Facts you didn't know about Michael Jackson's Thriller video,
The real stories behind the King of Pop's spooky mini movie.
Michael Jackson's video for Thriller was released over 35 years ago.
On December 2nd, 1983,
director John Landis extended the track, the seventh and final single released
from the Thriller album into a nearly 14 minute long musical horror film,
letting Michael indulge in his monster movie fantasies.
It got saturation play on MTV and has been
seen more than 600 million times on YouTube.
Here's things you might not have realized
the first time or the two hundredth time you watched it.
Here's the detail.
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One thriller was originally titled Starlight.
Rod Temperton, a British native formerly of the funk band Heat Wave,
also wrote Baby Be Mine and the Lady in My Life for Thriller.
Before songwriter Temperton came up with a final name Thriller,
Michael Jackson's working title for the album.
And the song was actually Starlite
to Michael Jackson's Faith seeped in at the time he was making Thriller.
Jackson was a devout Jehovah's Witness who would carry books about his and other
religions around with him on set after production wrapped on Thriller,
as explained by Jackson's longtime lawyer, John Branca.
Jackson started to panic because members of his church had told him the song
promoted demonology, afraid the church was going to excommunicate him.
Jackson begged Landis to have the film destroyed.
Instead, Branca convinced him to include a disclaimer at the beginning of the film
to distance it from his own personal beliefs.
Three Thriller is a coming of age story in adolescence, youngsters begin to grow
hair in unexpected places and parts of their anatomy swell and grow.
Director John Landis explained regarding
the role of the werewolf metaphor in cinematic history.
Everyone experiences these physical transformations in their bodies, in new,
unfamiliar sexual thoughts, in their minds.
No wonder we readily accept the concept of a literal metamorphosis.
In other words, undergoing a lycanthropy
transformation was a safe way for Michael Jackson to experiment with puberty.
For Thriller had a playmate.
Jackson's Thriller co-star Ray,
who appeared on Cheers and in Beverly Hills Cop two,
was also featured in Playboy magazine as a playmate.
She has since stated in interviews that she tried not to let Jackson know
about her Playboy history because she wanted the part so badly and thought it
would have been a deal breaker for the megastar.
Five.
Fred Astaire could have been a thriller extra Hollywood legend.
Fred Astaire was a fan of Jackson's dancing.
Jackson even personally taught him
to moonwalk and attended a Thriller rehearsal.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,
who edited Jackson's Moonwalk autobiography, logged some serious hours
when they were filming at three a.m. in a bad neighborhood in East Los Angeles.
She was hanging out in Jackson's Winnebago.
Sex, the thriller choreographer,
was a beat it gang member, choreographer Jackson Peters also did
the epic dance sequences in Pat Benatar as Love is a Battlefield
and in Jackson's Beat It video, where he played one of the gang leaders,
the one dressed in white with sunglasses and a moustache,
seven thriller sold millions and VHS sales.
The making of Michael Jackson's thriller
Home Video and DVD totaled nine point five million in sales to date
eight.
Michael Jackson does not transform into a werewolf.
Jackson undergoes two memorable
transformations in the film, first as a rare creature and later a zombie.
In the first scene,
he transforms into what most people typically assume is a werewolf.
This makes sense, given that he's shown
reacting to the full moon before he changes.
In fact, Jackson's transformation isn't into a werewolf, but into a weird cat.
The look was created by Rick Baker.
We made him into more of a weird cat
because I just didn't want to do another werewolf, Baker told Vulture in 2010.
At first I was thinking it would be almost like a Black Panther thing,
but I ended up putting a longer mane of hair on it and bigger ears.
Nine Michael Jackson snake was on set, according to multiple accounts.
Jackson would bring his pet snake mussels to the set while filming Thriller.
In a 2016 interview, Quincy Jones,
who produced the album, said that Jackson's menagerie,
which also included chimpanzees, was ubiquitous in the studio.
One day I said, Where's mussels?
And we went downstairs and mussels was in the parrot cage.
He had just eaten the parrot and his head got stuck in the bars of the cage.
10 Michael Jackson's tiny frame at the time of filming,
the 25 year old singer weighed just 99 pounds and had a 26 inch waist,
according to Landis's wife, Deborah, who designed the red jacket.
In June 2011, the Texan gold trader Milton Verrett paid one point eight
million dollars for Jackson's iconic red jacket from the video at auction.
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