Okay, so maybe I’m the last one to glom onto this, but today I happened on a terrific article about the Wilhelm Scream, the trademark howling man-scream sound effect that has showed up in countless motion pictures since 1951.  Believe me, you’ll know it when you hear it, and you’ve undoubtedly heard it over the years without paying much attention.  But now that you know, you’ll fall in love with it even more.

Although it (along with several other related screams) was recorded for and first heard in the 1951 Warner Bros. film Distant Drums, the unique scream got its nickname from a scene in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River, in which a character called Pvt. Wilhelm took an arrow to the leg during an Indian attack.  It showed up in many Warner productions throughout the years, including, for you musical fans, in the charming and funny “Someone At Last” musical production number that Judy Garland acts out for husband James Mason at their beach house in 1954’s A Star is Born. 

Up-and-coming sound effects professionals/film buffs like Ben Burtt became enamored with the scream after noticing it in many movies.  When he began his career designing sound for Star Wars, he got the chance to discover, after archival research in studio vaults, its august provenance, and started using it in a slew of George Lucas productions.  Burtt and his sound colleague friends adopted the Wilhelm Scream as a trademark, including it wherever feasible in their big budget assignments.  It’s still in wide use today, not only a silly favorite of sound guys but also with its own fan club among directors, including Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson and others, who love to include it in their productions. 

The web is full of good Wilhelm information; the best is Steve Lee’s Hollywood Lost and Found, which has the full history of the scream, plus an ever-growing list of movies containing the Wilhelm.  Steve appears in a nice video report on the scream available here on YouTube.  NPR’s audio show On The Media did an episode on the scream back in February of 2001, and it can be accessed here, via transcript and audio.  There are also a couple of video compilations of film clips with the scream, one here and a slightly slicker version here.  Both are worth watching and will crack you up.

And who was the brilliant set of pipes behind the Wilhelm Scream?  While no definitive, set in stone paperwork seems to exist, the trail points to the late actor/singer Sheb Wooley, who appeared in Distant Drums and was called in later to lay down some sound effect tracks, including screams.  Wooley was a talented performer (remember “Purple People Eater”?) and though the mystery may never be completely cleared up, you couldn’t find anybody more talented than Sheb Wooley to have given the world the Wilhelm.