Halloween Horrors: THRILLER

MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER  (1983)
Directed by John Landis
Starring Michael Jackson, Ola Ray, Vincent Price
PG for unspecified reasons (scary images and scenes)
SCAREmeter: 2/10
GOREmeter: 3/10
OVERALL: N/A

I don't really care for music videos.  They're weird.  It's like a one-song musical, and the song is the most important thing, followed by the choreography, but in a decent musical, those things are meant to serve the plot.  So, for a movie guy, it's all a little backwards.
Michael Jackson's an interesting case though, and an infamous perfectionist, bringing new levels of showmanship to the pop music industry.  At the time of recording the record-smashing album Thriller, Jackson was seeking to do just that, smash the records.  Whatever his highly-publicized moral foibles, Jackson was undoubtedly an artist of the highest caliber with incredible drive, and perhaps due in part to his rough upbringing as part of family band, which included sky-high expectations from an abusive father, Jackson was constantly driven by a desire for the worldwide approval of being the best at everything he did.
The 1980s were the decade of the MTV generation, and consequently, the decade of the music video, another area of the industry in which Jackson would have to be the best.  After Thriller was released in November 1982 to wide acclaim, it peaked with sales of one million copies per week, and when sales began to dip in summer of 1983, Jackson and his team began production on what would come to be widely considered the greatest music video of all time (admittedly, I'm not sure that kind of claim means much though).

MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER was directed by John Landis, one of the most prestigious directors in Hollywood at the time, known for blockbuster hits like NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE and THE BLUES BROTHERS, and having just recently ventured in horror with 1981's AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.  AMERICAN WEREWOLF had reinvigorated the horror genre and revolutionized movie makeup technologies, thanks to innovative techniques developed by legendary makeup/prosthetic artist Rick Baker, who was newly arrived on the industry scene.  By bringing in Landis to direct THRILLER, Jackson also got Baker, who plied similar techniques to turn Jackson into a "werecat" and later a zombie, along with a horde of back-up dancing zombies.
It's still a music video, so it's still cheesy and the plot, loose one that it is, is there to serve the choreography, but then again, it's great choreography.  Running at thirteen minutes long, the film follows Michael and his skittish date (Ola Ray) as they come from a horror movie, and Michael teases her for getting scared, and then the undead rise from their graves and Michael dances with them and becomes a zombie himself.  It's then revealed to have been the girlfriend's nightmare all along, or was it?  I guess it is a music video, so you have to adjust your expectations.  Either way, the makeup and choreography are great, and it's filled with iconic imagery.  What's funny though, is that the weirdest bit is actually a title card at the beginning in which Jackson (a devout Jehovah's Witness at the time) disclaims any belief in the occult.  Later on, Jackson was publicly apologetic about his most famous work.

Although it failed to receive a nomination, MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER was played with a re-release of Disney's animated classic FANTASIA  in order to qualify for an Academy Award in the category of Best Live Action Short Subject.  It was later decided that it might have been best to only include it with nighttime screenings of the animated Disney feature , after parents complained to the management about the music video's frightening content.  In 2009, MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER became the first and, to date, only music video to be selected for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," one of the highest honors afforded to works of film.  Today, it is consistently regarded as the most significant music video in the history of the medium, and one of the most iconic moments in American cultural history.