Back in 1993, Stephen King was standing on a film set out in the middle of nowhere. King is the writer behind “Carrie,” “It” and “The Shining,” the man most people mean when they say the words master of horror. That year he was busy turning one of his own stories, “The Stand,” into a long TV miniseries. Then somebody walked up and handed him a phone.
A soft voice came down the line. “STEPHEN?…Stephen King?…This is…ummm…Michael? Michael Jackson?”
He wasn’t ready for that one.
King later wrote about the moment in his column for Entertainment Weekly. He said the biggest thing he felt was pretty simple. “what I’m mostly feeling is flummoxed,” he admitted. The most famous singer on the planet had tracked him down on a shoot, and the master of scary stories had no idea what to say.
So what did Michael actually want?
He had an idea, and he wasn’t shy about it, even though King would later call him painfully shy in person. He wanted the two of them to build something nobody had ever seen. “Stephen,” he says, “we must do this. We’re going to shock the world.” What he was after was the scariest, the absolute SCARIEST, music video ever.
That phone call turned into a short film called “Ghosts.” It didn’t come together fast. Filming started, stopped, then picked back up about three years later, with the special effects legend Stan Winston stepping in to direct. Winston was the man behind the creatures in movies like “Jurassic Park,” so he knew how to make something strange and spooky. “Ghosts” finally reached theaters in October 1996, which makes it a pretty perfect watch for this week.
King shared the writing credit with Michael and a writer named Mick Garris.
In the film Michael plays a mysterious figure living in a big haunted house, and he dances the way almost no one else can. King said himself the project holds some of Michael’s very best moves.
Here’s the short film that grew out of that odd phone call, with Michael dancing through a haunted house full of surprises.
Michael Jackson’s spooky short film “Ghosts,” the project the phone call created
Watching it now, it’s easy to forget the whole thing started with one nervous call to a man who didn’t know what to say back. Two legends from two very different worlds, horror and pop, deciding to go scare people together for the fun of it.
King has told the story with a lot of warmth over the years. He didn’t know Michael all that well, but that strange little introduction stuck with him for good. And he got exactly what Michael promised him on the phone that day.
Grab a blanket, turn the lights down and hit play, and see how close they came to the scariest video ever made.