Most spooky music video ever!

Thriller is my favorite music video ever made. There, I said it. In 1983 I was twelve years old and running home from junior high every day to watch it on MTV. Remember when MTV used to actually air creatively made music videos? Yes, they actually used to do that! Shocking, I know! They would play it once every single hour and I would watch it again and again totally engrossed with its zombies and other spooky visuals.

As everybody knows Thriller was directed by John Landis and is filmed in a style that recalls the horror films of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Not only does it contain an elongated version of the song itself, it also has a detailed plot which is in turns fun, spooky, then fun and spooky! Nothing exactly like it had been done before and who the hell knew that Michael Jackson was heavily into old school horror films? Perhaps this is the first sign that we got to see of him being a bit unusual.

I grew up watching horror films. I saw Xtro, Dawn Of The Dead, Galaxy Of Terror and many others all in movie theaters during mostly double billed shows. On TV I watched a lot of Vincent Price and Hammer horror films and loved them to death! So, when Michael Jackson came along and not only made a spooky song but a spooky video to go along with it I was happy beyond belief! I was the kind of kid who made haunted houses in her closet and who dug in the sand at the local playground hoping to find the foundations of a burnt down Victorian house that used to be there. Yep, I’ve been pretty much morbid since birth!

It was cool to like the video and you weren’t seen as a complete freak if you did. If you said that you ran home to catch the video nobody thought you were an insane geek. Then again we’re talking about my junior high years, so perhaps if you were in high school at the time things were different. I would have liked nothing better at the time than to have been able to enter that spooky world and run through the cemetery where the zombies were rising from their graves. No, seriously, I’ve always been a bit into being chased by evil creatures, hiding from them and surviving. Yes, I’m strange.

To this day I can still watch the video and be highly entertained! There is just something about it that is not only spooky but highly nostalgic. I can look back at when it first came out and smile knowing that it helped shape me into being the person that I am today. Thriller has definitely been a part of my spooky journey through life.