The Same Scream Has Been Used in 400 Movies

The most reused sound effect in Hollywood is a man yelling. The actor was probably Sheb Wooley, the country-music singer who later wrote Purple People Eater. The recording session is undocumented but believed to date from the 1951 Warner Bros. Western Distant Drums, where a soldier wading through a Florida swamp is pulled under by an alligator and screams a quick, comic yelp.

Warner Bros. catalogued the take in its sound library as 'man getting bit by alligator, and he screams.' For the next two decades it appeared anonymously in dozens of studio films, including The Charge at Feather River (1953), where a character named Private Wilhelm is shot in the leg with an arrow. The sound's modern name comes from there.

In the mid-1970s, Ben Burtt was building the sound design for Star Wars. He found the scream in the Warner library, gave it the Wilhelm nickname, and slipped it into the moment a stormtrooper falls down a Death Star shaft. He has used it in nearly every Star Wars film since, and the in-joke spread. Indiana Jones, Toy Story, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Reservoir Dogs all contain the Wilhelm. The Hollywood Edge sound library, which licensed it for decades, says it has now appeared in more than 400 films and television episodes.

In the late 2010s, sound designers began deliberately retiring the cue, on the grounds that the joke had become a tell. Burtt himself reportedly stopped using it after The Last Jedi in 2017.