Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer call without the title song’s celebrated music video, thirteen John Landis-directed minutes full of not just singing and dancing, but also classic-style Hollywood monsters, some of them doing that singing and dancing themselves. Halloween night is, of course, the best time to revisit Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as it’s officially titled. This year, why not chase it with the behind-the-scenes documentary below, Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller?
Younger fans may not know that “Thriller” wasn’t even released as a single until November of 1983: about a year after the album itself, which had already spun off six songs, including enormous hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.” In fact, Jackson’s unprecedented vision for the album had been that every song could be a hit, with no filler in between.
The higher-ups at Epic Records felt that its popularity, however sensational to that point, had just about run its course. That made them unwilling, at first, to put out “Thriller” on its own, as did the song’s campy scary-movie lyrics, sound effects, and “rap” by none other than Vincent Price, the embodiment of old-Hollywood horror. (This sort of thing wasn’t without precedent: with his siblings, Jackson had created a similar spooky atmosphere in “This Place Hotel,” from 1980.)
Still, at that point in his rise to the kind of fame no cultural figure may ever know again, Jackson understood much that the old guard didn’t. He knew that “Thriller” could succeed, not just as a song on the radio, but a multimedia cultural phenomenon. It would, of course, need a music video, but not one that merely met the (still fairly lax) standards of MTV. Impressed by the horror, comedy, and visual effects of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, Jackson called up Landis and asked him to direct what he’d been envisioning for “Thriller” at feature-film production values. The $500,000 budget came from television networks like MTV and Showtime, officially for broadcasting rights to Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The documentary captures various aspects of the video’s creation, from casting to choreography to shooting to makeup, that last being an especially painstaking process overseen by industry master Rick Baker. Whatever the rigors of the production, Jackson displays undisguised enjoyment of it all in this footage, perhaps foreseeing that it would culminate in the kind of expression that could come from no other artist. Though an intensely collaborative effort, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is true to its name in ultimately being the product of a single, guiding performative sensibility, somehow both universally appealing and highly idiosyncratic at the same time. Jackson’s insistence on calling his music videos “short films” may have been regarded as a typical eccentricity, but never was the label more appropriate than when he brought back the old-school monster movie one last, funky time.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
