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The Famous Scream You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Did you know about this?

Jenny Austria
2 min readSep 24, 2022
An artwork of a man who appears to be screaming
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

My husband is a film editor, and sometimes he’s super annoying.

When we watch movies, he notices the smallest bloopers. Like shadows, lights, and lines my untrained eyes will never see.

He also has a bizarre dislike for Nicole Kidman’s CGI’d face. (To be fair, I can’t tell her face is edited.)

“See the microphone there?” he’d say as he pauses the film and points to a dot on the screen. “Is it really a mic?” I’d ask squinting, before hitting unpause.

Point is, I can be a grumpy wife on movie night. Who likes interruptions anyway?

But one evening, everything changed.

On the couch, we were enjoying an old Indiana Jones movie. Suddenly, he hits pause.

“Did you hear that?” he asks as if I’d just missed the most incredible thing in the world.

“Hear what?”

He presses a key to go back 10 seconds and replays the scene:

A screaming man is falling into a river full of crocodiles. Then the reptiles eat him.

“This,” he says as he replays the sound a few times. “This is the Wilhelm scream.”

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Jenny Austria
Jenny Austria

Written by Jenny Austria

France-based storyteller. I write about life lessons, self-growth, and la vie en France. Read unlimited stories: https://iamjennyaustria.medium.com/membership

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