Almost everybody has seen the start of the “Thriller” video. A line of text comes up on a black screen, something about the film not meaning to endorse a belief in the occult. Most people read right past it and wait for the music. But that little card is there for a reason, and it’s a story Michael Jackson’s own lawyer has been telling for years.
The video was a huge gamble. It cost about $1.2 million back in 1983, when a normal music video ran around $50,000. Nobody was making short films like that for a pop song.
The official version still opens with that warning. Watch the first few seconds and you’ll catch it.
The “Thriller” video, with the disclaimer card at the very start
Here’s the part most casual viewers never learn. Michael was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and he started feeling real pressure from his church over the monster imagery in the film, the graveyard scenes and Michael himself turning into a creature. It weighed on him.
So he went to John Branca. Branca was Michael’s lawyer, the man who handled his business and his biggest deals, and someone Michael trusted completely. And Michael gave him an order.
He wanted the whole thing gone.
“when Michael felt pressure from the church, from Jehovah’s Witnesses, he told me to get the film canisters and destroy them,” Branca told Billboard years later. Those canisters held the film. Asked if that really meant nobody would ever have watched “Thriller,” Branca didn’t soften it. “Yes,” he said. “So the world would never have seen it.”
Michael called him about it every single day. And every day, Branca just held on to the film. He didn’t destroy a thing. He kept stalling, looking for a way to change Michael’s mind without going against his faith.
What finally worked was a little story, and Branca admits now he made part of it up. He brought up Bela Lugosi, the actor famous for playing Dracula in the old horror films. “Finally I said to him, ‘You know Michael, Bela Lugosi played Dracula,'” Branca remembered, and he told Michael that Lugosi was a deeply religious man who kept the role separate from his own beliefs. “He was very religious,” Branca said. That gave Michael a way to feel alright about it.
Then Branca offered the fix that’s still on the video today. “We’ll put a disclaimer on it,” he said. That’s the card you skip past every time, the one about his strong personal convictions.
So the most famous music video ever made came within a few phone calls of never existing. That disclaimer turned out to be the one small thing that got Michael to yes, and it’s still sitting right there at the start, easy to miss.