Name a more iconic music video than “Thriller”, we’ll wait. Michael Jackson’s epic zombie flick remains as influential as ever, as seen at the 2024 NYC Village Halloween Parade, where dozens of ghouls got down to the famous dance. Led by a man in Jackson’s iconic red jumpsuit and uh, a zombie Chun-Li, the huge crowd of dancers wowed the packed New York City crowd with a synchronized dance to Jackson’s 1983 hit.
The New York zombie horde recreated the climactic scene in the “Thriller” music video, but instead of 18 dancers, there were at least a hundred ghouls getting down. The Music Man readers won’t be surprised to hear that this ghoulish Halloween hoedown quickly went viral after its upload last month. It’s a real testament to the longevity of Jackson’s output that 41 years after the original clip dropped, the pop legend’s music is still bringing people together.
YouTuber New York City Photos uploaded the Halloween dance on November 1, 2024. In the six weeks since the upload, the video has drawn 718,000 views. Jackson fans loved to see the celebration of the classic music video and added comments such as “No other music video will EVER be as iconic as ‘Thriller’. Over 40 years old and still relevant” and “It’s crazy how Michael Jackson makes a comeback on the Billboard charts every Halloween. It’s been years since he passed and yet his music lives on.”
Jackson’s music has continued to spawn dance crazes over the years. The most iconic dance tribute to the King of Pop surely remains the flash mob of 300 dancers who rocked a city square in Stockholm, Sweden, one afternoon to “Beat It”. The electric energy the surprise performance created resulted in a 32 million-view viral hit video. All the more impressive is the fact that the group gathered at 3:30 p.m. that day, learned the dance in half an hour, and then immediately performed it.
Jackson scored a US Diamond certified hit with “Thriller,” and central to the success of his album of the same name was the hit music video directed by John Landis. The Music Man readers might be interested to hear that Jackson and Landis wrote the music video, and after its release on December 2, 1983, it quickly went into regular rotation on MTV. The “Thriller” music video came quite late in the promotion cycle for the album, but the hit video is credited with doubling the album’s sales and turning it into the best-selling album in history.
