation films were the price we pay for, essentially, living a lie. Once upon a time, many would like others to think they were well-adjusted, considerate, intelligent people who would never enjoy - even revel in - the suffering of others. However, throughout history, the most civilised of sorts have otherwise entertained themselves in the most bestial of manners. Whether it was the Roman Coliseum, where Christians were fed to the lions and gladiators fought to the death, or France's Grand Guignol Theatre, where realistic dramas of mass murder were enacted, every one from the upper crust to the groundlings was left screaming for more.