Before reading this entry to Applied Mythology, I encourage my readers to take the time to watch “Michael Jackson’s Thriller”, from start to end. Not only is it a great crossover between the horror film and music video genres, but it’s got some formidable dancing that never gets old.
From the Car to the Couch
In 1983, “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” revolutionized the music industry with a groundbreaking music video to its 1981 titular hit song. Unabashedly ambitious and costing twice its original budget, “Thriller” became a huge success, catapulting the album to the most sold in history, a rank it holds to date. The video’s success can be attributed to its uniqueness: unlike its immediate predecessors (“Billy Jean” and “Beat It”, from the same album), “Thriller” warps the format of the music video over its 14-minute duration, blurring the line that separates it from a short film. While the song remains at the heart of the plot, it is edited freely to accommodate a brief albeit powerful storyline of monstrous predation, laced with social commentary, pop-culture and a dose of humor. The erotic bookends of “Thriller” ―which starts in a car and ends on a couch― help unravel the layers of meaning behind this modern pop myth, revealing the ultimate protagonist behind its creation.
Co-writer and director John Landis declared during the 2017 presentation of the 3D version of the film that “Thriller was nobody’s good idea, it was no brilliant business plan. It was a vanity video because Michael [Jackson] wanted to be a monster.” A first reading of the video falls in line with this conceptual levity: “Thriller” can be easily regarded as a mere pastiche of horror films clichés, tied loosely together by a very simple storyline in which a shape-shifting Jackson harasses his girlfriend, cycling through different monster tropes, all while leading a spectacularly choreographed dancing troop of the undead.
However, Jackson’s light-heartedness was tempered by Landis’ film culture, which explains the care to detail in the world-building behind “Thriller”. Fresh from writing and directing An American Werewolf in London (1981) and accompanied by make-up artist Rick Baker, Landis imbues the film with his skill and experience in the horror genre, linking it to popular references and lacing it with Easter eggs1. Christine Gledhill, the designer of Michael Jackson’s iconic V-shaped red jacket, describes how it was fashioned to make him seem virile and reinforce “his meta-textual superimposition of role as both boyfriend and star”2. The unusual combination of artistic candor and technical depth behind “Thriller” make it a delightful object for arcane analysis. In this vein, I will propose two different readings of the myth-building behind it:
Dream Sequence 1. The Demonic Thrill of the Eternal Return
“You close your eyes and hope that this is just imagination, girl
But all the while you hear a creature creeping up behind...
You're outta time!”
The most straightforward lens through which “Thriller” can be interpreted is as a recurring cycle of otherworldly torture, in which a demonic entity (“Michael”) ―capable of skipping through different layers of reality― accosts a young woman: first by feigning the role of a loving boyfriend, then by revealing his true monstrous form and, in the climax of her demise, rebooting the storyline into yet another iteration. The titular thrill is for the Michael-demon, who literally claims to be “enjoying” the spectacle that he is both observing and performing.
The source of the horror is not in the threat posed by the werewolf3 or the zombies that Michael turns into, but in the assumption that his cycle of torment will loop endlessly within an alternative time-frame mimicking a dream or the afterlife. The closing scene in which Michael breaks the fourth wall by looking straight at the camera with demonic yellow eyes reveals that he is still in control and that now we are all in on it, making the viewers uncomfortable witnesses to the parallel reality he rules.
One possible back-story is that the girlfriend is alive and trapped in a dream with an incubus. As a type of demon set on raping people in their sleep, it would make sense for “Michael” (an archangel’s name, another form of devilish mockery) to be an incubus, given his predatory nature, his absolute power to control the dream sequence, and his sexual ambiguity4 (sleek bodied and high-pitched). Since demons, like angels, are genderless, an incubus is said to take the form of a man, similarly to how Michael Jackson was “dressed up” by Gledhill’s Thriller jacket to look virile.
However, this interpretation fails to explain why the incubus Michael procrastinates with the imminent rape, reveling instead in the thrill of the hunt. This prompts an alternative interpretation, in which the girlfriend is dead and trapped in the Underworld, where she is being punished. Reminiscent of Tantalus’ torture in Greek mythology, her divine punishment is meted out by bringing her repeatedly close to her utmost desire ―dating Michael Jackson― but having that fantasy suddenly torn away from her and turned into horror.
Michael is no longer an incubus but a (regular) demon set on eternally breaking a girl’s spirit by chasing her, dancing around her, forcing her to watch her own death in a movie theater, all while removing the self-awareness that would enable her to see the trap she’s in. A small but revealing hint of these theatrics may be insinuated in Michael’s zombie sequence, where an undead man spawns from the sewers and not from a grave. Demons understand the underworldly, but they are no Romero scholars.
If “Thriller” is, in fact, a depiction of hellish torture, the missing component would be motivation. If the girlfriend’s soul has been condemned to an eternity of torture, why does the film offer no hints as to why this punishment might be deserved? A clue to solve this may lie in the promise ring Michael gives his girlfriend in the werecat sequence, leading us to a second reading, which challenges the very foundation of these speculations.
Dream Sequence 2. The Delusional Thrill of the Fangirl Fantasy
“Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together
All through the night I'll save you from the terror on the screen...
I'll make you see!”
