Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the music video for the song “Thriller” by the American singer Michael Jackson, released on December 2, 1983. It was directed by John Landis, written by Jackson and Landis, and stars Jackson and Ola Ray. It references numerous horror films and has 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 the documentary sold over a million copies, becoming the best-selling VHS tape at the time. It is credited for transforming music videos into a serious art form, breaking down racial barriers in popular entertainment, popularizing the making-of documentary format and driving home video sales. 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. It is closely associated with Halloween, and fans worldwide re-enact its zombie dance. 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, Michael Jackson’s Thriller became the first music video inducted into the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. It reached one billion YouTube views in 2024.
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 the woman accepts Jackson’s invitation to be his girlfriend. He warns her that he is “not like other guys”, transforms into a werecat and attacks her.
In the present, Jackson and his girlfriend are watching the werecat film in a theater. The girlfriend leaves, scared by the film. Walking down a city street at night, Jackson teases her by performing the verses of “Thriller“. They pass a graveyard, where zombies rise from their graves and surround them in the street. Jackson becomes a zombie and dances with the horde.
Jackson and the zombies chase his girlfriend into an abandoned house. She screams and wakes up, realizing it was a nightmare. Jackson embraces her and takes her home, but turns to the camera and grins, revealing his werecat eyes.
Horror elements
The Thriller video makes many allusions to horror films.[3] 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 as bestial, predatory and aggressive. The critic Kobena Mercer found similarities to the werewolf in The Company of Wolves (1984).[3]
The zombie dance sequence corresponds the lyric about a masquerade ball of the dead.[4] Jackson’s makeup 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).[4] According to the academic Peter Dendle, the zombie invasion sequence was inspired by Night of the Living Dead (1968), and the video captures the feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness essential to zombie films.
