The very first movie to use the Wilhelm Scream
Filmmakers are crafty folk, who love to show off to their peers quite how much they know about the history of the industry, planting small easter eggs throughout their movies that point to some of cinema’s most iconic moments. Pixar loves a Stanley Kubrick reference, Quentin Tarantino has pastiched almost every director on the planet, and the Wilhelm Scream is a running gag passed down through the generations of the art form.
Used both as a lazy sound effect and a running in-joke from one film to the next, the Wilhelm Scream has been used in horror movies, comedies and more, being highly recognisable for fans at this point. But where exactly did it originate from? To answer this question, we have to go right back to the 1950s and the release of a minor western flick directed by Raoul Walsh.
With filmmaking becoming an ever-more commercial enterprise, movie studios began to create stock sounds that could be used over and over for multiple film projects, saving them the time and money in the long run to once again find the same sounds. Western movies were the perfect type of flick to require countless sound effects, needing gunshots, the flurry of horse’s hooves, screams, explosions and much more.
Enter the 1952 Garry Cooper-led Warner Bros movie Distant Drums. Telling the story of a group of American soldiers who have to traverse the Everglades whilst facing hostility, one scene in the film involves a man being bitten by an alligator, a moment that would birth the very first Wilhelm Scream, being performed by Sheb Wooley.
As was the practice at the time, this sound effect was then passed around from movie to movie, with the audio clip being titled ‘Man being eaten by alligator’. It wasn’t until the sound designer Ben Burtt got his hands on it and recognised the effect from the ’50s western, The Charge at Feather River, when a character called Private Wilhelm is shot by an arrow, that he would rename it after the actor in order to use it on his latest project, 1977’s Star Wars.
Once Star Wars made $775.8million at the box office from a budget of just $11m, the Wilhelm Scream had been heard by millions of fans and filmmakers across the globe, and since everyone wanted to create the next sci-fi epic, the sound effect was copied and ripped.
Becoming synonymous with the Star Wars series, the effect made its way into each of the original instalments whilst accompanying over-the-top death scenes in such movies as Howard the Duck, Gremlins and even the animated flick Beauty and the Beast.
