In 1951, a sound crew working on the film Distant Drums recorded a short scream for a soldier being pulled underwater. Nobody involved thought twice about it. That scream got filed into a studio sound library like thousands of other clips.
A few years later, sound editor Ben Burtt stumbled across the clip while working on Star Wars. He liked its slightly cartoonish, over the top quality and dropped it into a scene where a stormtrooper falls off a ledge. That single decision turned an obscure 1951 sound clip into a running joke among sound editors worldwide.
Burtt started sneaking it into every project he touched, and other editors picked up on the habit. Soon it became an inside tradition, a way for sound crews to wink at each other across studios and decades without audiences ever noticing.
The scream has since appeared in over 400 films and TV shows, including all six original Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, and even Lord of the Rings. It has been used in some of the highest grossing films ever made without a single royalty payment changing hands.
That's because the original recording was owned by Warner Bros. and eventually became public enough within the industry that it turned into an unofficial tradition rather than a licensed asset. Editors just pass the file around like a shared inside joke.
Fans eventually gave the sound a name after noticing it attached to a character called Wilhelm in the 1953 film The Charge at Feather River, who screams it after being shot with an arrow. The nickname stuck, and now sound designers call it the Wilhelm Scream on purpose.
Today, spotting the Wilhelm Scream in a new blockbuster is practically a sport among film nerds, complete with online databases tracking every appearance. A scream recorded for a forgotten 1951 war film has quietly outlived nearly everyone who made it.
