The Wilhelm scream

[Stan Sakai]

Here's a bit of Hollywood lore. In 1953, a character named Wilhelm was shot with an arrow in the movie The Charge at Feather River. He screamed as he was hit, and that scream has since been in more than 130 movies. You heard it in all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. You heard it in Batman, Sin City, and Poltergeist. You also heard it in animated movies such as Over the Hedge and Toy Story. You heard it in great movies such as Lord of the Rings, and not so great movies like Howard the Duck.

We were talking about this at lunch today, and Russell mentioned there are a couple of compilations on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YDpuA90 ... re=related

[Jet_Jaguar]

THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: THE WILHELM SCREAM ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT

http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/2 ... Page1.html

IIRC, The most recent movie I've seen where I spotted the Wilhelm Scream was Inglourious Basterds (I think it can be heard in the Nazi propaganda movie-within-a-movie, which would make it sort of a meta-Wilhem Scream, I suppose).

I just discovered that there's a "Wilhelm Scream" tag on the IMDB (not quite sure how accurate this list is, I don't remember hearing it in The Wild Bunch):

http://www.imdb.com/keyword/wilhelm-scream/

It's not quite as common as the Wilhelm, but there's a somewhat similar scream sound effect that shows up regularly in movies that sounds like YEAAAAAARGH! I think it was also used in the computer game Starcraft. Anyone know what that one's called? Googling "YEAAAAAARGH" didn't bring up anything useful.

[shaxper]

absolutely fascinating!