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Why You ALWAYS Hear This Scream In Movies
Jul 28, 2025
The Wilhelm Scream is a sound effect most people would recognize, but few actually know it's history. From Star Wars, Batman, Lord of the Rings, Toy Story and countless others, The Wilhelm Scream has been an inside industry joke for decades. But how exactly did The Wilhelm Scream become such a staple in Hollywood? How did this Warner Brothers archive sound effect make its way into the cinematic classics?
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OK, you know this scream, right
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If you don't immediately recognize it, you've definitely seen it here, here
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and here. This iconic vocal exclamation is referred to within the industry
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as the Wilhelm scream. And the story of how it ended up being one
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of the most pervasive movie sound effects ever is a bit of a strange tale
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And what about that scream? We gotta dub that. Alright, you know any good screamers? People from all walks of life watch, love, and attempt to make movies
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Film is a common language across identities, generations, and continents. As such, the elevated platform and visibility of film's cultural prominence
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enables small in-jokes and Easter eggs to take on a cachet that wouldn't normally happen in other mediums
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Glancing references were callbacks to a director's hometown. It was bought in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee
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or childhood car become internationally recognized hallmarks. And these winks and nods at the audience become sacred institutions
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And that's a beautiful thing. And because the larger-than-life mythology so many filmic traditions take on
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these mechanics can be appropriated by filmmakers from generation to generation. It's almost like a game of artistic telephone
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one that plays out across literal time and space. And yet, no film hallmark exists in this paradigm more than the Wilhelm scream
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For a sound that we all know and recognize, the scream in question had a very humble beginning
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The initial use of this guttural howl appeared in the 1951 Warner Brothers film Distant Drums
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These frames of celluloid show a man being attacked by an alligator and screaming as he's pulled underwater
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While it sounds comedic now this seemingly forgettable sequence will become something that has touched almost every major corner of the filmmaking world The sound next showed up in a 1952 western The Springfield Rifle
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and then again in the 1953 film, The Charge at Feather River. This would be the appearance that
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gave the sound its name. The character yelping in pain was named Private Wilhelm. The character
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was shot with an arrow, and the rest, as they say, was history. Except really not. You see
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the sound would show up in numerous Warner Brothers productions after this. Them, the Green
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Berets, and the 1954 A Star is Born, among others, but it wasn't an industry-wide in-joke. It was just
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a stock sound effect that Warner's sound engineers would use in many of their films. It was as common
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and unappreciated as a thousand stock gunfire and thundercrack effects that Warner's had in their
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archive. That is, until the 1970s, when two film industry friends would forever make the sound
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iconic. Ben Burt, the sound designer responsible for such beloved movie sounds as R2-D2's voice
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TIE Fighter screams, and lightsaber hums, and his friend Richard L. Anderson, were just college students at the time attending USC
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According to the master of everything Skywalker Sound himself, the two were sifting through boxes of Warner Sound archive recordings and found a goofy-sounding
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pained yelp. They fell in love with it, and it became something of a running gag between the two
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of them. They began using it in all their projects in school, and when they both transitioned into
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professional work, it transitioned with them. Anderson was the first of the duo to utilize
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the scream as a pro in 1976's Hollywood Boulevard. But it was Ben Burtt who really poured rocket
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fuel on this inside gag when he put it in a little picture called Star Wars. It would show up in
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virtually every film the pair worked on after that. Raiders of the Lost Ark Batman Returns Poltergeist and literally scores of others
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And since these two were working on some of the biggest films of their era
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everyone else wanted in on the joke. It spread like wildfire. Just look at the ubiquity of the sound
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It shows up in everything from the two towers to Transformers to Pixar's cars
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This Hollywood-running bit has been so pervasive that it's entered the cultural lexicon in a way
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no one could have anticipated, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down anytime soon, which
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begs the question, whose voice is it that we're all so fond of? Turns out it belongs to the actor
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Sheb Woolley, or at least we're pretty sure it does. He portrayed a private named Jessup in the
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original Distant Drums film. Woolley made a career for himself portraying a variety of characters in
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westerns. However, when Ben Bird eventually went on a research trip to attempt to discover who the
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actor was and confirmed that it was his voice that everyone had been using for decades, Wooley
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had tragically passed away and therefore was unable to substantiate his role in film history
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However, his wife, Linda Dotson Wooley, affirmed that she believed it to be her late husband
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Shockingly, the original audio recordings of the Wilhelm Scream recording session have been recently uncovered. These recordings were discovered by a man named Craig Smith
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a researcher at CalArts. He found them after being given boxes of recordings no one wanted
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at USC. These original records illuminate the fact that there are six different takes of the
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beloved scream. If one of these other screams had been selected for the finished film, would we all
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be talking about it so many years later Impossible to know but thankfully the creative process yielded us something that is truly singular Believe it or not all these films that feature the scream are not reproduced from the original sound They duplicate recordings and dubs made from second and third generation rips
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Having this original recording is a gift to archivists and sound editors for generations
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to come. Today, the Wilhelm scream is something that even if you're not familiar with the backstory
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you definitely recognize the high-pitched shriek. It has jumped the tracks from being an in-joke between film school friends
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and become a piece of global culture, something that symbolizes the high-stakes adventure and whimsical nature of the silver screen
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Is it funny? Yes. Sure, it's an inherently humorous-sounding scream, but it's more a symbol of the uniting power of the medium of film
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There isn't an artistic medium on Earth that would give birth to a piece of ephemeral material
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that would have touched as many people. It's just not possible. But because every culture on Earth watches movies
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this small narrative cog can be recycled, picked up, and reused in literally hundreds, if not thousands, of films
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Movies bring people together. They're a communal art form. Theaters are a place where individuals from disparate backgrounds
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come together to marvel at spectacle on a 50-foot tall screen. What better way is there to symbolize the unifying power of art
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Well, maybe have an in-joke take on a life of its own
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and bring joy to literally millions of people by being adopted by nearly every sound engineer
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to ever try and splice film together. Yeah, that could work. The fact that this scream has spread like wildfire throughout nearly every corner of the globe
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is a supreme testament to both the simple beauty of its silliness
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and the clarity of vision that Ben Burtt and Richard L. Anderson had
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when they picked the sound from literal obscurity and chose to represent it to the masses
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This is one of the few stories that truly has a happy ending. Well, and the fact that objectively being attacked by an alligator sounds like a horrible way to die
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