Nearly everybody has seen it. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, walks a girl home under a full moon and then drops to the ground as something wild takes over. His eyes go yellow, fur breaks across his face, and claws push out of his hands. For more than forty years people have called that creature a werewolf. It makes sense too, because of how the whole thing started.
Michael had just watched a horror movie called “An American Werewolf in London.” He loved the way the man in it turns into a beast right there on screen. So he called up the film’s director, John Landis, and asked him to make something like that for a music video. Since Landis was the man behind that famous werewolf movie, fans naturally figured Michael turned into a werewolf too.
He didn’t.
The man who actually built the creature can tell you where the look came from, in his own words.
The makeup artist behind the “Thriller” creature tells how he dreamed it up
That man is Rick Baker, a makeup artist who has won the Academy Award seven times. He’s the one who designed and sculpted the monster for “Thriller,” and he never made a wolf at all. His own record of the work puts it plainly: “Baker also created the werecat creature Michael Jackson transforms into in the music video Thriller (1983).”
A werecat. A cat creature, not a dog and not a wolf. Once you know that, you start to catch the feline shape of the face and the way those eyes catch the light.
There was a practical reason for it too. Landis has said the monster had to dance, and anything dancing needs to stand and move on two legs instead of running around on four. That pretty much ruled out the usual hunched, four-legged werewolf and pushed the design toward something that could hold its own in a routine full of zombies.
And here’s a detail even big fans tend to miss. The sharp fangs weren’t just sculpted from scratch. They were molded from Michael’s own teeth, so the creature’s mouth was really built around his. This past August an auction house called Propstore put the original werecat teeth up for sale, from Baker’s personal collection. They’d been expected to bring somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000. They sold for $47,250.
Baker even slipped himself into the video. In the graveyard scene, he’s one of the zombies climbing out, the one shoving open the heavy crypt door.
Now watch the change again with fresh eyes. Look right at the start of the transformation and see the cat you always took for a wolf.
The full “Thriller” short film, including the famous transformation
It’s an easy thing to get wrong, and most people go their whole lives never finding out they had it backwards. The cat was there the entire time, hiding in the first few seconds of the change. Baker would go on to work on dozens of big films after this, but for a lot of us that little monster is still the one we picture first.