(An early Christmas present from me to you. Originally posted at Dark But Shining.)
The most popular zombie movie of all time is not Night of the Living Dead. The most popular werewolf movie of all time is not The Wolf Man. The most popular blurring of the line between fictional and real-life horror is not The Blair Witch Project.
No, my friends–“Thriller” tops them all.
Directed by John Landis, the video for the title track of Michael Jackson’s magnum opus is horror’s elephant in the room. Perhaps because it’s just a music video–or, to be fair, just a short film–“Thriller” is almost never seriously considered when the pantheon is discussed. This, I would argue, needs to be rectified, and pronto. Fans and students of horror are doing the genre a grave (no pun intended) disservice if they overlook a work this influential, and this excellent.
Consider the clout Jackson had when the video was released. Between late 1982 and 1984, the album from which it came spent 37 weeks at number one on the Billboard charts (out of a total 122-week stay) and spawned seven Top Ten singles, including “Thriller” itself, which went to No. 1 (as did “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “The Girl Is Mine,” its immediate predecessors). The album’s first single, “Billie Jean,” was the first video by a black artist to be played on the then-ruthlessly segregated MTV (a fact for which the network now lauds itself endlessly, as though overcoming their own racist policy is some sort of major blow for civil rights), and essentially transformed the network into a cultural phenomenon. Jackson won a record eight Grammys in 1984, seven of which were for Thriller, a record he holds to this day (he shares it with Carlos Santana); he also won eight American Music Awards that year, another record he holds to this day (sharing it with Whitney Houston). And of course, Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, with a staggering 51,000,000 copies and counting sold worldwide. In America, its 27,000,000 copies make it the best-selling album of all-new material in the country’s history. And (most importantly for our purposes) when the video for “Thriller” debuted in February of 1984, it was the first long-form music video in MTV’s history and rapidly became acknowledged as the greatest music video of all time, a position it continues to hold on countdowns and on critics’ lists and is unlikely ever to relinquish; its companion home video, The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, became the best-selling music video of all time (eventually being displaced by another Michael Jackson home video, Moonwalker).
The centerpiece for all of this is a 14-minute horror movie, folks. That matters.
The story behind the creation of “Thriller” is well-known: Jackson caught a glimpse of John Landis’s seminal werewolf movie An American Werewolf in London and, despite a thoroughgoing unfamiliarity with contemporary horror, decided Landis would be ideal to direct the short film he’d envisioned for “Thriller,” his campy salute to Vincent Price and the creature-features he loved when he was a boy. With the help of Werewolf make-up effects genius Rick Baker, Landis concocted a two-part adaptation of the song.
In the first part, Jackson and his female co-star Ola Ray are walking through the woods in ’50s-style clothes on a moonlit night, when Jackson transforms (graphically and grotesquely) into a slavering were-cat creature, who stalks and presumably kills his girlfriend. This is then revealed to be a movie that the “real” Michael and Ola are watching; disturbed, she insists that they leave. On their walk home, Jackson teasingly sings the verses of the song in order to spook her, presumably into his arms; but as the Vincent Price-narrated “rap” begins, zombies begin emerging from graves and sewers to surround the young lovers. Suddenly Jackson himself transforms into a zombie and leads the undead in a dance the choreography of which is pretty much imprinted directly into the memory of anyone who’s ever watched MTV. He then bursts into the song’s chorus, and then the zombies chase Ola into an abandoned house, where, again led by Michael, they prepare to devour her. Screaming, she’s awoken from this nightmare by the “REAL” “real” Michael, who reassures her that it’s just a bad dream and offers to take her home–only to take one last grinning glance back at the camera, revealing he has the yellow eyes and slit pupils of the cat-monster from the beginning of the video.
Does it work as a music video? Oh hell yes. The fact that MTV, which obsesses on the new to the point of psychosis, can’t bring itself to dislodge the video from the top of its All Time Greatest lists even today is testament to that. When not being monstrous or victimized respectively, Jackson and Ray are a really likable pair of performers–they actually have quite a chemistry, and Jackson’s charm reminds us why he was the hugest star in popular music this side of the Beatles or Elvis (and quite possibly the other side as well). The song itself, produced by Quincy Jones, is a killer slice of the pop-funk that Jackson all but singlehandedly converted traditional R&B into in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with goofily scary lyrics and that unforgettable “darkness falls across the land” monologue by Price at the end.
And Jesus Christ, could Michael Jackson dance or what? He’d debuted the moonwalk on May 16th, 1983, on Motowns 25th Anniversary TV special–probably the single most memorable dance step in the history of rock and roll–but the guy was so stupid with talent that he didn’t even need to use it here. Instead he put together a choreograpy combining the spastic movements of breakdancing with the shambolic stalkings of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Living Dead, creating a dance routine that’s seared directly into the brains of anyone who’s ever watched MTV. The limp shoulder-shimmy of the zombies, and most particularly the part where they make their hands into claws and swing from one side to the other with them, are still instantly recognizable as being from this video. Can you think of choreography that’s better known than this? (No fair using the knife fight in “Beat It” and the precarious leaning in “Smooth Criminal.”) I think you’ve got to go with “Singin’ in the Rain” or nothing. (Britneys tune-in-Tokyo move from “Toxic” only counts if you’re a Best Week Ever junkie.)
