By the mid 1990s the tabloids had settled on a story about Michael Jackson. He was the weird one, the man the headlines loved to paint as strange. Most stars in that spot would hire a publicist and try hard to look normal.
Michael did the opposite.
In 1996 he made a short film called Ghosts and set it in a sleepy little town named Normal Valley. The setup sounds like a bedtime story that took a wrong turn. A stranger lives in a big dark mansion on the hill. He’s odd. He puts on magic shows for the local kids. The grownups don’t trust him, so the mayor gathers a mob and marches up to run him out of town.
Here’s the part people tend to forget. Michael played the stranger. He also played the mayor leading the mob against him.
He didn’t dream it up alone either. He co-wrote it with the horror novelist Stephen King, then handed the directing to Stan Winston, the effects legend behind the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the creatures in Aliens. That’s a heavyweight crew for something the world waved off as a music video.
The music did the talking. One of the songs is called “Is It Scary,” written a couple of years earlier during the HIStory sessions. In it Michael takes all the whispering about him and turns it back on the listener, asking flat out, “is it scary for you?” He’s holding up a mirror. You wanted a monster, so here, have a good look.
What happens inside that mansion is the whole payoff, and I won’t give it away. I’ll just say the scaring contest does not go the way the mayor planned, and the dancing in the back half is some of the strangest, most committed footage Michael ever put to film.
Watch how he plays the crowd’s fear like an instrument, grinning the entire time, right up until the floor drops out from under the mayor.
Michael Jackson – Ghosts (Official Video – Shortened Version)
People are talking about Ghosts again this year, partly because the 2026 biopic Michael put his life back on screens everywhere. That film made its own choices about which chapters to show and which to leave out, and fans have been arguing about those choices for months. Ghosts is Michael telling a version of the story in his own language, which was always movement and music and a little theater.
Give it the half hour. It’s a strange, dazzling thing, and a little sad too, and it lands differently once you know he wrote himself in as both the hunted and the one leading the hunt.