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Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is so closely associated with Halloween that it can be easy to overlook the fact that it’s also the most influential music video ever made, for a host of reasons only partly related to its spooky subject matter.
For starters, it’s the most popular, critically acclaimed music video in history, one whose fame helped push the album it was a part of, 1982’s Thriller, to become the highest-selling album in music history, with some estimates claiming over 100 million copies sold worldwide. (For context, The Eagles’ hugely popular 1976 Greatest Hits album, which recently surpassed Thriller for album sales in the US, has only sold 51 million copies worldwide.)
It was legendarily scandalous, with a now-famous disclaimer that it “in no way endorses a belief in the occult” feeding into the era’s titillating frenzy over Satanic Panic. Its multi-layered storyline was destined to tease the squeamish: The narrative played with horror movie tropes, framing a vintage movie about a teenage were-person (Jackson) unexpectedly terrorizing his date (model Ola Ray), within a modern story about a teenage zombie also terrorizing his date — along with a grave-fresh dancing zombie uprising.
“Thriller” expanded the boundaries for music videos, single-handedly transforming what was then a new and oft-maligned genre that killed the radio star into a cultural phenomenon and an art form in its own right. Public demand to watch “Thriller” outside of its TV airings created a video-rental boom. And crucially, its popularity pushed FM radio stations and MTV to give equal time to black entertainers alongside white artists, on what had been until then tacitly segregated outlets.
And all of this was exactly according to plan. In his 1988 memoir Moonwalk, Jackson discussed how he had conceived of each of the three short films that were produced to accompany Thriller — the music videos for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Thriller” — to be genre-advancing, innovative, and inventive. “I wanted to be a pioneer in this relatively new medium and make the best short music movies we could make,” Jackson wrote. “On the set I explained that we were doing a film and that was how I approached it.”
To that end, Jackson recruited filmmaker John Landis, then famed for Blues Brothers and Animal House, to direct “Thriller.” Landis was fresh off of making American Werewolf in London, the film that established the “horror-comedy” as a galvanizing force within the horror genre. Jackson wanted to hire Landis because the concept of the “Thriller” music video also involved a were-transformation, and because Landis’s darkly comedic touch matched the comical pastiche of serious horror that Jackson was aiming for.
When the production budget ran over double the original proposal — “Thriller” ultimately cost $900,000, then an unprecedented cost for a music video — Jackson found an ingenious way to make up the difference: He hired a second film crew to document the production as it was happening, and convinced MTV and Showtime to pay to license The Making of Thriller, which ultimately premiered after the music video and (as Jackson reported in Moonwalk) sold a million copies all by itself. It was the first time a documentary film had ever been made about a music video, and it further legitimized the work Jackson was doing.
And then, of course, there was the impact of the video, released exclusively on MTV on December 2, 1983. Jackson reported in Moonwalk that the video and its title song, released as a single in February 1984, drove 14 million additional sales of Thriller in the first six months after their release.
Ultimately, the monumental success of the album Thriller — nominated for 12 Grammys and winning a record-breaking eight — made Jackson an unstoppable force who had to be taken seriously. “There were times during the Thriller project when I would get emotional or upset because I couldn’t get the people working with me to see what I was,” Jackson wrote in Moonwalk. But after “Thriller,” which would go on to become the first-ever music video added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, his creative genius spoke for itself.
There’s a lot to unpack in the video’s 14-minute runtime. Its iconic choreography, horror narrative, dazzling costumes, and effects have all been the focus of decades of pop culture writing. But here are some facts you may have missed amid all the hype, analysis, and dance-offs.
“Thriller” started out as something of an afterthought
While Epic Records was certainly thrilled (sorry) with the landmark success of Thriller after the hit singles “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” were released, the label viewed the album’s title track as something of a novelty and had no plans to release it as a single.
It wasn’t until the album started to fall on the charts in 1983, months after its November 1982 release, that promoter Frank DiLeo assuaged Jackson’s angst over declining sales by encouraging him to make a third video to join the other two. “Thriller” was considered an easy lift due to the content. “All you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary,” DiLeo recalled saying to Jackson in a 2010 Vanity Fair profile of Jackson and the film.
