The Stock Scream Hidden in 400 Movies

In a Warner Bros. sound stage in 1951, an uncredited actor recorded six takes of a man being shot and falling. The session label read "man being eaten by alligator," intended for the Gary Cooper Western Distant Drums. One of those takes ended up in the studio's stock effects library, where it sat for two decades doing routine work in B-pictures.

The scream got its current name from a single shot in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Warner film in which a character named Private Wilhelm takes an arrow to the leg and lets out the cry. By the 1970s a USC sound-design student named Ben Burtt had noticed the same yell turning up in old films, dug it out of the Warner library, and started slipping it into his own work — first into Star Wars, where a stormtrooper falls into the Death Star chasm in 1977.

Burtt and his colleagues at Lucasfilm and Pixar made a sport of it. The Wilhelm now appears in every Star Wars and Indiana Jones movie, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, every Pixar feature through Toy Story 3, Reservoir Dogs, Anchorman, Aladdin, and well past 400 films and television shows by recent counts. Sound editors who use it are signaling, with one cue, that they were trained in the Burtt lineage.

The identity of the man who did the original recording is still not certain. The best guess from researchers and from Burtt himself is the singing cowboy Sheb Wooley, who happened to be on the Distant Drums dubbing schedule that day in 1951 — the same Sheb Wooley who would later record "The Purple People Eater."