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