Until recently, I didn’t know that the last three years in the life of Symbolist painter Edvard Munch coincided with the first three of my own.  Born in Ådalsbruk, Norway, in 1863 and raised in what is now Oslo, Munch lost his mother and younger sister to tuberculosis.  He and his surviving siblings were raised by their father, a fundamentalist who beat into his offspring a deep-seated fear of the fires of Hell before his own untimely death when Munch was 13.  Another sister was later committed to a lunatic asylum while a brother, the only Munch child to marry, died shortly after his wedding.  "Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle,” Munch once said.  “And they have followed me throughout my life." 

The "sickbed child of the Industrial Age's alienation aura” (to quote Michael Atkinson), Munch completed “The Scream” in 1893.  The artist had abandoned naturalism and impressionism as sickness and anxiety turned his gaze inward.  Symbolism allowed Munch to externalize his roiling inner state as he set agonized or enervated characters against indistinct, dreamlike backdrops.   During the Nazi regime, Munch’s works were branded as degenerate art but not before they influenced the expressionist movement in German cinema.  The shadow of "The Scream" touches both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920) and Nosferatu (1922), which stamped the boilerplate for the nascent horror genre.  The painting (which exists in several versions) seems bespoke for the modern era, from the First World War, the 1918 influenza epidemic (which chipped off 5% of the world’s population) and the rise of Naziism to the dawn of the atomic age, AIDS, terrorism and seemingly out-of-nowhere school schootings that leave us holding our heads in our hands and screaming until the corners of our mouths tear.  

Munch meant his skeletal shrieker to be a victim but the movies keep making a monster out of him.  During production of Wes Craven’s Scream (1995), the filmmakers lacked a visage for their slasher… until somebody brought in the dimestore Halloweeen mask that became the series’ trademark.  In an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror anthology, Bill Malone’s “Fair-Haired Child” was another Munchian grotesque ripping apart luckless high schoolers thrown into his lair.   In Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge (2003), the murdered wife and child of a crazed Tokyo salaryman haunt their victims with the the bone-colored skin and yawning, edentulous mouths of “The Scream.”  Over a hundred years after its creation, “The Scream” still has currency for us… perhaps because there’s still so much to scream about.