As I noted in a piece I wrote earlier this week, I hold John Carpenter's “Halloween” head and shoulders above the majority of other slashers, and that's because the director brought real artistry and atmosphere to a film that in lesser hands would have played as cheap, exploitative cinema. To this day it remains one of the scariest movies of all time, but I've always wondered what it would have been like to see it in 1978, when audiences were a little less desensitized than they are now.
Now we can stop wondering, kind of, thanks to this vintage audio clip, recorded in a Hollywood Boulevard movie theater during a 1979 screening. It offers just the slightest sense of what it might have felt like to see “Halloween” in a packed house when it was still a relatively new phenomenon. Fair to say it was a little livelier than it would probably be today.