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Michael Jackson's Thriller is a 1983 music video for the song "Thriller" by the American singer Michael Jackson, released on 2 December 1983. The video was directed by John Landis, written by Landis and Jackson, and stars Jackson and Ola Ray. It references numerous horror films and sees Jackson dancing with a horde of zombies.
Jackson's sixth album, Thriller, was released in November 1982 and spent months at the top of the Billboard 200, backed by successful videos for the singles "Billie Jean" and "Beat It". In July 1983, after Thriller was displaced from the top of the chart, Jackson's manager Frank DiLeo suggested making a music video for "Thriller". Jackson hired Landis after seeing his 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. The pair conceived a short film with a budget much larger than previous music videos. It was filmed at various locations in Los Angeles, including the Palace Theater. A making-of documentary, Making Michael Jackson's Thriller, was produced to sell to television networks.
Michael Jackson's Thriller was launched to great anticipation and played regularly on MTV. It doubled sales of Thriller, helping it become the best-selling album in history, and sold over a million copies on VHS, becoming the best-selling videotape at the time. It is credited for transforming music videos into a serious art form, breaking down racial barriers in popular entertainment and popularizing the making-of documentary format. The success transformed Jackson into a dominant force in global pop culture.
Many elements of Michael Jackson's Thriller have had a lasting impact on popular culture, such as the zombie dance and Jackson's red jacket, designed by Landis's wife Deborah Nadoolman. Fans worldwide re-enact its zombie dance and it remains popular on YouTube. The Library of Congress described it as the most famous music video of all time, and it has been named the greatest video by various publications and readers' polls. In 2009, it became the first music video inducted into the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
In the 1950s, Michael Jackson and a young woman (Ola Ray) run out of gas while driving in a wooded area. They walk into the forest and Michael asks her to be his girlfriend; she accepts. He warns her that he is "not like other guys", transforms into a werecat[3] and attacks her.
In the present, Michael and his girlfriend are watching the werecat film in a theater. She leaves, scared by the film. In the street, Michael teases her by performing the verses of "Thriller". They pass a graveyard, where zombies rise from their graves. The couple are surrounded and Michael becomes a zombie. He and the zombies dance to the song.
Michael and the zombies chase his girlfriend into an abandoned house. She screams and wakes up, realizing it was a nightmare. Michael embraces her, but turns to the camera and grins, revealing his werecat eyes.
Horror elements
The Thriller video makes many allusions to horror films. The opening scene parodies 1950s B-movies, with Jackson and Ray dressed as 1950s teenagers. The metamorphosis of the polite "boy next door" into a werecat has been interpreted as a depiction of male sexuality, depicted as naturally bestial, predatory, and aggressive. The critic Kobena Mercer found similarities to the werewolf in The Company of Wolves (1984).
The zombie dance sequence corresponds the lyric about a masquerade ball of the dead. Jackson's make-up casts "a ghostly pallor" over his skin and emphasizes the outline of his skull, an allusion to the mask from The Phantom of the Opera (1925). According to Peter Dendle, the zombie invasion sequence was inspired by Night of the Living Dead (1968). Dendle wrote that the video captures the feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness essential to zombie films.
"Thriller", a song with horror themes, had not been planned for release as a single. Epic saw it as a novelty song; Yetnikoff asked, "Who wants a single about monsters?" Jackson's manager Frank DiLeo suggested making a music video for it; he recalled telling Jackson: "It's simpleโall you've got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary." According to Vanity Fair, Jackson preferred "benign Disney-esque fantasies where people were nice and children were safe", which ensured the video would be "creepy-comical, not genuinely terrifying".
In early August, after seeing his horror film An American Werewolf in London (1981), Jackson contacted director John Landis. At the time, commercial directors did not direct music videos, but Landis was intrigued;[9] he wanted to make a theatrical short rather than a standard music video, and hoped to use Jackson's celebrity to return theatrical shorts to popularity. Landis and Jackson conceived a short film shot on 35mm film with the production values of a feature film, with a budget of $900,000, much larger than any previous music video.