The Importance of Thriller
It's a movie, it's a video, it's the <i>Thriller</i>.
Perhaps no film has had as much an influence on the music industry as Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Yes, the album by the same name has sold over 104 million copies, was the best-selling record two years in a row and remains the best-selling album in the history of time; but these successes are due in no small part to the music video produced for the title track.
Thriller defined the long form video and is so much more than the usual three minute’s worth of epileptic seizure inducing cuts between dance scenes and headshots. In fact, the first three minutes introduce enough plot and character development, complete with an original score and impressive special effects that the video will heretofore rightfully be referred to as a monumental cinematic achievement.
The film opens as a send-up of campy vintage horror films, with the predicament of two lovers stranded in the dark. Michael in his “M? emblazoned red and yellow varsity jacket, she in poodle skirt and pink sweater, scarf up in her hair. Thriller compacts into three minutes the premises of any well-executed parody: perfectly clichéd context, cardboard character development and of course, the best part of any horror movie; the revelation of the monster.
Like Karloff’s creature or Lugosi’s Count Dracula, Michael’s werecat is a memorable and truly terrifying movie monster. Unlike either of the aforementioned, Michael’s monster relies not only on dramatic lightning and strategically framed camera shots, but benefits from advances in technology. The blazing yellow eyes, the multiphonic growl that emanates from his mouthful of razor sharp teeth, the sprouting whiskers and thickening palms would be impossible were it not for skilled Hollywood artists.
The makeup and special effects are formidable to any big-screen adaptation and unprecedented for a mere music video, but the genius of Thriller’s opening scene is in the inevitable turn from movie magic to musical truth. Just as the creature bares its teeth with a snarl and we expect the bloodcurdling scream of a woman mutilated, we instead see an audience reacting to the terror onscreen and we realize we’ve been had.
The situation of the monster movie within a theater plays a dual role. First, it foreshadows the action towards the end of the film when Michael again takes the form of a nefarious beast. Secondly, it functions as motivation for the action that accompanies the most musicvideoesque part of the film. The narrative continues in cinematic form by situating the couple outside the theater in the dark, and setting their otherwise unexciting jaunt to the frighteningly fresh beats of the thriller track.
The song itself is horrifying, made only more so by Michael’s enactment of every lyric. Yet, it’s clear that the lyrics are meant teasingly, in order to reassure his companion that what transpired onscreen was only a movie, made-up, fiction. A smile, a touch on the chin, signals her comfort. They mirror the action onscreen in the beginning in almost every way. As the pair passes a cemetery, the film devolves into horror storytelling by horror film veteran Vincent Price, credited in the marquee above the theater entrance.
Even this soliloquy captures both the haunting nature of the thriller as well as the referential treatment of music in film and vice versa. With his memorable and debonair delivery, Price lays it down like this and like that:
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 corpse's shell
The lyrics expertly match Price’s half-serious, half-comic onscreen persona, at once evoking the worst tortures imaginable and dropping slang with ease, an accomplishment itself in genre-bending performance.
The track officially ends with Price’s maniacal laughter and a descent into darkness, but the film includes an additional two minutes of looped music. The extended instrumental allows for one of the most recognizable and oft-reenacted choreographed dance sequences; perhaps only more familiar is Michael’s signature moonwalk.
Nothing can be said about the dance that cannot be witnessed in its full, unadulterated form within the film. The dance is both capstone and starting block. As the title track dies down and transitions into more traditional horror film fare, the unfortunate female finds herself trapped inside a dilapidated house, as the legions of bloodthirsty zombies approach.
With this, Thriller becomes the movie on the screen, it plays into the monster movie ideal, it makes us believe in the fright. As the bodies of the undead burst through the floorboards and crawl into the room, zombified Michael reaches out his hand, and with empty bug-eyes beckons that she joins them in the night. But, just as before, the film snaps out of scene and into reality.
As it turns out, this particular sequence was just an instance of some kind of somnambulant disturbance and not the death-threatening end we thought. With a quick throw of the shoulder and a flash of his face toward the camera, we catch a glimpse of Michael’s still-glowing eyes and wonder…is this really the end?
Posted by Diego Baez on Nov 01, 2007 @ 12:00 am