Ever want to let it all out and scream? Well now there’s a group for you. The Montreal Scream Society has been hosting meetups all summer 2026, allowing people to get together for a good scream. They say it helps relieve stress. “We tend to suppress a lot of emotions, especially scary ones like anger, anxiety and such, and we need to release. It’s important not to hit that breaking point,” said Clara Suzuki, the co-founder of the Montreal Scream Society. While there have been scream events in other cities, this is the only club of its kind in Canada. Lucas Hygate, who helps organize the free gatherings, said it’s also about community — and catharsis. “People are looking for a place to come together and express themselves, and I think that screaming is a bit of an unconventional way of expression,” he said. Every Thursday at 7:30 p.m., they gather at the Sir George-Étienne Cartier monument at the base of Mount Royal, just off Park Avenue, north of Pins Avenue. Suzuki said they have regulars, and the biggest crowd yet was 150 people. “It’s free therapy. Therapy’s extremely expensive, so we want to have a space where people can release and express themselves with no judgment and no payment,” she said. A multilingual countdown begins each round, increasing in volume and crowd size as they go. “After the first round, we get a couple of people from who watch us from the streets. They come and join. The most we’ve had, I think, is seven rounds,” explained Suzuki. The meet-up is only about 10 minutes long — but very intense — and followed by a natural high, said Hygate. “You feel a little bit ready to kind of take on the world and do anything. It just feels like a bit of a silly, fun thing,” he said, adding that it creates community. “We want to make friends who would be willing to come and scream with us.” Suzuki added that while it’s therapeutic, it’s also just for fun. “There are some people that think it’s a Satanic cult, which it very much is not!” she said. The Montreal Scream Society is free and runs all year long.
