A screaming comes across the sky, and the volleyball players on North Avenue Beach stop at once and instinctively duck and stare out across the sand, as if a bomb went off in the distance. A bomb, in a sense, had gone off. A bomb packed with anxieties and loathing — a scream, in fact. Followed by more screams, each one a few minutes apart, released by the 150 or so people lined up on the North Avenue jetty, facing the skyline.
Scream Club Chicago, which was not a thing when it began last June, and is now very much a thing, with chapters springing up around the world only nine weeks later, meets every Sunday evening at 7 p.m., to release the stress of the past week and face the new one. The group is a model of truth in advertising. You go to Scream Club. You stand at the edge of Lake Michigan. You think about the fears you want to let go. You scream for a few minutes surrounded by strangers screaming alongside you. You return to your life.
The screams, the reason everyone assembles, when the screams come, after a few collective inhales and exhales and a moment to gather one’s thoughts, the screams come like long guttural howls. The volume is a shock if you’re not expecting it. The sound curls upward, then splinters apart into individual yelps and high-pitched shrieks.
Some go ARGHHHHHH!
Some go AHHHHHHHH!
Some start with UGHHHHHH! and descend into the growl of a feral animal.
Some say, before these formal screaming sessions, they had no real place to scream in 2025, despite paradoxically having more reasons than ever to want to scream. Most of the time, they scream into pillows. Some scream in their cars. Moriah Arterberry, who attended recently for the first time, said, “I’m here because it’s not really appropriate to scream in my apartment. No one out here at this is going to call the authorities. And life, it’s just been really unstable lately and until I find stability, I guess screaming will work …”
She cracks up; she knows it’s just a scream.
Hector Cervantes started coming here after he was laid off from Northwestern University, one of 425 jobs cut from the school, partly to address financial woes many universities have faced since Donald Trump returned to the White House. “I’m sure screaming sounds strange from the outside,” he said, “but here, on this lake, it’s just a bunch of people who, for a moment, can be in this together, processing their worlds.”
In its small loud way, two or three good screams can help, said Manny Hernandez, a breathwork practitioner / transformational coach / CrossFit coach who started Scream Club Chicago with his partner, Elena Soboleva, a personal branding specialist.
They come from godforsaken places full of screaming. She grew up in Siberia and he’s from New Jersey. A couple of years ago, Hernandez moved to Chicago from Los Angeles. “We started this on a whim,” he said. “We were having (expletive) weeks. I do screaming in my breath classes and I know it feels good for some of the students so I said, ‘Hey, you want to go to the water to scream?’ She said OK. Soboleva was self-conscious at first, screaming in public. Hernandez hoped the wind off the jetty would drown them out. He also didn’t want to startle anyone. He asked people on the jetty if it was OK if he screamed. Not only were they OK with it, they joined in. “Turns out, it was better than fine. But it was quieter when it was just us! Soon we had 10 others, then like 20 others. Now we have like 200 or so a week. That’s harder to mask with the wind.”
They posted a message on Instagram and the meeting app Pie, inviting anyone to join them who felt a need to release their weekly demons and worries; they gave their weekly screaming a regular day, regular time, regular place. Xander Rodriguez — “lobby ambassador by day, musician for life” — was one of the first to respond. Despite singing in a metal band named Revenge of the Creature, “I actually had a lot of discomfort, and a lot of introversion, and a lot of anger. This helped me out of my comfort zone, I think. You come, you let loose, some of us cry — it’s OK. I’m sure some people would read this and hear a lot of weakness in it, but that’s not true. Some might want to say we are just people with nothing better to do on a Sunday night, but the communal nature, it helps.”
The back of his T-shirt read: “Til Death We Yell.”
Hernandez made the shirts. He knows he’s onto something here. As images of Scream Club went viral on social media, he received messages from fledgling screamers across the globe. He filed for a trademark for the Scream Club name and began meeting with new chapters on Zoom, explaining how to lead a scream, sussing out if a chapter was starting for the right therapeutic reasons and not to create empty spectacle. Apparently, this will shock no one, everybody lately wants to scream. By Labor Day, there will be Scream Clubs in Lisbon, London, Germany, Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Palm Beach, Austin, Seattle, Detroit, Denver and, closer to home, Bloomingdale, Evanston and Libertyville. “I’m getting overwhelmed by people wanting more clubs,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, could you start a scream at 1 p.m. Montrose Harbor, Thursdays?’ No! This is when we’ll do it.”
