Listen To A Terrified Audience During A Packed 'Halloween' Screening In 1978

It's been 37 years since John Carpenter's classic slasher Halloween sent waves through the horror genre and across the nation, scaring the living daylights out of audiences in 1978.

But what was it like to experience this film for the first time? What was it like to witness Michael Myers, or The Shape, chasing Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) through Haddonfield, Illinois before he became a horror icon? Thankfully, a vintage audio clip has surfaced online from a packed screening, and you can see how their screams, general uneasiness and suspense match up with scenes from the climax of the movie. It's just plain fantastic.

Listen to a horrified crowd in the Halloween screening audio clip below!

The audio comes from a busy screening from 1979 on Hollywood Boulevard, which means Halloween was still in theaters a few months after it arrived on October 25th, 1978. That's just something that doesn't happen anymore, especially with horror films.

Even though today's younger crowd may not be able to get past the somewhat dated nature of the film, inciting giggles upon their first watching, desensitized by the horror they've seen in today's movies, it's undoubtedly one of the best horror films in the history of cinema. Halloween set the standard for the slasher films teenagers flock to theaters to see today.

I can't count on one hand the number of horror movies I've seen in theaters where the terror was audible in the theater, the greatest being an advanced screening of the original Paranormal Activity, when no one had yet heard about it (I'm not trying to make a "I like it before it was cool" statement, that's just how it happened). Oh, how I wish I could have been at this Halloween screening all those years ago. Thanks to HitFix for bringing this awesome video to our attention.