Thriller

Rod Temperton, who had written Rock with You and Off the Wall for Jackson, wanted something theatrical to suit Jackson's love of film. His first version was called Starlight, and he also considered Midnight Man before settling on Thriller. Temperton wrote the lyrics in a couple of hours. Vincent Price recorded the spoken ending in two takes, with words Temperton had written in a taxi on the way to the studio. Swedien rented doors from the Universal lot for the creaking sound effects, and Jackson recorded the wolf howls himself, combined with library effects. The bass line was played on an ARP 2600 synthesizer, according to programmer Anthony Marinelli.

Epic did not plan to release it as a single, and executive Walter Yetnikoff asked who would want a single about monsters. When the album's sales began to fall in mid-1983, Jackson's manager Frank DiLeo suggested releasing it with a new video. It came out in the UK on 11 November 1983 and in the US on 23 January 1984 as the seventh and last single, and reached four on the Hot 100. John Landis directed the video, which premiered on MTV on 2 December 1983. Michael Peters choreographed the zombie dance. The video doubled sales of the album, and the making-of documentary sold over a million copies. In 2009 it became the first music video added to the National Film Registry. The song has returned to the Hot 100 around Halloween several times, and in 2025 it went back into the top ten at number 10.