How the Wilhelm scream became Hollywood's ultimate 'secret' sound effect

So how did a stock sound from a ’50s Western become so ubiquitous, popping up in hundreds of films and TV shows as a shared wink among sound designers?

The rise of “the Wilhelm” is noted in “Attack of the Hollywood Cliches,” a new Netflix special hosted by Rob Lowe that serves as a lighthearted survey course in the tropes of Tinseltown, such as the “meet cute” of rom-coms and last-second bomb detonations of the crime-action genre.

The Wilhelm scream is no hackneyed narrative device, but instead a nod to what Burtt calls the legacy of the language of sound.

Long before he became a sound man for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Burtt grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., tuned in to movies of his youth, tape recorder by his side. “I got very familiar with the sounds that repeat in movies because the five big studios that made all the films I saw as a kid, they were very distinct” with their sound libraries, Burtt says by phone from his Bay Area home.

“Paramount had its own scream. Warner Bros. had its own scream.” Studios had “their own thunderclap, their own horse whinny, their own gunshot — I became very interested in the provenance of them.”

Burtt had no designs on entering entertainment — he planned to be a science teacher — but by his teenage years, he was equipped with this “trivial knowledge” of Hollywood sonics. And one common yowl especially entertained him.

“The Wilhelm scream had been in a whole bunch of Warner Bros. pictures only, in the ‘50s and ’60s,” Burtt says. “I sort of laughed at it because it would come up in another Western. Some character would fall off a cliff or get shot off a horse and it’d be the same scream.”

By the mid-1970s, Burtt was at the University of Southern California, studying for a master’s degree in film production, when he and a friend, Richard Anderson, began putting that scream effect into their work. One project was an eight-minute student film, a Flash Gordon spoof they titled “Rod Flash Conquers Infinity.” They also sneaked the sound into trailers they cut for imported martial-arts movies. They’d go to theaters and laugh at the clandestine caterwaul.

But what to call this effect? They decided upon the Wilhelm because the sound can be heard in the 1953 film “The Charge at Feather River,” when a soldier on horseback named Pvt. Wilhelm (portrayed by Ralph Brooks) is shot with an arrow. Recalls Burtt: “We just gave that name to the scream because we had no other way to identify it.”

The scream can first be heard, however, in the 1951 Western “Distant Drums,” in which troops, led by Gary Cooper’s Army captain, fight Seminole Indians in the Everglades. A man lets out the sound upon being fatally attacked by gators. The effect was one from about six takes that an actor recorded in-studio after the scene was shot.

The obviousness of that post-shoot looping appealed to Anderson. “It’s a little overdone, but that’s what made it stand out — the fact that it didn’t sound like it was just the actor doing the take that was recorded at the time,” he says by phone from the Los Angeles area.

Soon after graduation, Burtt was hired aboard the sound team for what became 1977’s “Star Wars: A New Hope.” His Oscar-honored work on the film included creature and robot voices, but at one point, he needed a noise for a fight scene in which a Stormtrooper falls into a Death Star trench: “I couldn’t resist and I stuck this Wilhelm in.”

Burtt didn’t call attention to it, except to tell his pal Anderson: “I called Richard up: ‘Hey look, I put it in “Star Wars” ‘ — he thought that was funny.” They each kept slipping the effect into their films for Lucas, Spielberg, Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino. They even worked the Wilhelm into “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Nazi soldiers would tumble from transportation — a film for which the friends shared a special Oscar for sound effects editing.

“We would just call each other up: ‘Hey, I put one in here — can you find it?’ ” Burtt says of their ongoing Wilhelm “one-upsmanship.” “That went on for years and years, and no one said anything.”

The in-joke gradually became an industry joke, as the community of sound designers increasingly shared and used the Wilhelm. Now, Burtt says, “It seems it’s a rite of passage for every sound editor.”

Burtt says he never wanted to promote it, but like the arc of so many creature features, “it escaped into the world.” It found its way into other film franchises, including “The Lord of the Rings” and “Toy Story,” and eventually YouTube compilations.

Yet from all of Hollywood’s archived screams, why is it the Wilhelm that rose above the rest?

Some experts point to the scream’s “rise and fall” that give it a sometimes comic effect. “I think it’s that two-tone — it sort of almost laughs and it’s also a scream,” British film writer and presenter Francine Stock, who appears in the Netflix show, says by phone from London. “It’s that slight jokiness.”

British film critic James King, who also speaks in the special, says part of the appeal lies in its adaptability: “The weird thing about the Wilhelm scream is that obviously it’s one sound, and yet it sounds so different in different films.”

Although there is a primary Wilhelm scream, Burtt and Anderson say they have used all those studio-recorded takes of “Distant Drums” screams in their films. Anderson says he sometimes digitally alters them into such sounds as dinosaur cries: “I call them stealth Wilhelms.” And Burtt has imitated the scream himself while on screen, when playing a doomed Imperial Army trooper in “Return of the Jedi.”

Burtt has also tried to solve the scream’s most enduring mystery: Just who is the actor who delivered the effect?

He once tracked down a box of studio archives from “Distant Drums” and found notes on several actors who recorded soldier sounds in studio. The name of Sheb Wooley, the character actor (“Rawhide”) and novelty-song performer (“Purple People Eater”) who appears uncredited in “Distant Drums,” emerged. After stumbling upon Wooley’s 2003 obituary, Burtt contacted the performer’s widow and through conversation determined that “it’s highly likely with good evidence that it’s Sheb.”

Burtt stays busy — he recently completed a planetarium-style project for the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures — but he told his crew members about a decade ago that he was retiring his use of the Wilhelm. “But they would put it in anyway, so it does persist, because they can’t help themselves.” Besides, he gets asked about it often — questions about the Wilhelm and lightsabers far outweigh requests for his industry wisdom in his 70s.

He accepts that the scream is the marquee effect in his glorious legacy. “I know there’s going to be that microchip embedded in my tombstone,” he says, laughing — one that plays the Wilhelm with a never-ending wink.