It’s Halloween night, so somewhere a TV is playing “Thriller” right now. You know the scene. The zombies crawl up out of the ground, shuffle into a dark street and then fall in line behind Michael Jackson for the most famous dance in music video history.
The way it’s put together, it feels like that street sits right next to the graveyard they just climbed out of. Spooky and miles from anywhere.
It wasn’t.
“Thriller” was shot around Los Angeles. The movie theater scenes were filmed at the Palace Theatre downtown, and the old house at the end was on Carroll Avenue. The big zombie dance was filmed somewhere else entirely, on a plain street corner on the east side of the city.
Los Angeles Magazine writer Lindsay Blake spelled it out in 2014: “The Zombie dance was filmed at 3701 E. Union Pacific Ave. in Boyle Heights.” That puts it at the corner of Union Pacific Avenue and South Calzona Street. An earlier piece in the same magazine simply placed the corner “in East L.A.”
So what’s there? Warehouses. It’s an ordinary industrial block, the kind of place where trucks come and go and people head in to work. Roadside America, a website about offbeat places to visit, lists the address and doesn’t sugarcoat the movie magic: “there was never a graveyard in this industrial neighborhood.”
The crew filmed there in the fall of 1983. The dance itself was choreographed by Michael Peters, who also staged the dancing in “Beat It” and won a Tony Award for the Broadway show “Dreamgirls.” Director John Landis later told NPR, “Michael was an extraordinary dancer and, I mean, working with Michael Jackson at that time was really nuts.”
The finished video premiered on MTV on Dec. 2, 1983, and the world hasn’t stopped copying those moves since.
Next time you watch it, look past the zombies. In the long street dance in the middle of the video, keep your eyes on the red brick wall and the streetlight behind them, because both of those are still standing.
Michael and the zombies dance down a real Los Angeles street
That’s the fun part. A visitor who went to see the corner in May 2024 wrote that it “looks nearly the same as it did in October 1983 (minus a few zombies).” The red brick wall was still there. So were the warehouse, the streetlight and even the manhole cover in the road.
According to Roadside America, Michael did most of his dancing in the street just west of the intersection. Think about that for a second. The spot where he spun and stomped with his zombie dancers is a regular block that people drive past every day without a second look.
If you ever want to see it for yourself, keep in mind that it’s a working street with traffic and private businesses, so stay on the sidewalk and let the people there get on with their day. A quick photo from the curb will do the job.
So tonight, while the kids are out in their zombie makeup, you’ll know the truth about that famous street. It’s a warehouse corner in Boyle Heights, and that brick wall is still right where the zombies left it.