If you’ve ever let “Thriller” play all the way to the end, you know the voice. That deep, smiling, half-mad narration about creatures crawling in search of blood. It belongs to Vincent Price, the actor who spent a career scaring people in classic horror films like “House of Wax.” By the early 1980s his face and that silky, creepy voice were a Halloween staple, so Michael Jackson’s team wanted him for the spoken part that closes the song.
Getting him there was almost an accident. Quincy Jones, the legendary producer behind the album, was married at the time to actress Peggy Lipton, who most people knew from the old TV show “The Mod Squad.” She mentioned that Price was a friend of hers, and the idea took off from there.
But there was a problem.
On the day Price was booked to come in and record, the words he was supposed to say weren’t finished yet. Not even close.
The man on the hook for them was Rod Temperton, the quiet British songwriter who actually wrote “Thriller.” (He’d first called it “Starlight.”) Temperton still had two verses to write, and Price, a true pro, was going to show up right on time.
So Temperton did the only thing he could. He wrote them on the way there.
He didn’t write them at a desk or in the studio. He scribbled the lines in the back of a taxi, racing across town from his hotel to the session. According to PRS for Music, the verses “were finished just as the Hollywood icon’s limo pulled up outside.” Talk about cutting it close.
What he did next is the fun part. “I told the driver to drive round the back of the studio and I raced in,” Temperton remembered. He slipped in the back way with the pages in hand, so Price would never know the poem had been written minutes earlier in a cab.
Then the real surprise. Price sat down, read it cold, and got the whole thing in just two takes.
Years later Price got to perform that same spooky poem for a live television audience, and it’s a real treat to watch.
Vincent Price reciting the “Thriller” narration live on TV
That rich, theatrical delivery is exactly why the song still feels like Halloween itself. Plenty of people have tried to copy the laugh at the end, and nobody ever comes close.
Of course, the poem is only the finish line. Before it comes the short film that changed music videos forever, with the red jacket, the graveyard and the dance everybody still tries to learn.
The full “Thriller” video, with Price’s narration closing it out
Next time it plays at a Halloween party, you’ll know the little secret behind it. One of the creepiest pieces of writing in pop history got finished in city traffic, by a songwriter quietly hoping the limo out front would take a little longer to park.