The Original Wilhelm Scream Has Been Found, Hear This Piece Of Movie History
The original Wilhelm Scream recording has been located.
The Wilhelm scream is an iconic piece of film history, with its inclusion in hundreds of movies and television shows including Quentin Tarantino‘s Kill Bill, Toy Story, The Simpsons, and nearly every Star Wars film in the franchise. Now, as shared on Twitter, the original Wilhelm Scream has been located and shared on free sound.org for the very first time! The scream was originally recorded in 1951 for the movie Distant Drums, though its true origins have long been shrouded in mystery.
Believed to be recorded by none other than the Purple People Eater singer himself, Sheb Wooley, the Wilhelm Scream began in a recording session used to create a stock sound effect bank of screams and shouts for the post-production editing of Distant Drums. The recording session was aptly titled “man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams, ” precisely where the first on-screen use of the scream landed. In Distant Drums, a troupe of American soldiers wades through a swamp in the Everglades while fleeing a furious tribe of Seminole Natives, leading to one character being attacked by an alligator and pulled underwater to his death, resulting in the first use of the iconic sound bite.
In the Twitter post, which was shared by Odd Tales Games founder Tim Soret, the director can be heard providing notes for Wooley, as he delivers a number of variations on a scream. After experimenting with a few methods to produce the right shout, Wooley nailed the take on the fifth try, producing the iconic Wilhelm Scream we all know today. In the seven decades since the scream was recorded, it has become an instantly recognizable Easter egg for film fanatics across the world, with its use popping up in hundreds of iconic scenes.
Tim Soret recalls that the audio always conjures the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons, which employed the Wilhelm Scream and a number of other stock shouting sounds, sharing a silent GIF of the cartoon with the caption, “I’m pretty sure you can hear this GIF.” Others in the thread were quick to point out their favorite uses of the scream, from Indiana Jones to The Mandalorian. The sound is so iconic that almost any movie fan familiar with the scream can likely recall at least half a dozen uses by memory.
The scream got its name when sound designer Ben Burtt incorporated it into a scene in 1977’s Star Wars, wherein Luke Skywalker shoots a Stormtrooper off a ledge. Burtt named the sound after Pvt Wilhelm, a minor character in the 1953 Western film The Charge at Feather River, who emits the scream after being shot with an arrow. With the sound finally being made available in a stock sound library, this marks the first time the general public can download the Wilhelm Scream directly from the source.
Freesound.org, where the Wilhelm Scream recording sessions are hosted, is a user-generated resource for preserving and restoring audio files from years past. Having received the Wilhelm recording sessions from a donation, the organization has kindly uploaded the sound bank in its entirety for anyone to view and download. With the millions of terabytes of data being transferred by the internet each second, it is heartwarming to see internet historians maintaining historical data from film history, providing free access to the files.
