Tony Gardner | Through the Shattered Lens

“Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this post in no way endorses a belief that this statement was anymore necessary than the one at the beginning of this music video.”

The reason it was there is because Michael Jackson was a Jehovah’s Witness at the time. That’s just one of the many many many things you can find out about this music video on Wikipedia alone.

I guess I can add one thing to this that you have dig around a bit to put together. I’m sure there have been some made since Thriller, but just in case you didn’t know, or remember how huge this music video was, it was popular enough to get its’ own porno spoof. It is called Driller: A Sexual Thriller (1984).

Driller (1984, dir. Joyce James)

They even spoofed Jackson’s opening statement.

Driller (1984, dir. Joyce James)

Because when I see this,…

I totally want to see it have sex.

Driller (1984, dir. Joyce James)

The mask in Thriller is much better.

What I love best about this is that John Landis kind of predicted this would happen a couple of years prior when he made An American Werewolf In London (1981). Landis likes to stick references into his movies to a fictional film called See You Next Wednesday. Thriller is no exception. As Jackson gets up to leave the theater, you can hear someone onscreen say “See You Next Wednesday.” Of course An American Werewolf In London also had that bit, but it was a porno in that movie.

An American Werewolf In London (1981, dir. John Landis)

There’s even the scene where David is sitting in a porno theater watching the fictional “See You Next Wednesday” movie while talking to Griffin Dunne’s character who is looking like the undead in Thriller at that point.

An American Werewolf In London (1981, dir. John Landis)

The only other thing I noticed is that if you drop the ‘s’ in “Peters”, then you have a director that got his start making horror movies.

Sadly, just like Down Under by Men At Work and It’s Tricky by RUN-DMC, this music video ended up in litigation. Both John Landis and Ola Ray sued Michael Jackson over royalties. I’m glad none of that kept the music video off of YouTube as it seems to with so many others.

Happy Halloween!

What better way to kick-off Through the Shattered Lens’ tradition of the horror-themed month of October than a trailer that brings my favorite horror monster of all-time: the zombie horde.

Most zombie films try to be of the horrific and social-conscious variety. Let’s call this the Romero-effect. The grandfather of this horror subgenre was and is known to inject a dose (both subtle and heavy-handed) of social commentary to the scenes of apocalyptic gore and horror that others have tried to copy, mimic and emulate his style of varying degrees of success or failure. Then there are the zombie films that goes for the funny bone in addition to the usual gore and flesh-eating. This first started with the initial Return of the Living Dead film during the 80’s which spoofed the zombie genre without sacrificing the horror and gore. This type of zombie film is even more rare until the arrival of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead during themid-2000’s. Since then the success of this zombie-comedy there’s been more and more of this type of zombie film and most of them, to be honest, stinks to high heaven. It does make the adage that doing comedy is ultimately much harder to do than drama.

One such zombie-comedy that looks to be cashing in on the success of Wright’s film even now is another release from our cousins across the Pond with Cockneys vs. Zombies. It had made an appearance at this year’s Fantastic Fest and the reaction to the film has been quite positive and with this crowd of genre superfans with discerning taste this means just very good news for fans of the zombie genre looking for something new sink our teeth into.

While this is the type of film that never truly gets a wide release in the US I think it’ll be good for people to check it out once it comes out on video and On-Demand. I mean it has the geriatric and young bank robbers fighting zombies.