He has been shot by arrows, bitten by an alligator, thrown from buildings, blasted through the air and knocked from at least one remarkably unsafe catwalk aboard the Death Star.

He has died in Westerns, war pictures, space adventures, cartoons and video games.

And after more than 70 years of cinematic punishment, nobody is completely certain who he was.

His entire performance lasts roughly two seconds:

“Aaaaugh—ah!”

It is known as the Wilhelm scream, and once you recognize it, watching action movies will never be quite the same again.

It Started With an Alligator

The scream was originally recorded for the 1951 Warner Bros. adventure film Distant Drums, starring Gary Cooper.

During one scene, soldiers are wading through a Florida swamp when one unfortunate fellow is attacked and dragged underwater by an alligator. Because recording clean dialogue and effects on location was difficult, the victim’s cries were produced afterward in a studio.

The surviving recording session contains several different attempts at the scream. Its wonderfully matter-of-fact label reportedly read:

“Man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams.”

One of those takes was placed in the movie. Warner Bros. then added it to its stock sound-effects library, allowing other productions to use it without hiring another actor, renting a studio or finding another cooperative alligator.

That was standard practice. Movie studios accumulated enormous libraries of gunshots, doors, horses, explosions, punches and human reactions. If an editor needed the sound of a man falling off a cliff, there was little reason to throw a fresh actor off one.

Just pull a scream from the shelf.

So Who Was Wilhelm?

Curiously, the original alligator victim wasn’t named Wilhelm.

The scream acquired that name two years later, when it was reused in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River. In that movie, a minor character named Private Wilhelm is struck in the leg by an arrow and emits the familiar shriek.

Wilhelm survived the arrow, but his name became permanently attached to the scream.

The identity of the actual screamer was not recorded with certainty. Sound designer Ben Burtt later investigated and concluded that the most likely performer was actor and musician Sheb Wooley, who appeared in Distant Drums and participated in additional voice recording for the film.

Wooley later became famous for singing the 1958 novelty hit “The Purple People Eater.” His widow recalled that he used to joke about being particularly good at screaming and dying in movies. Still, because no definitive session document names him as the performer, Wooley remains the overwhelmingly likely—but not absolutely proven—voice of Wilhelm. The National Science and Media Museum recounts the original recording and Wooley connection here.

Actor and singer Sheb Wooley

Ben Burtt Resurrects the Dead

For years, the scream was simply another Warner Bros. stock effect. It appeared in movies including Them!, A Star Is Born and The Green Berets, usually accompanying some poor background character’s abrupt misfortune.

Then Ben Burtt came along.

Burtt was the young sound designer hired to create the audio world of George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars. He would eventually give cinema the hum of the lightsaber, R2-D2’s electronic vocabulary and Darth Vader’s mechanical breathing.

While researching old studio sound libraries, Burtt located the familiar scream he remembered hearing in earlier Warner Bros. pictures. He informally named it the “Wilhelm scream” after the hapless soldier in The Charge at Feather River.

Then he slipped it into Star Wars.

During the Death Star gunfight, Luke Skywalker shoots a stormtrooper who tumbles from a ledge. The falling trooper lets out the unmistakable Wilhelm scream.

Burtt included it mainly for his own amusement. He used it again in other films, and fellow sound editors began joining the game. What started as a private joke between audio professionals gradually became one of Hollywood’s most famous Easter eggs.

Wilhelm Gets a Very Busy Career

The scream became particularly associated with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, but it eventually escaped into virtually every corner of popular entertainment.

It has been reported in productions as varied as:

• Star Wars
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The original Indiana Jones films
• Poltergeist
• Gremlins
• Batman Returns
• Reservoir Dogs
• Toy Story
• Titanic
• The Lord of the Rings
• Kill Bill
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• Numerous television shows, cartoons and video games

Sometimes the scream is used subtly. Other times it is planted so conspicuously that knowledgeable viewers immediately begin laughing—even if the person on screen has just been launched into a bottomless canyon.

How Many Times Has It Been Used?

There is no official master count. Some lists include only feature films, while others include television episodes, commercials, shorts and video games. A single production may also use the scream more than once.

The safest accepted estimate is that the Wilhelm scream has appeared in more than 400 movies, television programs and games. Fan-maintained databases place the number considerably higher, but exact totals are difficult to verify. The National Science and Media Museum uses the “more than 400” estimate.

That makes its probable performer one of the most frequently heard—and least recognized—voices in movie history.

Why Do Filmmakers Keep Using It?

Today, nobody uses the Wilhelm scream because Hollywood has run out of men willing to yell.

It is a calling card.

Sound designers spend most of their careers creating work that audiences are supposed to experience without consciously noticing. The Wilhelm scream gives those behind-the-scenes artists a chance to wink at one another. Its appearance says, in effect, “One of us was here.”

It also became a friendly challenge. Editors would hide the scream in a movie and then ask colleagues whether they could find it.

Eventually, however, the joke became so recognizable that some filmmakers began avoiding it. Once the audience identifies the Wilhelm, the illusion can collapse. Instead of worrying about the person falling to his death, viewers may think, “There it is!”

Lucasfilm itself backed away from the tradition. Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood confirmed that The Force Awakens was the last Star Wars movie to use it before the studio adopted a different recurring scream. Wood discussed the decision with ABC News in 2018.

The Original Session Survives

In an extraordinary bit of film preservation, the complete original recording session was eventually recovered from the Sunset Editorial sound-effects collection held by the University of Southern California.

That means listeners can now hear not only the famous scream, but the other attempts recorded during the same session. The material was released publicly in 2023, more than seven decades after that unidentified performer stepped before a microphone and pretended to be devoured by an alligator.

He probably finished the session, collected his day’s pay and went home without giving it another thought.

He could not possibly have known that his two-second death scene would outlive the movie, travel across galaxies, fall from hundreds of cliffs and become an inside joke shared by millions of people.

The Wilhelm scream may be corny, overused and completely inappropriate in half the scenes containing it.

But it might also be the most successful scream in history.

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