Almost everybody has seen it. Michael in the red jacket, the yellow eyes, a crowd of monsters rising out of the dark while he leads them down the street.
That was 1983. The makeup got built by hand that year. Foam rubber pieces glued onto each face, greasepaint layered on top and long nights to get it done. For more than forty years nobody really tried to make it that same way again.
Then the new “Michael” movie came along.
For the film, makeup designer Bill Corso and co-designer Christien Tinsley decided against faking it with computers. They rebuilt all 25 “Thriller” zombies the old 1983 way, foam rubber and greasepaint, one face at a time. They shot it outdoors, all night, over two nights in a row, on the very street where Michael filmed the original.
To get it right, they needed the one person who had been there at the start.
The original “Thriller” video, the look they spent two nights rebuilding
Keep your eyes on the street, the jacket and those zombie faces, because that’s exactly what the new film set out to copy.
Rick Baker is the makeup legend who made the monsters in the first place. Back in 1983 he took molds of Michael’s face so he could build the look. All these years later he still had them. He scanned those molds and handed copies to Corso’s team, so the new zombies would sit on the same face Michael had.
Then Baker did something sweet. He brought his family down to the set just to watch.
Think about where he was standing. The actual “Thriller” street, late at night, 25 zombies getting made by hand from his own molds, the way he had done it as a younger man. He put the whole feeling into one sentence.
“This is honestly the closest to being in a time machine that you could ever be.”
That line is what the film people keep repeating. They were after the real recipe and the real street, right down to the molds Baker had kept all along.
So before you watch the new version, go back to the one that started all of it. Look at how the dancers move. Watch the light catch those faces. Then imagine a crew out on that same pavement at two in the morning, gluing on foam rubber and trying to match it piece by piece.
Forty years later, and people are still chasing one short film down a dark street. That’s a strange and wonderful thing to be able to say about a music video.
And the man who built the first monsters got to stand there and watch the whole thing happen all over again, with his own family beside him.