HALLOWEEN - MIchael Jackson - "Thriller"

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher, And on the first day of recording for what would become the best selling album of all time, producer Quincy Jones walked into Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles and said, okay, guys, we're here to save the recorded music industry. He wasn't joking. It was April nineteen eighty two, the music business was dying, and they were about to spend seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars nearly two point five million dollars in today's money to create something that would either resurrect the industry or become its most expensive funeral. They ended up doing both, and the song that best captured this death and resurrection story was fittingly about the undead. Thriller started life as Starlight, with the chorus lyric give me some Starlight and Starlight.

0:54 Sun Rod Temperton, the British songwriter who'd written Rock with You and Off the Wall for Jackson's previous album, had been improvising with bass and drum patterns until he developed that hypnotic bassline that runs through the song. But Quincy Jones felt Starlight wasn't a strong enough title for what they hoped would be the album's title track. They wanted something mysterious to match Jackson's evolving persona. Temperton went through several titles, including Midnight Man, which Jones felt was going in the right direction. Then it hit him Thriller. Within a couple of hours, he'd rewritten the lyrics. The intro was loaded with sound effects creaking doors, thunder footsteps, winds, howling wolves, but Temperton knew the ending needed something special, something theatrical. Jones's wife, Peggy Lipton, suggested Vincent Price. Here's how last minute this was. Temperton wrote Price's spoken word section in a taxi on the way to the studio on the day of recording. Price, the master of horror who terrified audiences for decades, nailed it in three takes.

2:03 Jones called his performance fabulous, noting how difficult it is to do a voiceover for a song. That voice, beginning at four to twenty five in the album version, would become one of the most quoted passages in pop music history, even though we can't legally reproduce it here. The album Thriller was released November twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two. By late October they were still mixing. Bruce Swedeen had done ninety one different mixes of Billy Jean alone. They had three studios going at once. They ended up submitting the record on November eighth, just twenty two days before release. Mixed number two of Billy Jean was the one they used.

2:43 Sometimes perfection comes early, and you spend months trying to recapture what you already had. The album exploded within fifteen months, It became the best selling album in music history, shifting more than twenty two million copies. Every song was a potential, but by mid nineteen eighty three, after six singles had been released, sales began to decline. Jackson, who was obsessive about his sales figures, was watching his masterpiece slip from the top of the charts. Enter Frank Delo, Jackson's manager, with a suggestion release Thriller as the seventh and final single, backed by a music video. Epic Records thought he was insane.

3:27 Who wants a single about monsters? Asked executive Walter Yetnikoff. The label saw it as a novelty song. They refused to finance a video, believing Thriller had peaked, Jackson had other ideas. He'd seen John Landis's An American Werewolf in London and knew exactly what he wanted to transform into a monster on screen. Not just any monster. He wanted to be a werewolf, then a zombie, then lead an army of the undead and synchronized dance. Landis, when Jackson called, said yes, but with conditions. This wouldn't be a music video, it would be a short film. The budget five hundred thousand dollars, at the time, the most expensive music video ever made. The financing came through an ingenious workaround. Since CBS wouldn't pay and MTV had a policy of never financing videos, they created a forty five minute making of documentary making Michael Jackson's Thriller. MTV and Showtime each paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the rights to air it. MTV reasoned that if they were paying for a movie, not a music video, they weren't violating their own policy. The documentary would sell over a million copies on vhs, becoming the best selling videotape at the time.

4:48 The fourteen minute film premiered on MTV on December twod nineteen eighty three, the network cleared its schedule advertising each upcoming showing. Audience figures were ten times the norm. Within week, it was playing hourly to meet demand. The plot was deceptively simple. Jackson takes his girlfriend Ola Ray to see a horror movie. In that movie, within a movie set in the nineteen fifties, Jackson transforms into a werewolf. She runs out, scared. He follows amused. Walking home. They take a shortcut through a graveyard. The dead rise, Jackson becomes one of them. Then comes the moment that changed everything, the zombie dance. Choreographed by Jackson and Michael Peters, who also did Beat It. The dance was something no one had seen before. These weren't shambling George Romero zombies. These were zombies with rhythm, with style, with coordinated moves that somehow made being undead look cool. The combination of Rick Baker's makeup effects he'd won the first Academy Award for Best Makeup for an American Werewolf in London, and the dancer's ability to move fluidly while appearing stiff created something uncanny and unforgettable. But here's the thing most people don't know the video almost never aired. Jackson was a Jehovah's witness at the time, and he didn't get approval from church elders until after the video was finished. When they saw it, they threatened excommunication. Jehovah's witnesses believe the dead