So far, the thesis that Michael is a demon and the girlfriend his victim, as compelling as it sounds, has failed to provide a motive. If it is sexual (the incubus theory), why is he not getting on with it? If it is a divine punishment (the Underworld theory), why is she so innocent? A more coherent outlook may be had by challenging who the protagonist of these dream sequences may be. While Michael’s turning to the camera at the end is an obvious display of him being in control, is it possible for the true mastermind behind this story to be its victim, the girlfriend?
Michael Jackson was arguably the first black solo artist with a zealous fandom, and the idea of dating Michael Jackson was certainly a collective teen girl fantasy at the time of this film’s release. The onslaught of movie clichés that start with a car running out of gas and ends in being woken from a bad dream at home make sense when seen as mental constructs of the Sally Simpson5 groupie, obsessively fixated with being Michael Jackson’s girl. “Thriller” could thus be regarded as an anonymous fangirl’s design; with Michael’s declaration of love and ring bestowal being less indicative of his demonic possession over her than a projected domination from the fangirl onto the pop idol, forcing him ―in her mind― to commit to accepting her exclusively as his girlfriend.
But if the girlfriend in “Thriller” is alive and deep-diving into her own fantasy, where is the horror coming from? It could be rooted in the sexual anxieties common to 1980s teenagers in a predominantly Christian nation, and as enforced by a conservative African-American community. According to Planned Parenthood’s “A History of Sexual Education in the United States”6, it was in the eighties when sexual education entered a national debate on whether advising abstinence was preferable to teaching responsible intercourse with contraceptives. Instead of resolving the matter, sexual education branched out in both directions at once, in ways that instilled cognitive dissonance in an entire generation, while failing to give teenage girls the tools they needed to address their sexual urges.
The first act of “Thriller” is thus a most conservative aperture of sexual fantasy, beginning with a car that breaks down, to then force the script to demonstrate that Michael is a gentleman with no ulterior motives beyond wanting to declare affection with an innocent hug. Dressed in what almost amounts to a nun-like attire, the fangirl accepts Michael’s ring, granting herself a symbol of marriage that would validate her fantasy turning overtly sexual. But her religious upbringing runs deep enough to sabotage her dream, turning Michael into a ravaging fiend. You can almost hear the girl’s mother saying “I told you all men are monsters”.
It is the girl, and not Michael, who then reboots her own dream into a more modern, though still innocent, setting in a crowded movie theater. This time, she is more audacious in her fantasy. She is assertive in wanting to leave the cinema and even wears a mild leopard print jacket, accepting her ambiguous role as prey and predator. Once outside, the pair are alone in an empty alley again, and the imminent sexual fantasy now requires a stronger moralistic display to counter her libido. If the first horror fantasy was drawn from werewolves, an easy reference for someone in 1983 given how Wolfen, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London had all been released two years prior, the second horror fantasy has to be more powerful, taking her back to her childhood and to the trauma of having seen The Night of the Living Dead, from which she borrows all her imagery.
The girl reboots her fantasy yet again, and she is now inside the shelter of a house, lying on a sofa, closer to her bedroom than she’s ever been. The fantasy with Michael Jackson is still ongoing, and his trickster smile at the end is not for us, the audience, but for the fangirl herself: she is no longer engaging the avatar playing out her fantasy, but is winking at herself as the author of the fantasy, complicit in knowing where this leads to. It is the smile of knowing that her own inner demons can scare her but can’t harm her, and they sure are not going to stop her from having sex with Michael Jackson.
One could be forgiven for thinking that “Thriller” could be a precursor of interdimensional horror films, à la Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street, released just a year later and which laid the groundwork for a new form of monster that could travel between realities in dream sequences. The legitimate offspring of “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” are to be found in the wave of late 1980s/early 1990s films about women unable to cope with the difference between their fantasies and reality: Fatal Attraction (1987), Misery (1990), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992), Single White Female (1992), movies that wouldn’t even be classified as horror but, more aptly, as thrillers.
Coming up next. Mothers and step-mothers. A quick look into why loving fathers marry so poorly in fairly tales.
And a fun fact. The incubus theory finds great delight in the conception of Merlin. According to Robert de Boron, a council of demons decide to engender the Antichrist by fathering a child on the holiest woman they could find. Tormented to the point where she forgets (once!) to make the sign of the holy cross before going to sleep, she is raped by an incubus and soon gives birth to the fatherless Merlin, who is quickly baptized, enabling him to use his devilish powers for good.
Landis uses trademark Easter eggs, most famously, the recurring “See you next Wednesday” line that is spoken by a character inside the movie-within-a-movie.
See Deborah Landis’ book Stardom: Industry of Desire (1991). More on this can be found at:
Or “werecat”, as described by Rick Baker, who wanted to work on something different after “An American Werewolf in London”. This is yet another example of the levity of some of the decisions taken in the film.
The “male” incubus and the “female” succubus are the same type of demon. The full rape sequence implies a demon first taking the form of a succubus to rape a man in his sleep, and then transforming into an incubus and using the original victim’s sperm to rape a sleeping woman.
Borrowing the term from The Who’s Tommy: a rock opera about fan worship gone wrong.
“Beginning in the 1980s, a debate began in the United States between a more comprehensive approach to sex education, which provided information about sexual health — including information about contraception — and abstinence only programs. Education about sex and sexuality in U.S. schools progressed in these two divergent directions. The former was based on the belief that medically accurate and comprehensive information about sexual health would decrease risk-taking behaviors among young people.” https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/da/67/da67fd5d-631d-438a-85e8-a446d90fd1e3/20170209_sexed_d04_1.pdf