There is a single recording of a man screaming that has turned up in more than four hundred films and television shows. You have almost certainly heard it. Once someone points it out, you will hear it everywhere for the rest of your life.
It was recorded in 1951 for a Western called Distant Drums, for a scene in which a soldier wading through a Florida swamp is dragged under by an alligator. The actor who supplied the yell was most likely Sheb Wooley, better known for the novelty song «The Purple People Eater». His scream was filed away in the Warner Bros. sound library, the way studios kept stock effects for reuse, and there it waited.
Two years later it was pulled out for another Western, The Charge at Feather River, and attached to a character named Private Wilhelm, who takes an arrow to the leg. That reuse eventually gave the sound its nickname, though nobody was calling it that yet.
The scream would still be a scrap of studio trivia if not for a young sound designer named Ben Burtt. While building the audio for Star Wars in the 1970s, Burtt dug the old yell out of the archives, recognised it from the films of his childhood, gave it the name Wilhelm scream, and dropped it into the movie under a stormtrooper falling from a ledge. Then he kept using it, film after film, as a private signature.
Other sound crews were in on the joke, and it spread. The Wilhelm turns up in every original Star Wars film, across the Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings movies, in Pixar and Disney cartoons, and in countless action films whose editors slipped it in as a wink to anyone paying attention. It is a seventy-year-old man’s voice, recorded for a forgotten alligator attack, still dying on screen every few months.
Here is the risk in reading this. The next explosion or long fall you watch, some corner of your mind will be waiting for it. And every so often, it will be there.
