Michael Jackson had a huge 1983. He sold millions of copies of his album Thriller and
starred in one of the most popular, famous, and well-produced music videos of all time.
This is the untold truth of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video.
When Michael Jackson's Thriller started to drop down the charts in 1983,
Jackson grew unnerved and pressed executives on how to restore the LP to its #1 perch.
Epic Records head of promotions Frank DiLeo suggested a third music video, for the album's
title track, which wasn't even slated to be a single, telling Jackson at the time:
"It's simple — all you've got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary."
However, Epic wouldn't pay for it — the label spent $250,000 on the video for "Billie Jean"
but made Jackson pay the $150,000 budget for "Beat It" himself.
The proposed cost of the "Thriller" video? Slightly less than $1 million.
After a screaming, profanity-laden phone call with Jackson and director John Landis,
CBS Records head Walter Yetnikoff offered up $100,000,
leaving the creative team to find the rest of the money elsewhere. Landis' production
partner George Folsey and Jackson's lawyer John Branca hatched a plan: raise money by
pre-selling the rights to a behind-the-scenes documentary shot during "Thriller" production.
MTV, which, to that point, had never paid for content, contributed $250,000, and Showtime paid
$300,000. According to The Guardian, Jackson made up a lot of the difference out of his own pocket.
In August 1983, film director John Landis received a phone call from Michael Jackson.
Landis had recently helmed several big movies, including the horror-comedy An American Werewolf
in London, which Jackson so enjoyed that he wanted the director to tell another
werewolf story and helm his "Thriller" video. The singer and the filmmaker met,
and Landis dismissed the notion of presenting "Thriller" as a typical, cheaply made music video.
Instead, he thought, it would be shot like a real movie, on classy 35-millimeter film stock.
"I knew by exploiting Michael's name, I could get it booked into theaters."
A musical number set to the song "Thriller" would comprise most of the video,
but it would also have a scripted drawing device. Landis and Jackson worked out a
story about a guy who takes a young woman on a date and transforms into a bloodthirsty horror
movie monster before her very eyes. Jackson was all in, especially after Landis said he
could probably get An American Werewolf in London makeup master Rick Baker involved.
"When I first walked into Rick's studio, it was like a museum of horror. I mean,
all these faces, and I was so amazed by it."
One major part of the early concept was rejected. Landis told The Guardian
that they initially planned to make Jackson turn into a four-legged creature, but said:
"We came to the conclusion that if Michael was going to dance,
it would be a hell of a lot easier for his monster to have two legs instead of four."
And so, that's what happened, although Jackson's character doesn't, per common knowledge,
become a werewolf. According to Baker, he technically portrays a "werecat."
"Thriller" hit MTV and other outlets in 1983, the same year that Flashdance was a hit in movie
theaters and made a star out of Jennifer Beals. According to Vanity Fair, Beals passed on the
female role in the "Thriller" video, and after a lengthy search, director John Landis cast Ola
Ray as the poodle-skirt-wearing young woman in the video's fake horror film as well as Michael
Jackson's date who witnesses his transformation into a monster. According to Landis:
"I auditioned a lot of girls and this girl Ola Ray - first of all,
she was crazy for Michael. She had such a great smile."
"I just stared at John Landis and had this grin on my face like, 'Ah,
you gotta give it to me, I would love to do it.'"
Only later did Landis realize that Ray was a former Playboy Playmate,
which threatened her involvement in the video because Jackson thought it might
come across as improper for him to be sharing the screen with a model from a racy magazine.
Landis talked Jackson out of getting a new actress by reminding him that
Ray was a Playmate in Playboy, not in "Thriller." The actress and the
musician wound up getting along just fine — more than fine, actually. Ray recalled:
"I had some intimate moments with him in his trailer [...] I won't
say that I have seen him in his birthday suit but close enough."
Before any of the "Thriller" fun — monster transformations, choreographed zombie dances,
creepy yellow eyes — the video begins with a brief bit of text on screen:
"Due to my strong personal convictions,
I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult."
