Wilhelm Screamix: The sound effect that never dies

listening to 20,000 Hertz.

In the film and TV industry, sound editors often use sound libraries to find the effects they need.

Many of these recordings go back decades, and certain sounds end up getting used over and over.

For instance, here's a recording you've probably heard called Two Cats Angrily Yowling During Cat Fight.

These cat sounds have shown up in hundreds of movies and TV shows.

For instance, they're often used for the Simpsons cat, Snowball.

Well, I don't care what you say.

She still loves us more.

Don't you, Snowball?

These cat sounds apparently came from an early 80s recording of two real angry cats.

But some people think these sounds might have actually been performed by the legendary voice actor Frank Welker.

Here's Frank making cat noises on a variety show in the 1970s.

In fact, in some Simpsons episodes, Frank is specifically credited as the voice of Snowball and the Simpsons dog, Santa's little helper.

If that were a real Girl Scout, I'd have been bothered by now.

There's also a classic scream that you'll probably recognize.

The soundbite is called Man Lets Out Gut-Wrenching Scream and Falls into the Distance.

That scream was recorded in the late 70s by an unknown voice artist.

It was first used in a 1980 film called The Ninth Configuration.

During a barfight scene, a bad guy with a knife lunges through a window.

In the mid-90s, the scream got a new burst of popularity thanks to an action movie called Broken Arrow.

In that movie, there's a character played by the football player turned actor Howie Long.

In one scene, Howie's character gets kicked out of a train which is traveling over a bridge.

As he falls down the cliff, you hear this.

Ever since then, this scream has been known as the Howie Scream.

But when it comes to movie screams, there's one scream to rule them all, and that was the subject of one of our classic early episodes.

Recently, this scream got some news coverage.

These articles said that the original recording session had been rediscovered after being lost for decades.

If only these reporters had been 20,000Hz listeners, they could have heard this so-called lost recording years ago.

To set the record straight, I decided it was time to remix our original episode and spruce it up a bit with a fresh coat of sonic paint.

Because as widely known as this sound is, many people still don't know where it came from.

So, let's find out.

The two screams you just heard were from Ron Burgundy in Anchorman and Ash in Evil Dead 2.

Movie screams seem like easy work, but they're not.

That's why some of the best are so iconic.

You have scary ones, like Captain Quint from Jaws,

or Janet Lee from Psycho.

And the original scream queen, Faye Rae, from King Kong way back in 1933.

Then you've got non-horror screams, like Kevin from Home Alone feeling the burn of Aftershave.

I can't seem to find my toothbrush, so I'll pick one up when I go out today.

Other than that, I'm in good shape.

And Marv the Burglar from the same film when Kevin puts a tarantula on his face.

But the most famous scream is one you've heard, but maybe never heard of.

The Wilhelm scream.

Hi, I'm Steve Lee.

I'm a sound effects wrangler, a film historian, and I'm forming the Hollywood Sound Museum.

It's interesting how Wilhelm has sort of become this sort of, you know, go-to sound effect that sort of represents a lot more than just the one sound.

It's fascinating how many of these sounds are actually reused over and over and over.

You may be thinking, what's the Wilhelm scream?

If you think you've never heard it, it's been used in movies such as Batman,

Star Wars,

Toy Story,

Lord of the Rings,

Tropic Thunder,

Beauty and the Beast,

Team America,

Spaceballs,

Jurassic World,

300,

Cars,

Indiana Jones,

and this barely scratches the surface

When I was a kid growing up, I went to Disneyland.

I lived in LA and I went to Disneyland and I watched movies and I recorded movies off the TV and, you know, studied the soundtrack.

And I started to hear sound effects over and over.

Wilhelm was one of them, but there were many other too.

There was a dog bark that is in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland.

And I remember hearing it again in Mary Poppins when I was watching that on TV once.

And I'm going, somebody must reuse these sound effects.

And that sort of was a very early realization.

And that sort of led the way for my

research and fascination with how these sounds are collected and reused and catalogued.

The Wilhelm Scream has been used in tons of movies.

But where did it come from?

We've done some sort of backtracking.

Most of this done by Ben Burt himself, who is the Star Wars sound effects designer, who

started using this as sort of a personal sound signature.

The name actually comes from what is probably the second film it was used in, which was Charge at Feather River, which was 1953 at Warner Brothers.

Poor private Wilhelm is at the end of this party going by on horses, and the leader yells back to him to, you know, pick up your pace.