But does it work as horror? Again, hell yes. Jackson may not have known horror aside from whatever black-and-white classics he managed to watch during his sad non-childhood childhood, but he knew what he liked, and what he liked was the work of Baker, who in The Howling and American Werewolf helped create some of the most convincing and disturbing transformation scenes in film history. Baker was a long-time collaborator of Landis’s, and while the director’s tasted in horror ran more along the lines of schlock (literally), don’t forget that Baker also worked on the likes of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. He was no stranger to serious, transgressive horror, and he brought this sensibility to his more mainstream work as well.
The end result, surely seen by many more people than had seen any of the many movies referenced by the video itself, took its two genres–werewolves and zombies–and knocked them the hell out of the park. Jackson’s transformation into the furry, claw-wielding beast at the beginning of the video is tensely built up to and shockingly directed–the way yellow-eyed, sharp-toothed, but still-human Jackson bellows “GO AWAY” at his girlfriend in a last-ditch effort to save her from himself is genuinely chilling and unexpected. We’re then treated to a series of straight-on, unblinking shots of Jackson’s face and hands as they bulge and swell, sprouting fur and claws and whiskers in what is a quite obviously painful process. The sequence culminates with Ola lying on the ground, helpless as the monster slowly approaches, reaching down to snuff her out. Even as a kid, I found that incredibly scary–there’s no doubt that she knows she’s about to die, and that’s maybe the scariest thing imaginable. And don’t let’s gloss over that final, smirking shot, with Vincent Price’s triumphant and evil cackle echoing in the background; that’s a face of horror, and an unforgettable one.
Then there are the zombies. Horror aficionados had seen their decrepit, decaying, blood-vomiting ilk in Italian movies like Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, but mainstream American audiences were being exposed to these really gross undead for the first time. Keep in mind that the revenants in Romero’s zombie movies looked more or less like living people with bad make-up; Romero’s grossest (and least popular) zombie movie in his initial cycle, Day of the Dead, came out two years after “Thriller.” These zombies, flesh rotting off their faces, limbs and heads dropping off their frames, black blood spilling out of their open mouths, were, as far as most people watching were concerned, sui generis. And those horrible noises they made when the song cut out–As a five-year-old who was super-excited that his parents allowed him to watch the video for this awesome song, I was so terrified that I began screaming and bawling, and spent days afraid to go near the television again for fear I’d hear those noises again. I’ve managed to hold myself together a little better when I’ve seen the video since then, but that zombie work still compares favorably to anything the feature-length folks have produced.
Finally, of course, there are the video’s unintentional and disturbing resonances with the Michael Jackson we’d come to know, or at least allegedly know, over the ensuing years. “I’m not like other guys,” says a suddenly serious Jackson to his bobby-sox’d girl during the film within a film. She reassures him, and he rejects the reassurance: “I mean I’m different.” That’s certainly one way to put it. Jackson undoubtedly came across as weird even in the behind-the-scenes Making of video: think of his childlike giggle as director Landis tickles him, or his high-pitched squeals as he’s coached to display pain during the transformation scene. But each time we saw the video as it was shown and reshown every year–around Halloween; at the top of MTV’s annual “Top 100 Videos of All Time” countdown (now abandoned, as are pretty much all videos on that network, and shunted over to occasional revisits on VH1), the film-Jackson’s claims took on more and more believability. The plastic surgery and skin lightening, the strange relationships with everyone from Brooke Shields to Uri Geller to Liz Taylor to Bubbles the chimp, the hostile takeover of the Beatles catalog from his former friend Paul McCartney, the regression into a perpetual childhood (the ranch is called Neverland, for pete’s sake), the hyperbaric chamber, the Elephant Man…the barrage of the bizarre never let up. By the time a simultaneously enraged and aroused Jackson destroyed a car with a crowbar while repeatedly fondling his own genitals in his video for “Black or White” in 1991, Jackson had gone from a superstar playing at a transformation into figures of horror into something of a figure of horror himself. And when allegations of child molestation surfaced in 1993 and sprung up again a decade later, this time leading to a trial and acquittal, the real-life transformation was all but complete. Watching the were-cat and zombie Jacksons stalk their respective girlfriends in sequences rife with subsumed sexualized violence is now infused with the belief, however unproven, that the real Jackson is a sexual predator too. (That Jackson himself was a victim of child abuse at the hands of his odious stage father Joe gets factored into the sinister equation as well.) Moreover, by the time of that trial, as we watched repulsed while Jackson’s face seemed to disintegrate before our eyes, “Thriller”‘s repeated use of disfiguring prosthetics–and especially the behind-the-scenes footage of their creation and application in the Making of video–seemed all too prescient itself. In the end (as with Robert Blake in In Cold Blood and Lost Highway), Jackson’s performance in “Thriller,” frightening then, is all the more frightening now.
So that’s “Thriller”: A musician and entertainer at the peak of his popularity and powers, employing a grade-A horror crew, tackling and nailing two key horror subgenres in the most public way imaginable, achieving an impossible-to-replicate level of pop-culture impact and unwittingly displaying traits that will be hauntingly eerie in later years. To me it’s a recipe for a horror classic. When you whip up that kind of dark magic, it is indeed an evil no mere mortal can resist.
(Images courtesy of Neverland Valley.)