Ben Burtt And The Wilhelm Scream
You’ve heard it a million times before, but you can’t quite place it. It’s the so called Wilhelm scream, a short pained scream that usually betrays its heritage by just sounding just a little low-fidelity for the modern blockbuster it has been inserted into. No, we’re not talking about those master of Indie production music ‘A Wilhelm Scream’ (no, never heard of them), the scream appears in an estimated 216 films and many video games and other media too.
The story of the ‘Wilhelm Scream’, or at least, the ‘Wilhelm Scream’ as a phenomenon, begins with sound designer Benjamin Burtt Jr. discovering a reel labeled ‘Man being eaten by alligator’ at the sound effects library at Warner Bros. Burtt was working at the time on ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’ and had noticed the scream before himself in many Warner Bros. films. In fact, he’d already incorporated the scream into a film called ‘The Scarlett Blade’, but ‘Star Wars’ was the first film where he had access to the source. Burtt adopted the scream as a personal signature for films he worked on, putting instances in every ‘Star Wars’, ‘Indiana Jones’ and other films like ‘Willow’ and ‘More American Graffiti’. Through the years, many other sound engineers have carried on the tradition. Richard Anderson, Burtt’s colleague on Indiana Jones, used the scream in ‘Poltergeist’, ‘Batman Returns’ and countless other films he worked on.
So why is it the ‘Wilhelm scream’? Burtt remembered the sound effect from a 1953 picture called ‘Charge at Feather River’, where the scream is used when a character named Pvt. Wilhelm gets show in the leg with an arrow. However, it has actually been discovered that the source of the sound effect was actually another western ‘Distant Drums’ which was made two years before ‘Feather River’. The original effect is likely the vocal performance of Sheb Wooley, a character actor who played a minor role in the picture. Wooley was also a musician, and his library music included the 1958 release ‘Purple People Eater’.
January 5, 2011
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Posted by Jam Man
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