Singer Chris Brown performs his salute to Thriller during the 2006 World Music Awards in London, England. (MJ Kim/Getty)
“I’m not like other guys.” Who knew just how prophetic that line was back in 1983, when Michael Jackson uttered it in the opening scene of his groundbreaking Thriller video? MJ was still a musical genius then — not yet a punchline, a baby dangler and a cosmetic-surgery victim — and his second solo album, Thriller, released in 1982, was a hit beyond all expectations. It topped Billboard’s album chart for more than two years, launched seven singles and sold 51 million copies worldwide. The video for the song Billie Jean was the first one by a black artist to get into MTV’s regular rotation.
But it was the release of the video for the single Thriller in 1983 that changed everything. Widely considered the best video ever made, it was the first to get a scheduled television launch — on Dec. 1, exactly one year after the release of the album. The 14-minute mini-movie directed by John Landis (Animal House, Trading Places) was a brilliantly produced homage/parody of horror movies and blaxploitation flicks. It had a then-unheard-of budget of $800,000 US and featured a spoken-word rap by Vincent Price. Its climax, a Broadway-style dance number featuring Jackson as a Cat Monster flanked by a chorus of zombies, has been re-enacted, celebrated and spoofed thousands of times since.
In honour of Halloween and the 25th anniversary of the album, we at CBCNews.ca offer some of our favourite tributes and ripoffs of the video “no mere mortal can resist.”
Wedding dance
An Oklahoma groom gamely recreated the video for his bride at their 2006 wedding. It went viral earlier this year on YouTube and now more than two million people have watched the wedding party do the zombie dance.
Chris Brown’s homage at World Music Awards
In 2006, at the World Music Awards in London, a distracted and disgraced Michael Jackson was booed off the stage after singing only four lines of We Are the World. Later in the show, hip-hop and R&B singer Chris Brown got raves for his version of MJ’s masterpiece.
13 Going on 30
In this 2004 rom-com, Jennifer Garner, a 1980s teen fast-forwarded to adulthood Freaky Friday-style, got the party started with Thriller.
Filipino inmates practice their dance steps at the Cebu Provincial and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, central Philippines. Their version of Thriller has been watched nearly 4.4 million times on YouTube. (Aaron Favila/Associated Press)
Music videos
Nods to Thriller have shown up in videos by Fatboy Slim, Fall Out Boy and Gnarls Barkley. Two of the most overt shout-outs were in Bob Sinclar and Cutee B’s video for Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now) and Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz.
Zombies around the world
Ines Markeljevic, an alumna of the dance program at Toronto’s York University, was the goofy genius behind a global dance project named Thrill the World. On Oct. 27, dancers in several different countries simultaneously re-enacted the music video's dance number. (You can find out more about Thrill the World here.)
Global thrills
A television show in Japan was one of the first to spoof the video in a comedy sketch that features a young woman freaking out when her young boyfriend is transformed into a dumpy old man. In German comedian Otto Waalkes’s movie Otto Der Film, his parody replaced the zombies with kitschy folk singer Heino. German a cappella group Wise Guys performed their jokey version – a tribute to 18th-century author Friedrich von Schiller – on German TV last year. But the two best international Thriller re-enactments are the Bollywood version and the performance by a group of Filipino inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre.
About one hundred people dance in sync to a recording of Thriller in an attempt at a world record at the downtown YMCA in Seattle on Oct. 27, 2007. (Alan Berner/The Times/Associated Press)
Dancing with the Stars
Former boy-band member and DWTS champ Drew Lachey cemented his reality-show win with a paso doble performed to Thriller with his professional ballroom dance partner, Cheryl Burke.
Latter-Day Thrillers
It’s a little odd that a music group from the religious Brigham Young University would cover this ghoulishly un-Christian song. After all, in the original video, Jackson, raised a Jehovah’s Witness, issued a disclaimer announcing that “due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” Sinful or not, these Mormons can move.
Lego stop-motion Thriller
If you build them, they will dance.
Marching band Thriller
A drum-line version of Thriller was performed at Penn State University to celebrate Halloween in 2005.
Virtual thrills
Avatars have re-enacted the video in The Sims and Second Life, but the best animated Thriller was performed by the characters of the video game and film franchise Final Fantasy.
The original
And the one that inspired them all.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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