Scream, and scream again

For our Parent-Teacher Conference last weekend (it's an even bigger deal for us than it is for most schools, since our parents are all flying several hundred miles or more to visit us), I put up in my classroom as a conversation piece this picture of the ill-fated 'Private Wilhelm' - who gave his name to the scream that has become one of the most famous vocal effects in cinema history (already mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago); indeed, in recent decades it has become an industry in-joke, re-used endlessly.

Tristan Wong was the only one of my Film students to guess the picture's significance. Today he shared with us in class this amusing compilation of some of the many on-screen deaths this effect has been used for. (There are a number of others on Youtube too.)

This is a rather more comprehensive round-up that includes many earlier uses of the effect in the '50s and '60s (several in giant ant shocker Them!, which scared the bejesus out of me when I was about 8 or 10, one of my favourite early horror film experiences). Amongst these you can see the original Private Wilhelm moment in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River - not killed, at least, but receiving a very nasty arrow wound right through his thigh (if he's an American cavalry trooper, why is he in civilian clothes here? I've never seen this movie!), and the original original moment (the effect was first created for a scene of a man getting eaten by an alligator in the film Distant Drums a couple of years earlier; but for some reason it became permanently associated with its next incarnation as the Ooooh, that hurt! screech of poor Wilhelm).


And here's a nice potted history of the Wilhelm Scream by veteran Hollywood sound man Steve Lee (who curates the Hollywood Lost & Found blog and Youtube channel), in which he reveals that a popular singer named Sheb Wooley is the likeliest candidate to be the creator of the sound.