By late 1983, Thriller was already a monster hit. “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had dominated radio and MTV, and CBS Records figured the album had done its job.
So when Michael Jackson said he wanted to make one more video, the label said no.
Michael had a wild idea. He’d seen John Landis’s horror comedy An American Werewolf in London and wanted to transform into a monster himself.
Landis didn’t want to make a regular music video. He pitched a real short film, shot on 35mm with dialogue, dancers, movie-quality makeup and an army of zombies. The price tag was somewhere between $500,000 and $900,000, at a time when many videos cost a fraction of that.
Michael put Landis on the phone with CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff, who flatly refused. As Landis later put it, the label believed the album was over.
Michael’s answer? He’d pay for it himself.
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He wasn’t bluffing either. He had already put around $150,000 of his own money into “Beat It.” But Landis refused to let him carry the whole risk.
The genius workaround
So the team got creative. Producer George Folsey Jr. and Michael’s attorney John Branca came up with a brilliant plan: film everything happening behind the scenes.
Add that footage to the short film and you had an hour-long TV special called Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which they could sell to networks.
Even MTV wasn’t interested at first. The channel was used to getting videos for free. Then Showtime jumped in, and suddenly MTV wanted a piece too. Each ended up putting in roughly a quarter-million dollars.
Michael Jackson – Thriller (Official 4K Video)
Then the making-of tape hit stores at a fan-friendly price and reportedly sold around a million copies within months. The workaround became a phenomenon of its own.
Just weeks before the premiere, Michael, then a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, called Branca and asked him to destroy the negative after religious objections to the film’s occult imagery. The team refused. Instead, they added that famous disclaimer at the start.
At the November 1983 premiere in Los Angeles, stars like Diana Ross, Prince and Eddie Murphy packed the theater. Michael reportedly hid in the projection booth. When it ended, Eddie Murphy shouted for them to show it again. So they did.
MTV started announcing airtimes like a big event, and Epic was soon shipping around a million albums a week. Thriller became America’s best-selling album of both 1983 and 1984.
In 2009, it became the first music video ever added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Not bad for a video nobody wanted to pay for.