Movies
[Video] Listen to an Audience React to John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ in 1979!
I feel like we may have shared this years ago, but I just rediscovered it and watched it several times in a row.
Back in 2011, Kyle J. Wood’s DarkCastle2012 posted a video clip of the final moments in John Carpenter‘s 1979 Halloween. What was so special about the video is that it captured authentic audience reactions inside a Hollywood Boulevard movie theater in 1979!
The clip, which was re-synced and re-upped, drops us into the film right after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) thinks she’s stopped Michael Myers. When Michael sits up behind her, the audience loses their collective minds. To experience this in 2015 is so astoundingly special that it gives me the chills. It just hurts my soul that we’ll never be able to experience anything like this ever again…
“This is actual AUDIO (with the appropriate video scenes added — a little out of sync, sorry) taken inside a Hollywood Boulevard movie theater in October 1979. I lived in Hollywood, California at the time. But failed to see the film in 1978 when it originally came out. The following year, in October 1979, it was re-released and playing at the Vine Theater (on Hollywood and Vine), where it was doubled-featured with The Toolbox Murders (also from 1978). I took an old Radio Shack cassette tape recorder inside the theater with me and sat in the front row to try and capture some of the music audio from both films. The Toolbox Murders’ audience was quiet. HALLOWEEN’s audience was not.”
– DarkCastle2012
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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