The Cream of the Screams : She Took a Talent for Shrieking and Found a Niche in Show Biz

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.

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 makes listeners grit their teeth.

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

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.

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

With her daughter belting out a new generation of screams, Lander said the time might just be right to take the market by screeching storm. “Danielle can scream beautifully,” she said.

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 for a uniquely off-the-wall niche.

“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.”

Roger Corman, a Hollywood director who has a host of horror films to his credits--including “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “Fall of the House of Usher” starring Vincent Price--said a good scream can make or break a chiller scene.

“We’re always looking for sharp, high-pitched sounds that can break through an audience’s defenses,” he said.

For Lander, screams are more than a way of making a few extra bucks--they’re 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, 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 college theater major, she answered a casting call for a scream screening, producing 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 drove a city bus in Sacramento. She worked as a nurse’s aide, sold real estate and mobile homes.

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

There on the radio, she listened to the shrieks and cries she had made 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 the screaming telegram service. 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.

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.

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

Two years ago, she and her 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 and did 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.”

But there’s a danger with a good strong 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,” she said.

“But done right, screaming is good for you. There’s so much stress in life that people have to keep inside.”