Notice how this writer emphasizes the effects of the music in her analysis:
“In the first verse of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ the performer walks alongside his date
in a contemporary urban setting; the bass line, played on a keyboard, has attacks that are
imprecise and mechanical. (They lack the nuance and variety attainable on an electric or
acoustic bass.) In the second verse, zombies emerge from the grave, line dance with
Jackson, and terrify the girlfriend. Here, with a live bass player and a guitar, the music
becomes exceptionally ‘warm-blooded.’ Some of the ‘thrill’ of ‘Thriller’ comes from the
fact that its zombies are cold on the outside yet passionate on the inside. On the contrary,
the first verse shows Jackson, though warm-blooded (as a vibrant, breathing person), to
be cold-blooded at heart. In other words, the sound quality tells us that it is the zombies
who know the groove. If the arrangement of the song were inverted, the video would lose
much of its charm.”
From Carol Vernallis, Experiencing the Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
This writer is interested (in her longer essay) in viral wedding videos that imitate the
zombie dance in “Thriller.” Notice what she emphasizes in her analysis so that she can
set up her argument about those imitations:
“Thriller is over thirteen minutes long – its running time supporting Jackson’s claim that
the video was a short film rather than merely a music video – and its length indeed makes
possible a more well-developed narrative structure than one typically finds in music
videos. The opening sequence, in which Jackson plays a high school student who asks his
date to ‘be his girl’ only moments before he transforms into a werewolf, is revealed as a
film within the film, projected on a large screen in a single-screen downtown theatre
where Jackson and his date are spectators. I mention the layered structure of the video’s
narrative (which includes two additional distinct layers of narrative action) in order to
foreground the cinematic ambition of the video and its insistent self-location within the
history of Hollywood horror films. The lyrics of the song and the video’s narrative play
with the twin frisson generated by the horror film mise-en-scène and the sexual overture
that both interrupts it and emanates from it. The zombie dance sequence that has been
imitated in [YouTube videos] occupies a relatively short segment of the video, with the
zombies emerging from their graves at the 6:33 mark, Jackson transforming into a
zombie and beginning the dance at the 8:02 mark, the lyrics reentering the video after a
long absence at the 9:41 mark, and the sequence ending at the 10:37 mark. In isolating
this sequence from the context of the video’s layered narrative structure, the wedding
videos (and other re-enactments) eliminate the explicit and sustained references to the
horror film genre and its narrative protocols and the seduction scenarios that frame the
zombie dance sequence.”
From Lisa Patti, “White Weddings: New Media Archives and the Transformation of
Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.” Reconstruction. 12.1 (2012).