Michael Jackson's Thriller (music video) Michael Jackson's Thriller (music video) Michael Jackson's Thriller is a music video for the Michael Jackson song "Thriller". It was directed by John Landis and written by Landis and Jackson. It was released on December 2, 1983, by Columbia Pictures. In the video, Jackson and his girlfriend (played by Ola Ray) are confronted by zombies while walking home from a movie theater. Jackson becomes a zombie and performs a dance routine with a horde of the undead. The video references numerous horror films. Jackson contacted Landis after seeing his film "An American Werewolf in London." The pair conceived a short
Behind the Mask (Michael Jackson song) during the "Thriller" sessions, and brought it to Michael Jackson, who had recorded the song, added an extra melody line and a few extra lyrics to Chris Mosdell's original. Mosdell has said of the collaboration, "when Michael Jackson took it, he made it into a love song about a woman. It was a completely different premise to me, I was talking about a very impersonal, socially controlled society, a future technological era, and the mask represented that immobile, unemotional state. But hey, I let him have that one." An agreement to share the royalties equally between Sakamoto, Mosdell and Jackson