6:21 will rise after Christ's second coming, and some take offense at trivial depictions of the undead. Jackson panicked called the record company, begged them to cancel the premiere and burn the negatives. Landis talked him down, suggesting a compromise, a disclaimer at the beginning, stating that the video in no way endorsed the occult or supernatural practices. The disclaimer, ghost written by Landis, satisfied the church elders. The video aired, History was made. The impact was immediate and staggering. Thriller doubled the sales of an album that had already sold millions. The single, release January twenty third, nineteen eighty four, hit number four on the Billboard Hot one hundred, making Thriller the first album to generate seven top ten singles. The video won three MTV Video Music Awards. Jackson took home eight Grammys in nineteen eighty four. But the real impact wasn't in awards or sales. It was in what happened every Halloween Thereafter, the Thriller dance became a ritual, not just a dance, A global, cross cultural, multi generational ritual, performed in streets, schools, prisons, and flash mobs worldwide. In two thousand and six, Guinness introduced a record for largest thriller dance. In two thousand and nine, following Jackson's death, thirteen thousand, five hundred ninety seven people in Mexico City, most dressed as zombies shattered that record. That red and

7:53 black jacket, designed by Landis's wife, Deborah Nadulman, became as iconic as any costume in film hit. More importantly, Thriller changed what music videos could be. Before Thriller, videos were promotional tools, three minute commercials for singles. After Thriller, they were art. Directors like David Fincher, Spike John's and Michael Gondry could trace their careers to the path Landis and Jackson carved. The making of documentary started a trend that would become standard practice in the DVD era. Every behind the scenes feature you've ever watched, Oh something to making Michael Jackson's thriller. Thriller also broke MTV's color barrier in the most dramatic way possible. The network, which had been reluctant to play black artists, couldn't ignore a video this popular.

8:45 As John Landis later said, the reality is it was a vanity video. None of it was planned. Yet this unplanned vanity project accidentally revolutionized multiple industries. See low Green, who was nine when the video premiered, recalled being so terrified he would flee the room whenever it came on. If he could be possessed, then I damn sure could be possessed Because Michael was so much stronger than I. That terror was part of the appeal. Landis understood that transformation horror is really about puberty. Youngsters begin to grow hair in unexpected places, and parts of their anatomy swell and grow. The werewolf transformation was Jackson experimenting with danger, with sexuality, with becoming something other than the child star America had watched. Grow Up Today. Thriller returns to the Billboard Hot one hundred every Halloween, one of the few songs with a built in annual resurrection. It's been viewed over a billion times across various platforms, though that doesn't count the hundreds of millions who watched it in the pre Internet era. It's a Halloween institution, as essential as candy corn and questionable costumes more in a moment. John Landis once said there was a course taught at Harvard Business School about Thriller, and he called it complete bullshit because none of it was planned. But maybe that's the point.

10:19 The greatest cultural phenomena can't be engineered. They happen when someone with unlimited talent meets someone with unlimited ambition, when technology enables new forms of expression, when the culture is ready for transformation. Vincent Price, recording his part in those Three Perfect Takes, had no idea his evil laugh would echo through four decades of Halloween's The dancers learning those moves had no idea they were creating a new form of folk dance. Jackson transforming into a werewolf had no idea he was actually transforming the entire entertainment industry. The Irony is Beautiful, a song about death, brought the music industry back to life. A video about monsters made a black artist the biggest star on the planet. A dance of the undead became humanity's most joyful Halloween tradition. Every October thirty first, somewhere in the world, someone is hitting that first shoulder pop, throwing their arms up, beginning the ritual. Again.

11:21 Thriller isn't just a song anymore. It's not even just a video. It's proof that pop culture at its best becomes folklore, that a baseline, a Vincent Price laugh, and some synchronized shoulder rolls can unite humanity in a silly, spooky, absolutely essential dance of the dead. Forty two years later, we're still in that graveyard, with Michael still rising from our graves, still hitting those moves. The music industry was saved, but we're the ones who were transformed. We're all zombies now, and every Halloween we dance to prove it. Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand, and somewhere in a school gymnasium, or a city street or a YouTube video filmed in someone's living room, the dead are dancing. They always will be. That's the real thriller.