You’ve heard it a thousand times. Every Halloween, that creaking door swings open and those long, spooky wolf howls come rolling in at the start of “Thriller.” It’s one of the most famous intros in all of music.
So here’s a fun little question. Whose howls are those?
The man behind the sound was Bruce Swedien, Michael’s longtime recording engineer. He got the idea from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the one with the giant, terrifying dog out on the moors.
And it turned out Swedien had a giant dog of his own. A Great Dane named Max, who tipped the scales at a solid 200 pounds. Perfect for the job, right?
So one night he came up with a plan.
Where you can hear those famous howls
Give the very start a listen before you read on. Those wolf howls are the sound people have been trying to copy for forty years.
Here’s what Swedien tried first. He put big Max out in his barn late at night, set up a tape machine, and waited for the wild coyotes to start calling in the distance. The plan was simple enough. The coyotes would howl, Max would howl back, and there would be his wolf, caught on tape.
Max had other ideas. The dog just sat there and didn’t make a peep. Not that night, and not any night after.
Swedien later laughed about the whole thing. “He didn’t want to be in showbusiness,” he said of his stubborn Great Dane.
So who saved the day?
Michael did. The spooky wolf howls you hear at the very top of “Thriller” are Michael Jackson’s own voice. “That’s Michael Jackson,” Swedien said. “We had to get Michael to do it instead, but he did it so great.”
Just the wolf howls, mind you. There’s some sound-library spookiness mixed into that intro too. But that haunting call right at the start? That’s the King of Pop himself, having a little fun in the studio.
So go back and press play one more time. Now that you know it’s him up there howling, you’ll never quite hear it the same way again.
And big Max? He went back to being a very good boy who simply refused to perform on command.