That's a pretty serious statement, and one that makes the silly horror movie-inspired
fun to follow seem like it's going to be a lot darker and menacing than it is.
It's also one Jackson felt personally compelled to include.
After production on the video wrapped, Jackson, a practicing Jehovah's Witness,
was told by leaders of his church that they thought "Thriller" encouraged demon worship,
and if it were released, he'd be excommunicated. Thoroughly upset, Jackson ordered his lawyer to
destroy the "Thriller" negatives. He wouldn't do it, and instead locked up the footage and
gave Jackson the idea to let "Thriller" out, but just with a denouncing disclaimer tacked
on to the start. The singer liked that idea and later told Jehovah's Witness publication Awake:
"I just intended to do a good, fun short film,
not to purposely bring to the screen something to scare people or to do anything bad."
The premise of the "Thriller" music video is fairly straightforward. Jackson's character
takes his date to a horror movie and then makes her life into one when he transforms
into a monstrous creature and leads a horde of other scary creatures, both ghoulish and undead.
But for director John Landis, "Thriller" was about something more. According to Vanity Fair,
Landis directed Jackson to add an element of forwardness to his role, with an eye toward
interesting the singer's many female fans by making him appear more manly and virile.
Additionally, Landis equates the process of man turning to beast,
in "Thriller" and in other werewolf-based movies, with puberty, writing in Monsters in Movies:
"In adolescence, youngsters begin to grow hair in unexpected places and
parts of their anatomy swell and grow. Everyone experiences these physical
transformations in their bodies and new, unfamiliar sexual thoughts in their minds.
No wonder we readily accept the concept of a literal metamorphosis.
"I'm not like other guys."
"Thriller," of course, came from the Michael Jackson album also called Thriller.
The record was a major hit that sold millions of copies and spawned numerous hit singles,
which, in turn, led to more album sales. The LP is only nine tracks long, and seven of those were
commercially released singles. "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" went the extra mile, all the way to #1.
Title track "Thriller" was the seventh and final Thriller single, released to stores
and radio in January 1984, well over a year after the album debuted. The cultural event
that was the video for "Thriller" pushed sales of the single, too, and the song hit #4 on the
pop chart. The horror mini-movie also directly led to Thriller flying off store shelves again.
Millions of people who somehow hadn't yet purchased the album were inspired to do so,
and during the peak of the video's popularity, it sold more than a million copies a week.
By the time Thriller's sales cycle wound down in 1984,
it was the best-selling LP of all time in the United States, with sales of 33 million.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" clip permanently elevated the medium of music video to artistic
and cinematic relevance at a time when it was still relatively new and directionless.
"Thriller" also helped steer toward importance and
bring a new standard operating protocol to another kind of video — home video.
In the 1980s, millions of consumers were purchasing their first VCRs. Either in the
VHS or Betamax format, the TV accessory allowed them to watch movies or other content at home
via a cassette borrowed for the cost of a few bucks from a local video rental outlet.
This was the business model in home video for most of the early to mid-1980s:
Studios and publishers charged about $90 for tapes and sold almost exclusively to rental stores,
which would then charge customers a few bucks to rent it for a day or two.
"The perfect video store…"
"Welcome to Blockbuster Video!"
"...is popping up all over the country!"
A videocassette of "Thriller" opened the door to priced-to-own videos.
According to Vanity Fair, Vestron Video helped offset the high production cost of "Thriller"
by paying for the VHS and Betamax distribution rights for the Making Michael Jackson's Thriller
documentary and then gave it a $29.95 retail price tag. Within just a few months of release
in November 1983, it had sold over a million copies, easily making it the best-selling home
video ever to that point. There's even data to suggest that the existence of
Making Michael Jackson's Thriller helped fuel the massive rise of VCR sales in late 1983.
