Thriller - The Full Experience

This post contains some links to Amazon, from which I may get compensation for qualifying purchases, although it's not bloody likely.

If you're a *ahem* person of a certain age *cough! Gen X! cough!* you'll remember what a big deal it was when the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller came out.

MTV and music videos where at their peak at that time, and the production companies were desperately trying to keep the interest of millions of teenagers by creating musical stories which were eye-catching and buzz-worthy. It was getting harder and harder to stand out amid all the noise of promoting thousands of songs and driving kids to the record store to pick up the latest hits.

And then, Thriller dropped...

We freaked. We screamed. We spent endless hours in front of the TV, figuring out  the choreography (Thank you to Michael Peters, may you Rest in Power) for the now-famous dance scene in the middle of the video.

This alone was a huge challenge, as there was no such thing as a DVR! We had to have a VCR at home (an expensive luxury), have MTV (cable was another expensive luxury), wait endless hours for Thriller to be played  (we never knew when that would happen), and have a blank VHS cassette tape loaded into the VCR and waiting to record, and even then it wasn't guaranteed we would have it for long enough to learn the routine, because our parents were vicious about recording over what we had so painstakingly ripped off from MTV.

It drove our parents nuts.

What made this video so unique was a combination of length (it clocked in at 13:41, the longest music video made at the time) production value, and the high quality creative team it attracted. 

John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, National Lampoon's Animal House, Twilight Zone: The Movie) was on-boarded as the director, co-producer and co-writer. Robert Paynter, B.S.C. (British Society of Cinematographers) came on as the Director of Photography (An American Werewolf in London, Curtains, Trading Places). The now-legendary Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Altered States, Ghost Story, The Funhouse) created the makeup effects we now know so well. Ola Ray (Night Shift, Trading Places) played Jackson's girlfriend.

Even the movie theater used for the exterior shots (interior theater shots were done at The Rialto in Pasadena, California), The Palace, gained its fame by being the oldest movie theater in Los Angeles! You can check out the other locations used here. 

 

As with almost everything one sees on screen, the background of Thriller was carefully curated by the crew to appeal to the horror movie aficionado.

Classic movie posters from various Vincent Price films (The Mask of the Red Death, The House of Wax, The Mad Magician, The House on Haunted Hill) adorned the exterior of the movie theater, in addition to several visual hat-tips to more then-current horror films.

And of course, Vincent Price took top billing on The Palace's iconic neon marquee! 

I'm fairly sure most of Gen X has the famous Vincent Price rap committed to memory, but many don't realize the final cut of both the music video and the album track didn't contain the original, full version, included below.

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'all's neighborhood

And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpses shell

The demons squeal in sheer delight
It's you they spy, so plump, so right
For although the groove is hard to beat
It's still you stand with frozen feet
 

You try to run, you try to scream
But no more sun you'll ever see
For evil reached from the crypt

To crush you in its icy grip

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
 

And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller

 

Can you dig it?

Price's trademark maniacal laugh at the end was chef's kiss, of course, and Thriller would not have been the same without his deft voice work.

For more behind-the-scenes thrills and chills, watch this.