Mental Floss

Listen to the Original Recording Session That Gave Us the ‘Wilhelm Scream’

The iconic sound effect used in hundreds of movies began with a man being told to scream like he was being eaten by an alligator.

The Wilhelm Scream has appeared in hundreds of movies.
The Wilhelm Scream has appeared in hundreds of movies. | VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS/GettyImages

There are hundreds of movie tropes that have endured over the decades, from guns and knives making strange, metallic sounds whenever they’re handled to people never saying “goodbye” when ending a phone call. But the most pervasive might be the Wilhelm Scream, which is the name given to a stock sound effect of a man howling in pain that filmmakers take great delight in using.

The scream’s origins can be traced back to Distant Drums. In the 1951 Western starring Gary Cooper, a platoon wades through alligator-infested waters. One hapless soldier is attacked and—as one would expect—shrieks in pain as he’s being devoured.

While the scream has been heard countless times since, the original recording session was discovered just recently. It surfaced in 2023 thanks to USC School of Cinematic Arts graduate and CalArts academic sound coordinator Craig Smith. For years, Smith had managed the preservation of archival materials from Sunset Editorial, a sound effects house that operated from around 1964 to 1987. The session, which you can hear below, was one of many audio tapes from the studio donated to USC Cinematic.

In the clip, the performer is prompted by an engineer to produce a sound suited for “a man getting bit by an alligator.”

“Ooohh!” the man yelps. Then: “Owwww! Owwwwww!”

“No, no, not an ‘ow,’ ” he’s told. “A real scream of pain.”

With this direction comes the classic scream: “Ahhhhoahhh!”

The man lets out two more takes. While his identity has never been confirmed, it’s believed to have been an actor and singer named Sheb Wooley, who sang 1958’s “The Purple People Eater.”

“It’s pretty certain,” Smith said on LAist’s radio show AirTalk in 2023. “There’s not a piece of paper that actually says that but Sheb Wooley was in [Distant Drums] and it’s known that he was contracted to do some dialogue replacement and voice sounds for the film.”

While the scream debuted in Distant Drums, it didn’t capture the attention of filmgoers until it was included in 1953’s The Charge at Feather River, in which a character named Private Wilhelm is struck by an arrow. Those in the industry who remembered it began using it more frequently in films of the 1970s, most notably in Star Wars, where sound engineer Ben Burtt attached it to a falling Stormtrooper and named the effect after the wounded private.

For a sampling of the various Wilhelm Screams in cinema, including Distant Drums, check out the compilation below.

You can also keep an ear out to see if you can catch it in new releases, but don’t expect to hear it in a newer Star Wars project. In 2018, Skywalker Sound’s Matthew Wood said Star Wars productions would be retiring the scream. It last appeared in 2015’s Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

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