"Thriller" was a watershed moment in music video. Prior to its production in 1983,
music videos weren't taken seriously or considered anything more than a way to
cheaply promote a single or an album. Early music videos were usually shot on video, not film,
adding a cheap look to a cheap production — a singer or a band might do little more than
stand in an unadorned studio and lip-sync to their recording. "Thriller" was one of
the first music videos to show that the medium carried the potential for greatness, and not
only did critics acknowledge its importance, but they kept doing so for years afterward.
In 1984, Making Michael Jackson's Thriller won the Grammy Award for Best Video Album,
and in a 1999 end-of-the-century countdown, MTV named "Thriller" the #1 music video of all time.
Less than two years later, sister network VH1 would also name "Thriller" the top video ever
made. In 2009, the Library of Congress added "Thriller" to the National Film Registry, naming
it part of its collection of films that should be, quote, "preserved as cultural, artistic,
and/or historical treasures for generations to come." And yet despite all these fancy awards,
"Thriller" didn't win the one prize that seemed like a lock. At the inaugural MTV Video Music
Awards in 1984, "Thriller" surprisingly lost Video of the Year to the Cars' "You Might Think."
Ola Ray took home a lot of memories and stories from her time co-starring in the landmark music
video. And as later legal filings would indicate, that's about all the actress and model took home.
"So. What are we gonna do now?"
In May 2009, Ray sued Jackson, along with his production company, for breach of contract.
The actress claimed that back in the 1980s, she was promised a portion of the "Thriller" profits,
and yet, more than two decades later, she hadn't received any money since some initial payments.
Ray's attorney, Jason Feldman, told the New York Daily News:
"We don't believe they were complete, and they were never timely."
The publication reported that the most substantial chunk of money
the actress received came in 1998 — 15 years after "Thriller" was shot.
Jackson died a few weeks after the suit was filed, and according to TMZ, the singer's estate settled
with Ray in 2013 to the tune of $75,000. In 2017, Ray had to file a lawsuit again,
when she alleged that she wasn't paid her share for a 3-D re-release of the "Thriller" video.
The massively successful "Thriller" video was a close collaboration between performer
Michael Jackson and director John Landis, although it would seem that of the pair,
only Jackson greatly benefited financially from the project. In January 2009,
nearly three decades after production on the video wrapped, Landis sued Jackson and his production
company for having failed to fork over what was due over the years. According to the suit:
"The Thriller video became a worldwide megahit and an iconic pop culture phenomenon that has
continued to generate profits for defendants Optimum Productions and Michael Jackson,
who have wrongfully refused to pay or account for such profits to plaintiff."
The suit alleged that Landis didn't receive his promised 50-percent
cut of the profits and that Jackson and company acted with, quote, "fraudulent, malicious,
and oppressive conduct" in withholding what The Hollywood Reporter said amounted to about $2.3
million. Jackson died about six months later, and his estate settled with Landis in 2012.
"Thriller" never really stopped being popular. As of September 2020, the video,
hosted by Michael Jackson's official YouTube account, had racked up nearly 700 million views.
This is to say nothing of the countless videos, viral and otherwise, of people re-creating the
familiar "Thriller" dance moves — particularly the stylized zombie movements — at weddings, block
parties, and Halloween celebrations. Certainly the largest example of the phenomenon: In 2009, 13,957
people in Mexico performed the "Thriller" dance all at once, setting a Guinness World Record.
"Now it's official."
What's likely the most popular second-generation "Thriller" video came from an unlikely place:
a prison in the Philippines. According to NPR, government security consultant Byron Garcia
instituted an exercise program in the mid-2000s at the Cebu
Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. Sessions had been previously sparsely attended,
so Garcia introduced elaborately choreographed dance routines,
and before long, as many as 1,500 inmates reported to the prison yard to learn some moves.
Garcia taped and uploaded videos of the sessions to YouTube, and in 2007, the one of the "CPDRC
Dancing Inmates" doing the "Thriller" dance hit big and went viral. As of 2020, more than 59
million people had watched the sea of orange-clad people amble and groove like zombie-monsters.
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