You Scream. They Scream. We All Love the Franchise Scream.

Dani Bethea
5 min readMar 21, 2023

Welcome to Horror Anonymous. A great place to hide.

A sea of ghostly faces.

*taps mic*

Hi! My name is Dani.

Hi Dani!

I’m really nervous about this but I have something to share with the group.

This is a free and safe space, Dani. You can share anything here.

~sigh~ Okay, ummm…I haven’t always been a Scream fan.

…..silence…..What?! How dare you?! How on earth can you sit here with US and call yourself a horror fan?!!!

Well, I…

Kick them out! Horror membership revoked!

Okay, okay, I had a feeling the knives would come out about this…and yes Ghostface I see you lurking ready to pounce. Just hear me out for a second.

Hmmm, well let’s hear it…and yeah Ghost, put the knife away…for now. We’re horror kith and kin here and we’ve all got our {grumbles} personal relationship with the genre.

Okay, first and foremost, I was six years old when the first Scream came out. This was the early 90s and trying to see some horror-related media at that age was still really difficult. It was rated R and my parents didn’t play back then about the rating system.

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Dani Bethea

Horror Sommelier & Pop Culture Pontificator. Prev EIC: We Are Horror. Published: Studies In the Fantastic + Women of Jenji Kohan + Montréal Monstrum Society .