The History Behind the Iconic ‘Wilhelm Scream’ Effect

The music and audio channel Mixed Signals looked at the history behind the famous “Wilhelm Scream”, a sound effect widely used to portray abject fear. This scream, thought to be voiced by Sheb Wooley, originated in the 1951 Warner Brothers film Distant Drums, even though the name was attributed to the ill-fated Private Wilhelm in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River.

This is known as the Wilhelm scream   and it’s one of the film industry’s longest  running inside jokes having been used in over 400 films It’s actually been in almost all of  the “Star Wars” movies as well as “Lord of the Rings”, “Indiana Jones” and countless others.

Because the sound effect didn’t really have a name or a use for a long time, it sat in the archives for decades. However, a couple of film students who went to work for George Lucas decided to insert it into the first Star Wars movie. Since then, the sound has been used widely across popular film franchises, including Indiana Jones, Home Alone, Predator, The Lord of the Rings, and many, many others.

The  sound remained in the Warner Brothers archives and it was used on and off in the decades that followed until it appeared on the radar of a film school student by the name of Ben Burtt. Burtt and his friend Richard Anderson found the scream hilarious and would put the scream into their student films And when Burrt was hired by George Lucas’s production company Lucasfilm to work on the sound effects for the first “Star Wars” movie he took the opportunity to place his favorite scream sound into the huge blockbuster.

Burt and Anderson also gave the scream its “official moniker”.

Over the years the two started  sneaking it into tons of films as an Easter egg for each other, casually referring to the sound  as the Wilhelm scream named after Private Wilhelm.  

Mixed Signals came back with more finely tuned information about the very first utterance of the Wilhelm Scream.

The Goofy Holler