The Same Scream Has Been Dying in Movies Since 1951

In Raoul Walsh's Distant Drums (1951), a soldier wading through a Florida swamp gets bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. The scream isn't his — it was added later, in a foley session labeled, on the recording can, "Man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams." The fourth take was the keeper. Six different agonies in that movie share that same voice.

The scream got its name two years later. In The Charge at Feather River (1953), a character called Private Wilhelm takes an arrow to the thigh and lets the cry out again. By then it was already a stock effect, sitting in Warner Bros.'s shared sound library, the kind of thing a studio kept on hand for any scene that needed a body falling.

It would have stayed there if Ben Burtt hadn't gone digging. Burtt was the young sound designer hired for Star Wars in 1977. He pulled the recording out of the vault, christened it "Wilhelm," and used it for the stormtrooper Luke Skywalker shoots off a ledge in the Death Star. Then he kept doing it — The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi. His friends in the sound community noticed and joined in.

The likely owner of the original lungs is Sheb Wooley, an uncredited bit-part actor on Distant Drums who later wrote the 1958 novelty hit "The Purple People Eater." His widow told an interviewer in 2005 that Wooley used to joke about how good he was at screaming and dying.

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings has it. Toy Story has it. Reservoir Dogs has it. Once you've heard it, you can't un-hear it — the same man dying, over and over, for seventy-five years.