Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983)

Michael Jackson's Thriller arrives as a fourteen-minute horror pastiche with a budget that would embarrass most independent features of its era. John Landis shoots on 35mm, Rick Baker builds a werecat, and the whole apparatus exists to sell a record. That is not a criticism. It is the entire architecture of the thing, and it never pretends otherwise. Michael and Ola Ray run out of gas, she accepts his invitation, he warns her that he is not like other guys, and then he is a cat. Later there are zombies. Later still, a grin.

On the matter of social consciousness, the record is thin and honest about it. Jackson and Ray, both Black performers, carry the piece, and its MTV rotation is credited with loosening that channel's racial restrictions. That is a historical fact about distribution, not a theme inside the narrative, which contains no racial commentary whatsoever. There is no LGBTQ content in the werecat-and-zombie business. There is no feminist framing; Ray functions as the screaming quarry, and the metamorphosis has been read for four decades as male sexuality rendered bestial and predatory. Environmental concerns do not appear. Neither does body positivity, neurodivergence, or any revisionist history. The video is a commercial vehicle for an album and a VHS tape, and it offers no critique of the wealth it generated.

Most tellingly, there is no sermon here. Landis and Jackson wanted a creepy-comical short, and they got one. The objections came from the National Coalition on Television Violence, which worried that young viewers might imitate the terrorizing of a girlfriend, and from Siskel and Ebert, who simply disliked the horror tropes. Nobody objected on ideological grounds, because there were none to object to. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2009, the first music video so honored, calling it the most famous music video of all time. A zombie dance, a red jacket, and a disclaimer about the occult. The culture has spent forty years studying this artifact, and what it teaches is choreography.