Seven Sounds You Have Heard in a Hundred Movies Without Knowing

1. The Wilhelm scream

A man gets shot, falls off a cliff, and lets out a short strangled yell. You know this yell.

It was recorded in 1951 for a western called Distant Drums, for a scene where a soldier is dragged under by an alligator. It got its name two years later from a character called Private Wilhelm in The Charge at Feather River, who screams it after taking an arrow in the leg.

It would have stayed a forgotten library file, except that a young sound designer called Ben Burtt dug it out and put it in Star Wars in 1977. He then kept using it, and so did everyone who worked with him. It has since turned up in Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, Toy Story, Pirates of the Caribbean and hundreds more.

It is now an in-joke among sound editors. Once you can hear it, it becomes very hard to unhear.

2. The eagle that is not an eagle

A bald eagle appears on screen. Camera tilts up. You hear a long, fierce, falling screech.

That is a red-tailed hawk.

A real bald eagle makes a thin, chattering, almost squeaky call. It sounds like a small bird, and it does not fit a shot of a national symbol soaring over a canyon. So films dub in the hawk, which sounds exactly the way people expect a big bird of prey to sound.

This has been going on so long that most people have never heard what an eagle actually sounds like.

3. Horses that are coconuts

Two halves of a coconut shell, knocked on a surface, sound more like a horse than a horse does. It has been the standard trick since radio drama in the 1930s, and it is still used.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail turned it into a joke by having the knights mime riding while a servant follows behind clapping the shells. The joke works because everyone already knew the sound.

This whole craft is called Foley, after Jack Foley, a sound man at Universal who worked out how to perform sound effects live in time with the picture. The job still exists, and it is still done the same way — a person in a room, watching the film, walking and grabbing and hitting things in sync.

4. Breaking bones is a vegetable

Snapping a stick of celery close to a microphone gives a wet, splintering crack. It has been the standard sound for a broken bone for decades.

The rest of the kitchen is in there too. Cabbage or watermelon for body impacts. Uncooked pasta for smaller fractures. Cornflour in a leather pouch for footsteps in snow, because it makes exactly the right squeak.

The reason is simple. A real broken bone is quiet. Screen violence has to sound like it hurts, and reality does not deliver that.

5. The same thunderclap since the 1930s

Universal recorded a thunder effect in the early 1930s that became known as Castle Thunder. It comes from the era of the old Frankenstein and Dracula films.

It was then reused for decades, in horror films, in cartoons, in adventure serials, and later in comedies that were deliberately nodding at old horror. Ghostbusters uses it. Plenty of Saturday morning cartoons used it.

Every rumbling, rolling clap of thunder you associate with a haunted house probably traces back to that one recording.

6. The trailer horn

A very deep, very loud brass note that hangs in the air. It appeared in almost every action trailer for about five years.

Everyone credits Inception in 2010, and that is broadly right about the trend but not quite right about the sound. The teaser that started it used a track called Mind Heist by Zack Hemsey, not the film score. Hans Zimmer used slow, huge brass in the score itself, and over time the two blurred together in everyone’s memory.

Whatever the origin, the effect on trailers was immediate. Editors reached for it constantly, then audiences got tired of it, and it faded. Now it mostly appears in trailers that are making fun of trailers.

7. The THX sound

The rising, spreading wall of sound before a film starts. Officially it is called the Deep Note.

It was made in 1982 by James Moorer at Lucasfilm, and first played with Return of the Jedi in 1983. It is not a recording of anything. It is generated by a computer program — around thirty voices that begin scattered at random pitches and slide until they land together on one huge spread chord.

The program that made it ran to roughly twenty thousand lines of code. It is one of the earliest pieces of computer generated sound that a general audience heard, loved, and can still hum.

Why so much of it is built later

On a film set, the microphone is there for the dialogue. It is pointed at the actors and it is trying to reject everything else — the camera, the crew, the wind, the generator.

So almost everything that is not speech gets thrown away and rebuilt afterwards. Footsteps, clothing, doors, punches, cars, weather. All of it is added in a studio, sometimes months after the shoot.

That is why the same sounds keep appearing. They are not lazy choices. They are the recordings that have been tested against thousands of scenes and are known to work. A sound editor reaching for the celery is doing what a cook does reaching for salt.

Common questions