Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) Review
Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) Review
The video begins with a personal disclaimer from the pop superstar that reads “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult—Michael Jackson.” This is accompanied by heavy breathing on the soundtrack. We see a vintage car trundling to a crawl in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere. Michael and his unnamed girlfriend appear to be out of gas and take to having a stroll in the woods. Michael proposes to her and she is elated but he warns her that he is not like other guys. She soon finds out how. As a full moon is revealed he starts to transform into not a werewolf but what looks like a werecat. She runs, he gives chase and after knocking her to the ground leans in for the kill.
We then cut to the interior of a cinema and a packed auditorium revelling in an unseen horror flick playing out onscreen. Michael Jackson, playing Michael, is evidently enjoying what’s unfolding onscreen, shovelling popcorn into his mouth and grinning enthusiastically. However his date, played by Ola Ray, is rather less keen. She can’t watch and leaves the movie theatre. Michael, being the gentleman he is, hands his popcorn to another patron and catches up with his unnamed date outside. Before then pay attention to a young lady towards the bottom of the screen and witness how she breaks into the biggest smile as everyone else screams about her. I love this moment, it comes just after the unseen onscreen film’s dialogue utters the line “See you next Wednesday” – an ongoing joke/reference in Landis’ movies.
Outside the young lady is still not happy and Jackson reminds her that “it’s only a movie” before doing his best to cheer her up with an eerie walk by a graveyard whilst warbling the title track from his best-selling album. No sooner is she smiling again than Vincent Price is heard warning about ‘grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom’ and voila! The zombies start to encircle the couple, slowly moving in towards them threateningly, when the young lady turns around only to find out that Michael has turn into a zombie too. Along with the other zombies, they start to perform a terrifically choreographed dance sequence as Ola does what most victims do, just stand there and watch, and only takes to her heels when Michael and chums decide to slow-chase her to an abandoned old house nearby where she seeks refuge.
However there is no safe place to hide from Michael and his newly-made zombie chums. She screams and screams and screams as they close in on her only for it appear like this was all just a bad dream she was having. And there’s Michael, again grinning away, stood before here saying that he will take her home. This pleases her, even though she was evidently very confused just moments before, and as they both move to leave the house Michael turns and faces the camera displaying the yellow eyes that he exhibited as the werecat at the start of the video.
It was a dark night in the latter part of 1983 that Channel Four’s music TV programme The Tube first aired for UK audiences this short film. I was fifteen years old at the time and well versed in the delights that were labelled Video Nasties at our local video store and the idea of a pop video that referenced the genre I had come to embrace with such a passion, as well as being helmed by the director of An American Werewolf in London, a big favourite of mine, even at the time, was ‘Sean nirvana’! However for my friends Mark Smith and Chris Speight, with whom I watched the UK TV premiere, it was all too much, especially Mark who hid behind as many cushions as he could. By the time the clip had finished the time was gone eleven at night and I had to walk back home through the common that abridge this housing estate with the one I lived on. I was absolutely in awe of what I had just watched, whilst Mark and Chris had to contend with a sleepless night after seeing Michael turn into both a werecat and a superbly choreographed dancing zombie, and I couldn’t wait to see it again.
This may, at first glance, look to be a bit of an odd choice for inclusion for a book dedicated to recommending guilty pleasures and overlooked treasures from the 1980’s from the horror genre; after all it’s certainly not overlooked. In fact it’s often referenced as a pivotal moment in popular culture, opening up the music video format, which was still in its infancy at the time, and elevating Michael Jackson to superstardom in the process. So why have I included it for this book? Simply because for my money it IS overlooked in respect of how it tapped into the horror genre – werecat, zombies, Vincent Price’s eloquent rap all packed within a tight thirteen minutes running time – and elevated the form with its Rick Baker make-up effects and affection for the genre.
What is difficult to convey in this media saturated times, to the younger element amongst you reading, is the impact of this short film upon the world and the zeitgeist at the time. Until then the music video had been pretty much the remit of pop group ABBA – helping them reach out from their Swedish shores – and the Queen Bohemian Rhapsody clip. By this time MTV had been running for a couple of years in the United States but there was reluctance on their part to screen a video clip that wasn’t by a white artist, normally a country singer. The idea of showing a pop clip featuring a black singer was a no-no however with both Jackson and Prince making big waves on the world music scene this was on the change but it was the John Landis directed promo for Michael Jackson’s pop song Thriller that ensured this absurd tradition was about to change.
However, unlike now, you couldn’t just pop online and Google the clip and load it up for another video, you had to wait until a music program/channel decided to play it again (although at the time the video was deemed too scary for younger viewers so it was always shown earlier in a truncated form). However, as the home entertainment boom that was video cassettes was still in its infancy there was the opportunity to buy a video called The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and many, many people did. The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller went on to become the biggest selling home-video release at the time with then sales of an estimated nine million copies.
Jackson was not happy that his album Thriller had lost sales momentum in the summer of 1983 and his manager Frank DiLeo suggested releasing the title track, written by Rod Temperton, and making a video to accompany its release. Jackson had no interest in turning out simply yet another pop promo; he wanted something more akin to a short film, something that was cinematic in scope. Jackson had dabbled with this notion previously with some success, along with his brothers for their video for single release Can You Feel It? Produced by Jackson and his musical partner Quincy Jones, Thriller was apparently the most expensive video clip at the time with budgeting estimates varying between an estimated $500,000 and $1,100,000 (at the time music video clips cost on average around $100,000).
At the time film directors did not do pop videos, in fact it was often common practise, a few years later, for video directors to use it as their calling card into the film industry and not the other way round. However Jackson approached director John Landis after seeing his then recent success An American Werewolf in London and pitched his idea to him. Landis loved the idea, seeing it as a way to resurrect the theatrical short, and co-wrote the story with the pop star. Landis also brought with him his An American Werewolf in London composer Elmer Bernstein to compose the pop clip’s incidental ‘scary’ music and enlisted that same film’s make-up effects man, the extraordinarily talented Rick Baker, to perform similar duties here. (Baker also features in the video as the zombie seen coming out of the mausoleum).
Jackson and Landis hoped that screening the video theatrically for a limited release in Los Angeles (it played as a theatrical short before Disney’s rereleased Fantasia) would see their work qualify for an Academy Award for Best Short Live Action but alas there was no nomination forthcoming. However Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the first ever music video ever selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and in 2006 it was named as the most successful music video of all time by the Guinness World Records.
When Landis worked with Jackson again, on the pop promo for the singer’s Black or White single in 1991, his career had been derailed by a tragic accident on the set of The Twilight Zone movie but it failed to recapture the magic both produced first time around. Jackson returned to the ghoulish with his Stan Winston directed Ghosts video clip (1997), from an idea from Stephen King, but it again proved that the benchmark he set himself with Thriller was never going to be matched, not by him, nor anyone else for that matter.