And he says, oh, I'm just filling my pipe.

But in that moment, he gets an arrow in the leg and lets out the screen.

Wilhelm!

Wilhelm!

Yeah, I'll just fill my pipe.

They must have liked the Wilhelm scream a lot because they ended up using it two more times in the film.

Once when a soldier is killed,

and another for an American Indian warrior in battle.

The Charge at Feather River was the film that gave Wilhelm its name, but it was the second film it was used in.

What was the first?

It started at Warner Brothers.

The first film it was in was a Western called Distant Drums, a Gary Cooper Western.

Distant Drums was released two years before the Charge at Feather River in 1951.

And it had a scene where a man is walking across the Florida Everglaves with other soldiers, and he's bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator.

And they needed a scream for that.

Ben found a memo in the Warner Brothers archives that said that several people came in to do sort of post vocals for the film, and we're pretty sure that the scream was recorded in that session.

And one of the gentlemen on the list of people was a guy named Sheb Woolley,

who is most famous for his pop song, Purple People Eater.

It was a one-eyed, one-horn flying purple people eater.

One-eyed, one-horn flying, purple people eater.

But he was a character actor, and he was in a lot of these old westerns.

We're pretty sure that he is responsible for the scream.

And many years later, I was able to put Ben Burt in touch with Sheb's widow, and she was delighted.

And she actually remembered that Sheb used to talk about going in to do sessions like that and screams and things like that so we're like 99% sure it's Sheb Woolley.

Sheb Woolley sounds like a fascinating guy.

A singer, an on-screen actor, and a voice actor.

But how was the Wilhelm scream actually captured on tape?

Well, thanks to Steve, we've acquired the full-length original recording of the session.

It was recorded from a Warner Bros.

soundstage in 1951 on the set of distant drums.

Remember, Sheb is not actually in a river surrounded by alligators.

He's trying to create the sound of tremendous pain, agony, and fear, but from the safe surroundings of a film lot.

The session starts out.

You hear several people on a stage.

We believe it was actually recorded on a filming soundstage and not a recording stage, because you hear several people milling about.

And then you hear someone slate through and he says, A man getting bit by an alligator and he screams.

And you hear a director like shutting everyone up

and then he tells the kayake

and he asks for the first scream okay right in the foot go in

and it's pretty good it's it's like a quick scream he does another one

and then he asks for a little direction the first one you did up here was much better You know, I shared the frustration with the director.

It's like, no, that's not what I want.

I want a real scream.

And he's getting closer, but it's still not quite.

And then the director gives him something that motivates him to do the classic scream that we all recognize.

And then the next two are very similar to that.

And we've actually used these.

all three of these last ones as sort of the official Wilhelm.

If this obscure scream was first used back in 1951, how did it become so popular that it's been used in so many movies since then?

We'll find out after this.

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Congratulations to Matt Berry for correctly guessing last episode's Mystery Sound.

That's a scene from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the bad guys take the lid off the Ark of the Covenant.

The scraping sound you hear when the lid gets removed is actually the lid of sound designer Ben Burt's toilet tank.

And here's this episode's mystery sound.

If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org.

Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000Hz t-shirt.

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We're now pretty sure that Sheb Woolley was the voice behind the Wilhelm scream.

We also know how it was recorded.

But how did this spread like wildfire and become the most iconic movie scream in history?

Ben Burt went to college with two guys, Rick Mitchell and Richard Anderson.

Richard and Ben won an Oscar for Raiders Lost Art for sound effects.

They were sort of doing this as a little joke in film school at USC using this scream that they remembered from all these old Westerns.

And they started using it in their short films at USC.

And when they went pro, they started sneaking it into the films that they did for real, real feature films.

For decades, this was a below-the-radar thing that only sound designers knew about.

Maybe someone in the industry who used the Wilhelm scream themselves might recognize it in another film, but it wasn't really a thing.

Warner Brothers used it quite a bit.

It was in their library, and sound editors could just pull it and use it.

And up until the early 70s, it was still getting used out of Warner Brothers exclusively.

And Ben tracked it down when he was doing research for Star Wars.

He said, Oh, I got to use this.

This is a favorite of mine.

He tracked down the master and he started using it in all the Star Wars films.

All the Indiana Jones films.

And that's when I started to really take notice and started maintaining a list of all as best I could.

I mean, there are hundreds of films.

