Cover Your Ears and Conjure Up Fears

Sometimes, when she’s sitting in a lumbering line of near-frozen freeway traffic, feeling so frustrated she could yank her steering wheel out by its roots, Cheryl Lander does what she does best.

She rolls up her windows, takes a few deep breaths, and lets loose with a heart-stopping, reach-for-your-ears siren of a screech. She shrieks out of anger, nervousness and, sometimes, purely for joy. And because she needs the practice.

Lander is a professional screamer.

That hair-raising howl is her cacophonous calling card. Over the years, she has shrieked for movies, radio and television, screeched for charities on Halloween and recently recruited her teen-age daughter to form a mother-daughter scream team.

Together, they have dozens of versions in their scream repertoire. There is everyone’s favorite, the primal scream--a frightening blast of sheer vocal power that can send animals running for the hills.

Then there’s the staccato scream, the crescendo and three-toned screams, the I’ve-just-been awakened-by-Frankenstein-scream, the Faye-Wray-meets-King-Kong-scream and the I’ve-just-won-the-lottery-scream.

Said Lander, a 40-year-old mother of four, “There’s a scream for every mood.”

For years, Lander ran her own Screaming Telegram service throughout Southern California--delivering on-the-scene, live-wire screams for such events as birthdays, job quittings, even divorce announcements.

All the while--thanks to a scream album she made as an 18-year-old amateur--her screeches were heard nationwide, slicing from the screens of B-grade horror flicks and on radio gags. She went on to do her signature screams for 25 other movies and for goofy television shows, going scream for scream against a live studio audience.

Now, after a brief hiatus from the business, Lander is ready to make a shrieking comeback. On Halloween night, she and her 14-year-old daughter, Danielle, will scream at a Riverside County premiere of the new “Addams Family” film. There’s even talk of a new mother-daughter scream album.

With her daughter belting out a new generation of screams, Lander says, the time might just be right to take the market by screeching storm. “Danielle can scream beautifully,” she says. “She’s got a totally different sound of high-pitched screams.”

High praise has come for Cheryl Lander’s screaming as well.

Earl Durham, co-producer of the television show “Candid Camera,” was won over by her screams when he auditioned her for the show “People Do the Craziest Things.”

“Simply unbelievable,” he said. “I remember we looked through a lot of people--it was tough. I mean, where do you find professional screamers? But when we finally found her, she blew us away. From the moment she walked through the door, we knew we’d found the best in the business.”

Andrew Friedenberg, director of the Cinema Society of San Diego, said Lander and her daughter have the potential to fill a new and off-the-wall niche.

Because in the lucrative market of teeth-chattering, teen-aimed horror films, one believable, blood-curdling scream is worth a thousand words.

“I have never heard of a mother-daughter scream team--and probably never will again,” he said. “If they keep their lungs strong, I’ll bet they have a real future.”

For Lander, screams are more than a way of making a few extra bucks. They’re also therapeutic.

“It just does things for your body that nothing else can,” she said. “A good scream is a full-body experience. It can send chills down your spine, make your toes and fingers tingle.”

The way Lander tells it, she was a born screamer. When other children laughed with glee, she screamed.

“It was the way I released energy when I got excited,” recalled the Pomona native. “When I was happy, I screamed. When someone scared me, I screamed. I screamed at birthdays. And funerals. It got so bad I had to ask my mother for permission. I’d say, ‘Mom, can I scream, can I scream?’ She usually only let me do it at the beach and the zoo.”

Bonai Sanders, Lander’s mother, recalls the anguish of being a migraine sufferer with a child screamer. “New neighbors would always become concerned when they heard Cheryl screaming--wondering what we were doing in our house.

“In the car, when she saw cows--she loved cows--she would scream bloody murder. You never wanted her behind you in the back seat of the car.”

Cheryl’s screaming became a rarely mentioned family secret, until 1970, when, as a theater major in college, she answered a casting call for a scream screening. A day later she had produced 75 screams that would become stock scary-movie shrieks.

“The directors loved me,” she said. “They kept me there for two days, doing all kinds of screams. They paid me $50 for my work--and that was that.”

Lander thought her screaming career was over. She joined the Air National Guard as a communications specialist, becoming the first enlisted woman in the state. She drove a city bus in Sacramento. She worked as a nurse’s aide, sold real estate and mobile homes.

Then, years later, she heard a sound that made her want to scream.

There on the radio, she listened for the first time to the shrieks and cries she had recorded as a college student. “I realized that I had been seriously ripped off,” she said. “They were using my screams without giving me a dime in royalties. But it made me wake up to the fact that there was money in screaming.”

So Lander opened a screaming telegram service, screeching at birthdays and anniversaries. For $75, dressed as the Grim Reaper, she screamed for employees who quit their jobs--and for married people who wanted to quit their spouses.

“I would walk in and hand the person the divorce papers and just scream my head off,” she said. “I only did two of them because they left such a bad taste in my mouth. But the rest were a lot of fun.”

Soon, word about The Screamer began to get around. Lander began getting calls for auditions. At $200 a shot, she got two dozen off-screen screaming parts--mostly for scary movies and one cliff fall in a Western.

But Lander says her contracts forbid her from mentioning the names of movies in which her screams were featured.

“Some actresses don’t want it to get around that they don’t do their own screaming,” she said. “And I had to sign on the dotted line that I wouldn’t ruin their secret.”

For a screamer, it’s hard to keep quiet about anything. Lander has had complaints from neighbors--although now, her husband says, she has learned to control herself around the house. Once, while auditioning for a television variety show starring Buddy Hackett, she said the police showed up at the audition room because they thought someone was being attacked.

“A crowd of people had gathered outside,” she recalled. “I had to scream a few times for the officers to show them it was all legitimate.’

In the mid-1980s, she screamed at the opening of a King Kong exhibit at Universal Studios, she said.

Then, two years ago, she and husband David left Costa Mesa for Temecula, where Lander became the artistic director of a children’s theater called Temecula Valley Show Biz Kidz.

But she never forgot about her talent, continuing to do breathing and relaxation exercises. And she screamed.

“The freeway is the best place to scream,” she said. “The traffic jams on the 91 freeway in Orange County give me a good reason to belt out a few good screams. A lot of people look at me like I was crazy. They scrunch up their shoulders, grit their teeth and cover their ears. And some of them start joining in.”

Even her boss is impressed with what he has heard.

“It was,” said Chip Clark, who runs the financial consulting office where Lander works, “the loudest thing I have ever heard coming from a human being.”

Lander says she doesn’t mind the attention: “Last year, the Kiwanis Club named me its person of the year. Now people stop me in public and say, ‘There’s the screamer.’ ”

But she lets people know there’s danger in letting rip with a good, healthy screech.

“Especially with the primal screams, you can pull muscles and ligaments in your back and chest. And you can really damage your vocal chords so your life will never be the same again.

“But, done right, screaming is good for you. There’s so much stress in life that people have to keep inside. This is one release that no one can take away from you. It’s totally personal.”