When Grant picked me up outside my apartment, he said he was so fucking stoked about the movie he was taking me to see.

Scream 4, he said. You like scary movies, right?

I knew Grant well enough through mutual friends, but we didn’t know any personal details about each other. We’d never been alone together. Nearly three years had passed since the murder, and I could still hear the sounds: the screaming, the crying, the help me, please, somebody. The volume was a little lower, but the howling still echoed in my ears.

After you wake up one night to that impossible sound of dying, you don’t pay to watch someone fake it. But I couldn’t tell my date that I didn’t want to go to the movies anymore. This was college. I’d learned to stop telling people the truth freshman year, when a new friend had seen an envelope from the prison on top of a stack of papers in my dorm. She’d eyed Mom’s ID number written in the top left corner for a beat too long, and asked me the following day after she’d obviously done a Google search: did your mom really kill someone? Like, literally, stab someone?

What’s your favorite scary movie? Grant asked in a raspy, unsettling voice. I recognized the quote from the movie commercial I’d seen so many times back in elementary school. I didn’t tell him I’d never seen any of the previous Scream movies, or that I didn’t want to see this one.

I was in the third grade when boys my age started wearing Ghostface costumes for Halloween. I’d seen the masks everywhere—Sears, Kmart, even the drugstore where Mom picked up her prescriptions—since Scream 3 had come out that year. When I saw all the boys wearing hooded cloaks with long white chins and warped black eyes, I wondered how many had seen any of the movies. How many parents had let their 8-year-old sons watch it, dress up like the masked killer to trick-or treat in our small town?

I was too afraid to watch, but everyone recognized the voice who asked, what’s your favorite scary movie? The commercials gave me what I tried to describe to my friend at school as bad thoughts.

We all knew how it started: Drew Barrymore, popping popcorn with her blonde bob and her off-white sweater, answering the cordless phone we all had in our living rooms.

Those of us who could only stomach the preview never knew that Drew Barrymore wasn’t the star, that she didn’t even survive the first few minutes of the film. Every time I’d see the commercial, I’d run into every room in the house. I’d flip every light switch, tiptoe into the bathroom to pull back the patterned plastic shower curtain, make sure nobody was hiding behind it.

There were the kids whose older siblings had left the VHS lying around, who’d later lie about having watched the whole thing without flinching. But really, they’d just read the cover front to back while no one was looking, then put a newspaper or magazine on top of it so they wouldn’t have to see that face again. The blue-eyed girl with the hand over her mouth, waiting to die just like her friends. And there were those of us whose parents would watch the Blockbuster rental with the volume just high enough after our bedtime had come and gone, thinking we’d fallen fast asleep.

Most of us would still be awake, secretly listening to the sound that gave the movie its title, hiding under our blankets and fearing the next time the phone would ring.

There was a moment when it seemed like everyone had forgotten about Scream and started talking about The Matrix instead. Kids would run around the playground asking blue pill or red pill, bending their bodies back like Neo while we played limbo at recess. But once Scream 3 came out, Ghostface was back. Once Halloween came around, I’d see a dozen boys in white masks and black robes, bending their elbows, pulling their clenched fists into the air, ready to strike their next victim.

I’d never seen Ghostface kill anyone, never found out who was really hiding beneath his mask, but still, I was terrified. I had nightmares about his face and his voice and would startle awake some nights in a cold sweat, fearing he was somewhere in the room with me. I was only four years old when the first movie came out, and somehow it felt like Ghostface—his mask and his voice and his especially his knife—had always been there, lurking in the background.

But I was not four anymore. In the car with Grant, I imagined what it might be like to tell him about the murder. To explain why I didn’t watch slasher movies, why I wasn’t a fan of blood and gore.

How cute, he said when I told him I was nervous. He kept on driving. I decided not to say anything. We got our tickets and sat down in silence. I wondered if anyone in the crowd could tell how scared I already was, how I began digging my nails into my skin.

After the first phone call, the movie begins with two false starts: sequential opening scenes from the films-within-the-film, Stab 6 and 7, to trick the viewer. To blur the line between fantasy and reality. First, two teen girls—one I’d recognized as Darcy from my favorite show growing up, Degrassi—sit in the kitchen talking about a guy who’d been stalking one of them on Facebook. After Ghostface attacks them, the screen zooms out to show the title card for Stab 6, which two other teen girls are watching on the couch. The audience, including Grant, laughs at the graphic deaths of the teen girls as they are attacked by the man in the mask.

The blonde on the left, unimpressed by the film, says, A bunch of articulate teenagers sit around and deconstruct horror movies until Ghostface kills them one by one? It’s been done to death… Stick a fork in 1996 already.

Soon, her friend pulls out a knife and stabs her, telling her to shut the fuck up and watch the movie. While everyone around me was entertained by the effects and the gratuitous fake blood, I stood up and ran out of the theater as the title card for Stab 7 flashed across the screen. I couldn’t breathe, flooded with thoughts of the knife from that night, and the screams—the real kind—I’d heard that night.

Alone in the bathroom stall, I wondered if Grant even noticed I’d left.

