Michael Jackson's Thriller is a 13-minute-and-43-second-long music video for the song of the same name released on December 2, 1983 and directed by John Landis, who also cowrote the screenplay with Michael Jackson.
Voted as the most influential pop music video of all time, Thriller proved to have a profound effect on popular culture, and was named "a watershed moment for the industry" for its unprecedented merging of filmmaking and music. Guinness World Records listed it in 2006 as the "most successful music video", selling over nine million copies. In 2009, the video was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, the first music video to ever receive this honor, for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. It is also the most watched music video of all time, seen by more than four billion people all over the world.
Costarring with Jackson was former Playboy centerfold Ola Ray. The video was choreographed by Michael Peters (who had worked with the singer on his prior hit "Beat It"), and Michael Jackson. The video also contains incidental music by film music composer Elmer Bernstein, who had previously worked with Landis on An American Werewolf in London. The video (like the song) contains a spoken word performance by horror film veteran Vincent Price. Rick Baker assisted in prosthetics and makeup for the production. "Thriller" was the third and final video for the Thriller album. The red jacket that Jackson wore was designed by John Landis' wife Deborah Landis to make him appear more "virile".
To qualify for an Academy Award, "Thriller" debuted at a special theatrical screening, along with the 1940 Disney motion picture Fantasia.
Read more about Michael Jackson's Thriller: Content, Credits, Awards, Origins, Making Michael Jackson's Thriller, Broadway and Litigation, Legacy
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“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
—Monty Python’s Flying Circus. first broadcast Sept. 22, 1970. Michael Palin, in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV comedy series)
“[Government’s] true strength consists in leaving individuals and states as much as possible to themselves—in making itself felt, not in its power, but in its beneficence, not in its control, but in its protection, not in binding the states more closely to the center, but leaving each to move unobstructed in its proper orbit.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)