Just before 7 p.m., as people arrived to a recent Sunday screaming, Soboleva greeted them and handed out small biodegradable slips of paper, for screamers to write down whatever they want to scream about. Before each scream, screamers ball up each slip of paper and toss it into the lake then scream. A woman approached Soboleva. “What do I scream about?” she asked. Soboleva handed her a few pieces of paper and smiled.
“Scream about whatever you want to let go,” she said.
“That’s like a lot of stuff,” the woman said.
“Well, I’ve got plenty of paper …”
Nearby, Hernandez fitted new batteries into the bullhorn he uses to lead the scream. He crouched on the sidewalk in black sweats and red Chuck Taylors. He’s a very chill guy, even as he acknowledges that not everyone believes in the validity of scream therapy as a way of managing anxieties: “We’re trying to figure out how to grow this and have something to scientifically back us up. There is not a lot of evidence for it (as a useful therapeutic practice), so we are reaching out to scientists. When we start to doubt, we get hugs, tears, we see emotions coming out that reminds you there’s something here.”
He’s right on one thing.
The history of scream therapy is full of doubters. Its creator, a Southern California psychologist named Arthur Janov, called it “primal therapy.” He began espousing the benefits of screaming in 1967, after a patient came to him, triggered by an actor in an experimental theater production who screamed “MAMA!” Janov suggested his patient scream “MAMA!” He came to believe screaming released childhood trauma, which he said were the source of most neurosis. Within a few years, Janov founded the Primal Institute and counted James Earl Jones, John Lennon and Yoko Ono among his practitioners. He claimed screaming would cure 80% of ailments, from epilepsy to asthma, alcoholism to ulcers. He also claimed screaming might remove homosexuality.
Needless to say, the evidence-based profession of psychology did not agree. Janov wrote a 1970 self-help bestseller, “The Primal Scream,” but by the 1980s, he was widely mocked. (The Tribune review of the book in 1970 was headlined: “A Short Course in Brainwashing.”) Since then, when psychologists have addressed screaming, it was usually to warn that it might be helpful in small doses but it was not a longterm solution.
Still, there is catharsis in a good scream, right?
Steve Jobs screamed from time to time as self-therapy. Beyoncé says she screams to relieve the stress of being Beyoncé. Screaming among mere mortals is often less acceptable, and yet, it’s hard to deny the temporary blistering release of a scream, the way it seems to cut through a fog of thoughts. Some of the people who came to Scream Club the other night said they do yoga, they journal, they take ice-water baths, they eat right — they didn’t expect much out of a scream, just a bit of communal steam released.
They waited side to side, a cross-section of Chicago, elderly couples, young men, a few children and their parents, groups of girlfriends, entire families. They did not look like the kind of people who scream in public. Hernandez stood behind them with his bullhorn: “We didn’t expect this to happen, we didn’t expect this many people to show up every time we do this, but it’s an indication this is something very, very needed in the world right now. And I want to make sure we give everyone a safe space to express for what they are feeling, with no judgement, doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like.”
He asked them to live in the moment, and try not to film themselves screaming. He said it works best if they close their eyes and just let loose. He had them inhale, exhale, throw their slips of worries into the water, then, after a count of three, he told them to scream.
When the screams faded away, Monica Santana and Maria Lema, who had driven down from Waukegan to scream, peeled off. Lema had tears in her eyes. Her brother died a few years ago, she said: “I’m here to let go of the guilt and the hurt and the pain, all of the stuff that doesn’t serve me anymore. I started crying during the breathing exercises.”
A moment later, just as the night went quiet and the sun set, two new screams.
Hernandez and Soboleva, who had been too busy leading the scream to scream, were now bent at their waists over the lake, like professional divers. They erupted. Like horror movie loud. After 10 seconds or so of screaming, Hernandez brushed at his face. He picked up his megaphone and waded into the leaving crowd and faced the week ahead.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com