The Scream That Hides in 400 Movies

In a 1951 Warner Bros. swamp scene, an alligator drags a soldier under, and someone in a Foley booth screams six different ways into a single take. The film was Distant Drums. The screams sat in the studio's stock-effects library, anonymous, for the next twenty-six years.

They would have stayed there if Ben Burtt, the sound designer for Star Wars, had not gone digging through Warner's archive in the mid-seventies. He pulled the reel labeled "Man Being Eaten by Alligator" and dropped one of the screams onto the moment in A New Hope where Luke shoots a stormtrooper off a Death Star catwalk. He named it after Private Wilhelm, a character in the 1953 cavalry picture The Charge at Feather River who takes an arrow to the thigh and lets out the same yelp. Burtt later traced the voice, with some confidence, to the country singer Sheb Wooley, of "Purple People Eater" fame.

After Star Wars it became a private joke. Burtt slipped it into Indiana Jones. His friends in the sound community started slipping it into their own pictures. The National Science and Media Museum puts the count at more than four hundred films, from Reservoir Dogs to Toy Story to Lord of the Rings.

Lucasfilm retired the gag after The Force Awakens in 2015, on the grounds that everyone was now in on it. The scream is still in the archive, still free for anyone to use, and still being used. It is the closest thing Hollywood has to a passed-down handshake.