This has bugged me for a long time, but my pique came to a head yesterday when I was watching the early Ray Harryhausen effort “It Came From Beneath the Sea”—you know, the one with the giant octopus that attacks San Francisco?
A lovely actress whom I had never been aware of before named Faith Domergue played a female scientist specializing in marine biology. Throughout the movie, despite being Kenneth Tobey’s love interest (You remember him, right? The hero in the original “The Thing From Outer Space”? Later a villain in “Billy Jack” and one of the air traffic controllers in “Airplane”?) she was completely professional, always composed, bristling at sexist comments and assumptions from the male pigs around her (this was in 1955, remember). And yet when the giant octopus that she had insisted was real while everyone else pooh-poohed the idea finally appeared, she screamed like a teenage girl at an Elvis concert. Why would she do that? She was the only one who was expecting to see a giant octopus! The men around her, in contrast, looked startled or went into action (getting the hell off the beach); only the woman screamed.
On Christmas Eve, for my solitary holiday viewing pleasure with Spuds, I again watched “The Towering Inferno.” True, everyone who falls out an 87th floor window or out of the scenic elevator, male or female, screams going down, but when a charred elevator passenger stumbles out after his fellow-riders have been incinerated, only the women scream—-naturally, a man rushes to try to put out the flames—Fred Astaire in fact, not by tapping them out but with his rented tux jacket.
That stereotypical female screaming was in 1974. It’s half a century later, and I still see movies and TV shows where the women scream if they see a corpse, or someone pull a gun, or a car crash that doesn’t threaten them. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been the lucky one to discover four dead people in my life, and screaming never entered my mind on any of those occasions. I never heard my mother scream. I never heard my sister scream. When I was on an ill-fated white-water rafting trip in West Virginia that made “Deliverance” seem like a cruise in the kiddie pool and everybody almost died, none of the women in the rafts that were sent shooting over waterfalls or flipped over screamed, including my former fiancee who was tossed out of our raft and smashed her head on a rock. The women on the expedition were all in their thirties, lawyers, writers or performers: none were commandos or martial arts fighters. They didn’t waste time screaming; they were too busy trying not to drown.
My father the war hero, ironically enough, did scream once in my presence when a car in a parking lot appeared to be speeding backwards into his drivers’ side door, stopping maybe an inch before a collision. (I laughed; Dad was not amused.) That’s the kind of situation where a scream, male or female, is, I think, justified and instinctual: you have no control over something that looks like its going to kill you. One of my favorite female screams of all time is Laura Dern’s in “Jurassic Park.” It’s completely justified: after all, she’s exposed in a fleeing truck’s bed and a Tyrannosaurus Rex is closing in: a scream is about all you can do in that situation. I’m not entirely sure that even the famous scream depicted above is realistic.
But with all the efforts by feminists to eradicate traditional stereotypes that portray women as weak, cowardly, and useless under stress, how and why has this ridiculous trope survived? I will say one thing for “The Walking Dead” and its (too many) progeny: the women in that dystopian world seldom screamed unless a zombie was actually eating them alive.
Now that’s worth screaming about.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ve noticed when going through haunted house attractions, it seems to be women that scream the most. Also for what it’s worth, I’ve known two screamers in my life, and they are both women. My mother has always been a strong-willed, intelligent woman, but she is easily startled. When I was growing up, she’d often call for me thinking I was on the opposite end of the house, then jump in surprise when I’d call back just as loud, right next to her. In one memorable incident, my mother was leading a pilates class in the downstairs TV room. I’d gone down to head to my room, when I noticed Mom was on her stomach facing away from me. Because I’m evil, I tickled her feet. Her scream wasn’t quite horror movie level, but close.
The other easy screamer in the family is my sister-in-law. One day we were watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with my niece and nephews. There’s a scene where Harry’s class is practicing against a boggart, which turns into a person’s greatest fear. When it turned into a giant snake, my sister-in-law let out a loud “EEEEEEE!” She does not like snakes.
So basically, the screaming woman stereotype doesn’t come out of nowhere. I would argue that both cultural and instinctual influences encourage men to be more stoic and women to be more expressive. I believe that movies play up the screaming stereotype to trigger that primal protective instinct in male viewers, and perhaps it also heightens the fear instinct in female viewers.
My daughter-in-law loves horror movies. I definitely do not, but this post has me thinking, maybe it’s the screaming I hate, not the genre. I love Korean revenge dramas, so it’s not the gore that bothers me. Maybe I should ask her to recommend ones that don’t have screaming. And no jump scares. Not because they startle me, but because they don’t and they just feel like lazy storytelling to me.
I don’t think I’ve ever screamed.
Jump scares: The CGI monster staring into the camera and roaring, shaking it’s head like engaged in a South Asian greeting completely ruins whatever enjoyment I had for the film.
Both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings did it. Come on guys, I could give ‘The Mummy’ a pass on this, but that was decades ago.
Spiders and mice get Mrs. OB. Totally irrational for such a commonsense woman.
I got a big kick out of the Woody Allen scene (in “Annie Hall?”) where he’s sent into a bathroom with a tennis racket to deal with a spider he observes is “the size of a Buick.”
And yet the most famous movie scream of all time is the Wilhelm scream; a dude.
I don’t know why women are portrayed this way. It makes them appear helpless and therefore rescuable(?) Teenage girls often go through a scream phase. It’s ridiculous and cringey but, thankfully, most of them outgrow it. Me personally? I more of an expletive dropper. No delicate flower, I.
Do you really think it’s more famous than Janet’s in Psycho? It may have been the most USED scream. You know, I assume, that the Wilhelm scream is attributed to Sheb Wooley, the Western bit player who appears in High Noon, Rawhide, Bonanza, and who played the high school principal who hires Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers.” Sheb also had a hit song in the ’50s, singing the “One Eyed, One-horn, Flying Purple People Eater.”
Because it is the most used scream, I think it’s save to say that more people would recognize its’ sound (even if they can’t name it) than they would Janet’s.
Found what appears to be the original recording, and the first movie it appeared in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rksd5v43zxI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc5F2C0CYlA