Sheb Wooley
The Wilhelm Scream: Film’s Most Overused Sound Effect?
You don’t have to pay a lot of attention to the Movies to hear it, because it’s everywhere. It’s what has become known as the ‘Wilhelm scream’, one of three short, pained screams that seems just a little too antiquated for the big-budget pain yelps happening all around it. Not be mistaken with masters 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. It wasn’t Burtt’s first encounter with the scream: with an ear for sound effects he’d noticed it countless time in past 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. The scream thereafter became a signature of both the ‘Star Wars’ franchise and Burtt himself, appearing in ‘Indiana Jones’, ‘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.
Considering the title on the reel, why did Burtt call it the ‘Wilhelm scream’? Burtt associated the scream with the 1953 Western ‘Charge at Feather River’ because it is used when Pvt. Wilhelm is shot with an arrow. Research has since indicated that the sound effect was probably created for another western, ‘Distant Drums’, made in 1951. The original effect is likely the vocal performance of Sheb Wooley, a character actor who played a minor role in the picture. Sheb Wooley was also a novelty musician whose music library included the bizarrely named ‘Purple People Eater’.
Sheb Wooley – Purple People Eater (1958)
