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Classmates reveal strange behavior

BY EMILY C. DOOLEY | Special to Newsday
emily.dooley@newsday.com

April 19, 2007

Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho took an English class last year called Contemporary Horror in which he studied films such as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the slasher flick "Saw," according to two classmates.

Cho was the guy in class who never signed his name on a roll call sheet.

"He would only put a question mark," said senior Lauren A. Moscater, 21, a communications student from Centereach majoring in film.

Just days after the shootings that ended with 33 people dead, a chilling image of the 23-year-old has emerged. Among the details are two twisted plays he penned for a creative writing class -- one about a child who obsesses about killing his pedophiliac stepfather with a chainsaw and another about a teacher stalking and terrorizing students.

Contemporary Horror examined such scenarios.

"It used to be that horror films came out at a prescribed time: October," the description for the class read. "But now it seems as if every week a new film invades the multiplex. We are consuming horror on an unprecedented scale."

During the class, students watched the 2004 slasher movie "Saw" about the Jigsaw Killer, who trapped two men in a bathroom and told them to kill each other or be killed.

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was part of the elective's curriculum, as was a book about Jack the Ripper.

Students kept a fear journal, writing of personal terrors and reactions to class stories.

"I would have been terrified to know what he had to say," said Allison Lewis, 22, a classmate of Cho in a literature course.

When teacher Harry Brenton Stevens asked Cho to introduce himself to the class on the first day, he refused, once leaving the room before he could be called upon and another time shaking his head, Moscater said.

In a 2006 Roanoke Times interview, Stevens said the class tracked the history of horror and what the genre's developments say about culture.