Set in the 1950s, the short film opens with a boy named Michael and his partner (Ola Ray), who run out of gas at night near a forest. While on foot, Michael asks her if she wants to be his steady girlfriend. After she accepts, he warns her that she is different from the other guys. Soon the full moon appears and Michael transforms into a cat man. His girlfriend screams and runs away in terror, but the creature catches up to her, knocks her down and comes at her with its long claws.
At that instant, the setting changes to more modern times and the same couple is watching the previous scene in a movie theater. The girl, frightened, leaves the place and Michael follows her to tell her that it is only a movie. In the dark of night, they both walk down the street and he begins to sing the verses of “Thriller”, while she seems delighted. They continue walking and pass a fog-filled cemetery where zombies begin to emerge from their graves.
When the song stops, the zombies surround the couple and turn Michael into one of them. Then they start dancing and the girl runs for shelter in an abandoned house. The zombies go after her and violently make their way through the doors, windows and wooden floor. Just before she is caught, the girl wakes up and realizes it was all a nightmare. Michael reassures her and offers to take her home. The short film ends with him turning to the camera, smiling and revealing his yellow feline eyes, while Vincent Price’s laughter can be heard.
The short film makes several allusions to classic horror film elements. For example, the opening scene parodies B-movies of this genre, with Michael Jackson and Ola Ray dressed as 1950s teenagers.417 The metamorphosis Jackson undergoes (from polite “boy next door” to ferocious cat man) can be interpreted as a representation of male sexuality, of a bestial, predatory and aggressive nature.
At the same time, the boy’s transformation represents a coming-of-age, as director John Landis remarks: “In adolescence, young people begin to grow hair in unexpected places, and parts of their anatomy swell and grow. They all experience these physical transformations in their bodies, as well as sexual thoughts that were previously unknown in their minds. “18
Actor Vincent Price has a section in “Thriller” where he narrates that the dead revive at midnight in search of blood (“The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood…”) and threaten with the hounds of hell whoever does not have the courage to surrender to them (“Whosoever shall be found, without the soul for getting down, must stand and face the hounds of hell. …”).17 The choreographed zombie sequence seems to allude to the part of the lyrics that mentions a masked ball composed of the undead (“Night creatures call, and the dead start to walk in their masquerade”).17
Jackson’s makeup gives a “ghostly pallor” to his skin and emphasizes the outline of his skull, an allusion to the 1925 Phantom of the Opera mask.417 For Peter Dendle, the zombie invasion scene seems inspired by the film Night of The Living Dead (1968), as well as conveying feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness.19 Kobena Mercer observes that the characters exist on a metatextual level, with Ola Ray’s character aware of the horror that his “film-within-a-film” counterpart suffers and forgetting that it is only a film, so he also represents the person watching the short film.17 This character’s reality is confusing at the end, as he awakens and his companion has the same feline eyes as the beast in his nightmare.20
Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was released in November 1982 on Epic Records and spent four months at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.6 It spawned the singles “The Girl Is Mine,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Human Nature,” and “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” all of which were among the top ten most popular songs on the music charts, a record no other album had ever achieved before.2
In June 1983, the soundtrack to the film Flashdance displaced Thriller from the top of the Billboard 200. The album briefly regained the top spot in July, before being displaced again by The Police’s Synchronicity. Jackson, obsessed with his own sales figures, urged Epic executives Walter Yetnikoff and Larry Stessel to devise a plan that would return the album to the top of the chart.6