A friend picked me up from the theater, and I lay in bed unable to sleep, haunted by my bad thoughts again: the blood on the wall, the knife the cops had never found, the terror I felt then and still felt every time I had to relive it. After I turned the light on in my room, I ran out to my apartment’s shared bathroom, pulled back the curtain. My roommate was never home, so most nights, it was as if I lived alone. I stared up at the ceiling and wondered if Grant had been one of those boys who dressed up like Ghostface to scare girls in the school hallway just because he could.

I wanted to find out more about the movies that had lived in the darkest corners of my imagination for so long. I pulled out my laptop and typed in Scream history. In a 1998 interview, screenwriter Kevin Williamson told a story: he was scared to death when he wrote the opening scene of Scream. It was credited with reviving the slasher genre but was comical and over the top enough that it seemed to spoof itself.

I was watching this Barbara Walters special on the Gainesville murders, he recalled. He told the reporters how the crimes of the Gainesville Ripper—a series of 1990 stabbings that had shaken the small college town in Central Florida just two hours away from where I lived—had scared him so bad he’d imagined an intruder had broken in through the window and left it open.

He didn’t mention the details of the Gainesville killings, which included stalking, rape, and even decapitation in the case of the victim whose head had been posed on her dresser for her parents to find. After waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, thanks to that Barbara Walters special, Williamson explained, he got up and started writing about a masked killer who stalked a small town with a knife in his gloved hand.

A year earlier, Janet Frake gave an interview to a local Florida newspaper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, seven years after the Gainesville murders. Frake was the only victim who’d survived an attack by the Gainesville Ripper—before he’d become a media sensation complete with a nickname fit for primetime TV. She explained how, just three days before the first attack in Gainesville, she’d returned to her Sarasota home with a rented video and a six pack of beer when a man in a black ski mask who’d been hiding in her bathroom attacked her, raping her at knifepoint.

Somehow, Frake explained, she’d convinced him not to go through with the rest, by inviting him to sit down for a beer. He offered to take off his mask, but she didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to have to remember his face. In the interview, Frake said, To be honest, I thought it was a joke at first. Then you see a black mask and you see a knife.

The opening scene of Scream, which leaves Drew Barrymore’s body bloodied and hanging from a tree for her parents to find when they get home, seems to say the same thing: all of this is just a joke.

The special Williamson had watched was an episode of ABC’s news series, Turning Point, titled Gainesville: The Price of Murder.

But who remembers the victims? Barbara Walters had asked in her opening remarks. It was 1994. Three years had passed since the Ripper, Danny Rolling, had attacked five University of Florida students in a black hood, black mask, and black leather gloves.

The special detailed the tragic deaths of the five young people who were stabbed to death by Rolling over the course of three days in August 1990. In her bright red blazer, Walters sat viewers down in their living rooms and promised to do things differently than most murder stories, as she called them. She would highlight, maybe for the first time, the lives of the victims rather than the crimes of the perpetrator.

Starring news personalities Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings, Turning Point was in its first season. The Gainesville special was the third episode, airing just two weeks after its premiere, The Manson Women: Inside the Murders, showed Sawyer interviewing Charles Manson in prison. The 90s were ripe with televised crime stories, with Unsolved Mysteries airing inside millions of our households and Law & Order already in its fourth season of telling the same story over and over.

Turning Point premiered three months before Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death in Brentwood, California, and two years before the mysterious death of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey. We invited Barbara Walters into our homes to show us the worst of humanity and she convinced us never to look away. We didn’t yet know these investigations—and others like them—would become an American obsession that would endure for decades. We didn’t yet know how long our eyes would be glued to the white Bronco speeding down a Los Angeles freeway, waiting to see what would happen next.

Most of the time, even all these years later, when I tell people about what happened, I know where their minds go: cop shows like Law & Order, slasher movies like Scream. Sometimes they’ll mention these titles themselves, won’t even try to hide it. But they know the murder wasn’t committed by some masked man, some stranger wearing a black hood. So, they’ll usually offer another reference, like the early 2000s mother-daughter melodrama White Oleander.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Orange is the New Black, said a co-worker once after I told her at happy hour.

I’ve never seen it, I said, swirling the ice around in my glass. She seemed genuinely surprised.

Others have asked me if interrogation rooms really have mirrored windows, if I really had to put my hand on the Bible before I testified in the trial, if I had to talk to my mom through glass with an old school telephone.

I’m sorry, it’s just, it’s kind of like the movies, they usually say. People must ask you stuff like that all the time.

I think back to the only part of the Scream franchise I’ve ever seen—the opening in Scream 4, the one where the blonde kills the other blonde because it’s really Stab 7.

It’s been done to death, I think. Still, I smile and nod, answer their questions, no matter how intrusive, no matter what bad thoughts they conjure in me. It’s when I’m alone, flipping every light switch on, double, sometimes triple checking that the doors are locked that I’ll deal with the cost. It’s me, alone, who’s left to face what Barbara Walters called the price of murder.

Kristi D. Osorio is the winner of the 2023 Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Sonora Review Mercy Contest in Nonfiction. She is at work on a memoir that blends cultural criticism around violence in popular culture and her personal story as the survivor of a violent crime. Her work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She enjoys running, watching baseball, and spending time in nature.