Everybody knows the first few seconds of “Thriller.” That slow, spooky creak of a door swinging open, then footsteps, before a single note of music. It’s one of the most famous openings in pop history. And for years a lot of people figured the sound was made on a keyboard or some studio machine.
It wasn’t.
The man who would know was Bruce Swedien. He was Michael’s recording engineer, the person behind the mixing board for “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad.” So much of what makes those records sound the way they do came from him. Swedien passed away in 2020, but plenty of his interviews are still around, and in one of them he laid out exactly how that door came to be.
Here’s Swedien talking about what it was really like to make records with Michael.
Hear the engineer who was in the room talk about recording Michael
Now, the door. Swedien didn’t want a fake. He wanted the real thing. So he rented a batch of sound-effects doors and spent a whole day at Westlake Studios in Los Angeles opening and closing each one, hunting for the perfect creak. A full day, just on a door.
When he finally landed on the right one, he set the microphones right up against the hinges to catch every groan of the wood. He put it simply: “miked the hinges real close. That is a real door and I recorded that and added it on the track.”
Then come the footsteps. You can hear somebody walking in right after the door opens. For a long time nobody said much about whose feet those were. Swedien had a hunch, and it’s a sweet one: “Come to think of it, that might have been Michael doing those footsteps too, actually.”
So the next time the song starts, you could be listening to Michael himself walking into his own record.
If you want to hear it the way Swedien built it, this is the official album version. Turn your speakers up for the first few seconds, the door and the steps, before anything else comes in.
The official album version of “Thriller,” where the door and footsteps open the track
There’s one more thing Swedien shared about those sessions. The lights were usually off. He said Michael didn’t care for the bright studio lamps, so they’d record him in near darkness. His words: “we always recorded with Michael in the dark… he hated light.”
A dark room and a real creaking door, on a song about monsters. It almost writes itself. Play the top of the track again and listen past the music to the door itself. Somewhere in there, a real one is swinging.