When I started working professionally in the mid to late 80s, I started sort of pushing Wilhelm, and we used it in quite a few films.

And I think I sort of overdid it because it really got noticed noticed by a lot of people.

Ben Burt started this, and Steve kind of took the baton and ran with it.

He was just doing it as a little in joke, and then I sort of pushed the envelope a little in the late 80s and early 90s.

We used it in everything.

I even got it in a goofy movie.

I was the sound designer of a goofy movie, and it has absolutely no business being in a goofy movie.

Roxanne, please don't forget me.

I will return someday.

Oh, I may be attraction when I do.

And like many things, when the internet came along, everything changed.

And then when I published the list online on a movie history website I run, I published this list and sort of the definitive history of Wilhelm.

And that's pretty much when the dam broke.

While Ben introduced the Wilhelm Scream to people like George Lucas, it sounds like Steve has done his fair share.

I wondered if there's a good story about any directors he brought into the Wilhelm Club.

We were very lucky at our sound shop.

We worked with a lot of directors over and over who kept coming back, and some first-timers that went on to be really great and do some amazing things.

One of them is a guy I'm sure you've heard of named Quentin Tarantino.

We did his first film Reservoir Dogs, and there are a couple of Wilhelms in that one.

How did you get up?

I shot my way out.

I started shooting, so I blasted my way out of there.

Move back!

Get away!

And I will never forget, we cut it in, and then when we were dubbing the film, we pointed it out to him and told him the history.

We actually, we schooled him on it.

And he loved it.

Quentin's a huge movie fan and just eats that stuff up.

And I had a little tiny black and white TV in my office, and I turned it on.

And lo and behold, distant drums is on the Saturday afternoon film.

So I ducked my head into the dove stage and said, hey guys, you remember I told you about that screen?

Well, the movie's on right now that it was recorded.

And Quentin went nuts.

Oh my God, really?

Really?

Do you know when it's coming up?

Can you tell us when it's coming up?

And yeah, I could probably give you like five minutes' notice.

Okay, do that and we'll take a break.

And sure enough, I did.

And I called him in.

And there were like 10 guys in my little office.

And as soon as it came on, Quentin was screaming, that's in my movie.

But Quentin Tarantino isn't the only modern director with a soft spot for Wilhelm.

Peter Jackson was another one when it was in The Two Towers.

He apparently told the mixers to turn it up, make it louder.

The Wilhelm Scream is in all three Lord of the Rings movies and all three Hobbit movies.

Like many movie styles or special effects, they eventually fade out.

So has interest in using the Wilhelm Scream started to die down?

It's still used all the time.

It's in commercials.

I'll turn on the TV and I'll hear it in an Exxon commercial or something.

A week does not go by where I don't get an email or a message from someone saying, I heard it in such and such.

Hey, we're on a dub stage in Australia putting it in some little movie or, you know, hey, it's going to be in a Twix commercial.

It's going to start airing in December.

You know, that kind of thing.

You know, kids coming out of film school are eager to use it too.

And there's a scene in the Judy Garland Star is Born where it's actually completely in the clear and you can notch out the classic take number four, Wilhelm.

And people are stealing it out of that to use in their student films and things like that.

It's pretty crazy.

Ben accused me of starting a cult and I'd have to agree with him.

So why does the movie industry continue to use the Wilhelm screen?

Is it cliché or cachet?

Maybe it's a connector, a through line, a way to be a link in the chain of movie history from 1951 to today.

To share a common bond with directors like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Quentin Tarantino.

It's sort of a way of communicating with others in our craft.

It's like a way of saying hi.

One of my dear friends, another Oscar winner, Dave Stone, he equated it to dogs on a fire hydrant and other dogs would come by and, oh, yeah, Sam's been here.

We put it in there to see if others of our kind get noticed.

And I, for sure, if I hear it in a movie that I wasn't aware it was in, I'll wait and look at the credits more closely and say, oh, yeah, so-and-so did this.

Yeah, that dirty dog, he snuck it in.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the studios of DeFacto Sound.

Find out more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Edds.

It was story-edited by Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East.

It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.

And Joel Boyder.

A huge thanks to film historian and sound effects archivist Steve Lee, who's heading up the Hollywood Sound Museum project.

The museum will be a destination for fans, students, scholars, and professionals, where you'll be able to discover the art of creating sound for film, TV, and other media through exhibits and educational programs.

Please help get this great cause off the ground by visiting HollywoodSoundMuseum.org.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.