Horror in Edvard Munch’s e Scream and Beyond

Horror in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Beyond

Words By Libby Phillips

How does art horrify us? Blood and gore may be gross, or a strange figure in the shadows may be creepy, and still visual mediums do not have the ability to surprise viewers. So, is it possible for the horror genre to extend to static mediums in art? Edvard Munch’s The Scream is one piece of art that many consider to be truly horrifying because of the existential dread it incurs on the viewer.

Yet, most people misunderstand The Scream without realizing it. The figure in the painting, a quasi-self-portrait, is not the one to elicit the sound. In fact, Professor Peter Schwenger said of the artwork: “Munch has painted the horror more than the scream; and his painting serves us best as a way of defining what the scream is almost, but what it ultimately is not.” Maybe the most striking way to interpret The Scream is to know how Munch himself experienced it - his diary of the day reads:

“I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the  aming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black  ord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast in nite scream through nature.”

Image By: Orla Brennan

The open mouthed, wide eyed figure that only by a stretch could be considered a man, is actually reacting to the scream around him. Munch’s words come alive in the painting and vice versa. The most illustrative elements of the diary entry are when Munch employs synesthesia. He feels the melancholy and the infinite shriek. Likewise, we are made to feel it, as well, as readers and viewers of his work. Moreover, the repeated imagery of death and pain is quite horrific. The sky, the blue-black fjord, the city all warp in The Scream to create a sense that the figure is being closed in on and twisted by the scream around him. Appropriately, this painting is a part of Munch’s series Frieze of Life in the third part called ‘Anxiety.’ In Schwenger’s Phenomenology of the Scream he goes on to say: “There is then a final irony in the scream: if it is forced from us as a response to the horror of pure existence, to being trapped by existence, it belongs itself to the order of things that are wiped clean of personal being.”

The horror of The Scream is further enhanced by its persistence and continued ability to produce said horror, despite being created in 1893. British performance artist Tracey Emin made a tribute to Munch in 1998 in which he visited the site of Munch’s scream and screamed, herself, for a full minute while camera settled on the fjord. Emin’s medium allowed her to be the screamer while, instead, the cinematography produces the existential fear of being trapped in your own body and mind, surrounded by an immense world in which your role is negligible.

Finally, The Scream makes another iconic appearance in Wes Craven’s horror movie trilogy Scream. The film, of course, makes use of the ghostface mask inspired by Munch’s work. The item is now a popular Halloween costume. The films, however, too incorporate horror of the same nature as Munch’s original work over a hundred years later. The three films uniquely apply intertextual-referencing, omniscient genre-awareness, and self-awareness to the scripts and plots which create an inescapable mind trap. The anxiety of knowing what’s to come and the psychological repercussions of that evoke the same feeling in viewers as both Munch’s and Emin’s works do.

Horror as a genre and as a medium are artistic experiments in human emotional which continually subvert expectations and refine horror. The fact that these same themes, feelings, and fears continue to reappear over centuries, though, is both horrific and beautiful in and of itself.