Thirty years ago this Sunday, Michael Jackson put out the strangest and spookiest project of his whole career. It wasn’t quite a music video. It was a short film called “Michael Jackson’s Ghosts,” and it ran about 39 minutes, longer than some people’s favorite TV shows.
It debuted in US theaters on October 25, 1996, playing before select showings of Stephen King’s “Thinner.” If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Stephen King is the famous horror writer behind “It” and “The Shining,” and he helped Michael come up with the story. The man who directed it was Stan Winston, a makeup and effects legend who built creatures for movies like “Jurassic Park” and the “Terminator” films.
The setup is simple. A kind, mysterious man called the Maestro lives in a big spooky mansion on the edge of a small town. The townsfolk are scared of him. One day an angry mob marches up to his door, led by a grumpy town official who wants him gone for good.
Here’s the part most folks never catch.
That kind Maestro is Michael. And the grumpy man leading the mob against him? That’s Michael too.
So he played both the hero of his own film and the villain trying to run that hero out of town. The makeup was so thick that plenty of longtime fans watch the whole thing and never realize the two men on screen are the same person.
And it didn’t stop at two. Michael played five different characters in “Ghosts.” There was the Maestro, the kind stranger. There was the Mayor, the angry man leading the town. Then came three ghoulish monsters he turns into along the way: the Mayor Ghoul, the Superghoul and the Skeleton.
Four of those roles meant hours in the makeup chair. As the horror site Bloody Disgusting put it, “Four of those characters required extensive prosthetic work and hours in the makeup chair.”
Why would the biggest pop star in the world bury himself under all that latex? Stan Winston had a simple answer. “Michael wanted badly to be accepted as an actor,” he said. This was Michael’s shot to disappear into other people and show he could do more than sing and dance.
The easiest way to spot it is to watch the film and look closely at the Mayor’s face. The eyes give him away.
Here’s the official short version, so you can see both Michaels for yourself.
The official short film of “Michael Jackson’s Ghosts”
Turning one man into a whole cast took weeks of work. This behind-the-scenes look shows Stan Winston’s crew building the faces.
Behind the scenes with Michael and Stan Winston’s makeup crew
The film later played at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May 1997, which is about as far from a spooky small-town mansion as you can get. Not bad for a project a lot of people today have never even heard of. Give it a watch with the secret in mind, and the grumpy Mayor is pretty hard to miss.