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MITMH2022
Public Access

Solution to Scream

Lake Eerie

Answer: WOEBEGONE
by Eric Berlin and Gavin Edwards

Each of the audio clips includes a scream from a well-known song, with the vocal isolated from the backing music and then masked (in varying degrees) by the theme from Jaws.

The original tracks, in order, are:

  1. Beastie Boys, "Sabotage"
  2. James Brown, "Cold Sweat"
  3. Pink Floyd, "The Great Gig in the Sky"
  4. Led Zeppelin, "Whole Lotta Love"
  5. Prince, "The Beautiful Ones"
  6. Kanye West et alia, "Monster"
  7. The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
  8. Stevie Wonder, "Superstition"
  9. Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet"

Each of the titles on the movie posters is a lyric from one of those songs, while the movie's single-line synopsis includes a paraphrase of the same song's title.

  1. "Sabotage": Fly Off the Handle / "You've been… undermined."
  2. "Cold Sweat": Pulse / "Feel the clammy perspiration."
  3. "The Great Gig in the Sky": AAHH! / "At a heavenly concert, evil lurks."
  4. "Whole Lotta Love": Misusing / "When devotion turns into obsession."
  5. "The Beautiful Ones": Smash the Picture / "Who's watching the attractive people?"
  6. "Monster": Eat Your Brains / "Grotesquerie!"
  7. "Won't Get Fooled Again": The Shotgun Sings / He will not be deceived anymore!
  8. "Superstition": Devil's on His Way / "Is it a myth—or a curse?"
  9. "It's Oh So Quiet": Shhhh! / "It's utterly silent—maybe too silent."

The audience rating score for each movie indicates which letter to extract in the corresponding song title: Fly Off the Handle has an audience rating of 1, so we want the first letter of "Sabotage," S. Pulse also has an audience rating of 1, so we want the first letter of "Cold Sweat," C. AAHH! has an audience rating of 5, so we want the fifth letter of "The Great Gig in the Sky," R. Doing this with all nine song titles leads to the word SCREAMERS.

That suggests that we want to employ the names of the individuals who actually produced the screams in question.

  1. "Sabotage": Ad-Rock
  2. "Cold Sweat": James Brown
  3. "The Great Gig in the Sky": Clare Torry
  4. "Whole Lotta Love": Robert Plant
  5. "The Beautiful Ones": Prince
  6. "Monster": Nicki Minaj
  7. "Won't Get Fooled Again": Roger Daltrey
  8. "Superstition": Stevie Wonder
  9. "It's Oh So Quiet": Bjork

Using the critics' rating score to extract letters from those names in the order of the audio clips results in OWEBENGEO — which, when reordered in the sequence of the associated movie posters, produces the answer WOEBEGONE.