The Wilhelm Scream

The ‘Wilhelm Scream’ is a recording of a man screaming in great agony. The Wilhelm Scream was first used in the 1951 film ‘Distant Drums’. However it takes its name from a film made shortly after - ‘The Charge at Feather River’ (1953); in which a character named Wilhelm is given this sound as his death cry in the post-production sound-tracking process. This recording has subsequently been used in over a 130 films right up to the present day. This sound effect has become iconic for the frequency of its use – as opposed to its singularity. The power of a scream lies in it being primal and pre-verbal, herein lays its universality. When one considers iconic screams or wails in visual media (Eve in Masaccio’s The Expulsion, Munch’s The Scream, the screaming nurse from the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, Francis Bacon’s Popes, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Rod Steiger in the Pawnbroker) it is the particularity of the situation that makes them memorable, while we recognize the anguish of that particular instant through the sound made. The Wilhelm Scream is perversely interesting because of it being divorced from its original context and author and repeatedly applied in different situations.

The Wilhelm Scream’s separation from its source, of course happened when it was first recorded on tape in 1953. Fittingly there is no conclusive evidence as to the originator of this sound. The disturbing aspect of the Wilhelm Scream is the dislocation of the individual’s signature: by effectively presenting a multitude of deaths with one anonymous wail, humanity is being constructed in representation as a mechanistic system, made of interchangeable parts, to be reassembled and dismantled as seen fit. This is horrifying enough to earn a scream itself (although not a Wilhelm one).

At the moment of being recorded it moved beyond being a live experience between the maker of the scream and the sound recordist, and became a unit of information in its own right. It might be useful to think of the Wilhelm Scream as a meme. [one website definition of a meme being: ‘an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behaviour) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’, this term was constructed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)].

This meme has been particularly successful and propagated by various ‘carriers’ which in this model are the sound engineers. One film historian described the use of the sound effect ‘in-joke’ between engineers as “a sort of way of communicating between ourselves and saying hello to each other”. This also points to the idea of a film itself being a communicative system in which minority or marginal discussions can occur that might be completely different (or even opposite) to the primary message(s) intended by the film’s central contributors (film studio, director, producer, screenwriter) – aimed at the cinema going public. Here is exciting example and potential model for the marginal operating within any communicative system to establish their own discourses ‘piggybacking’ / or encoded within a dominant message.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
(a compilation of film clips which feature the Wilhelm Scream)