You’ve seen that text a thousand times. It appears before the zombies, before Vincent Price’s voice drops into the bass register, before the first zombie hand breaks through the soil. Just a black screen and white letters sitting in silence. “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
” Most people read it once and move on. They assume it’s a legal formality, a liability thing, maybe even a bit of self-aware humor from a man who knew he was about to terrify you. It’s none of those things. That text is a document. It records what happened during 3 weeks in November 1983, when the most expensive music video ever made was sitting in a lawyer’s office waiting to be destroyed, and the man who made it was locked in his bedroom, not eating, not sleeping, not answering the door.
This is that story. It doesn’t start in a recording studio. It starts on a Sunday morning in Los Angeles, in a residential neighborhood that has no reason to appear in any account of music history. A man wearing a fake mustache, thick-rimmed glasses, and a low baseball cap was walking from house to house with a stack of Watch Tower magazines.
He rang the bell, waited, and when someone answered, he talked about his faith. The man was Michael Jackson. Nobody around him knew it. He wasn’t filming anything. There was no camera, no assistant, no security detail waiting at the curb. He did this because he genuinely believed in it.
Michael had been raised a Jehovah’s Witness by his mother, Katherine, and the faith was not something he maintained at a distance while the rest of his life went on. It was active, practiced, and present. He attended meetings, distributed literature, and kept to the behavioral codes the community expected of its members.
Even at the peak of his fame, he made time for it. That detail matters. It’s what the rest of the story turns on. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were not a loosely organized religious affiliation with soft edges. They had doctrine, they had leadership, and they had a formal system for handling members who drifted from either. The community operated with a structure that was both supportive and when necessary punishing.
The rules around occult content and spiritism were among the clearest in their teachings. No engagement, no exceptions. No context in which horror imagery or supernatural content became permissible. Not as entertainment, not as fiction, not under any framing at all. The Thriller album had been out since November 1982.
By the spring and summer of 1983, it was doing something albums almost never do. It kept accelerating instead of tailing off. Seven singles, every one of them a top 10 hit. Stores were reordering stock that should have slowed months earlier. The record company wanted a video for the title track that matched the scale of what was happening commercially.
Michael had something more specific in mind. He wanted to make a short film. He had seen John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London and become absorbed by the werewolf transformation sequence. The practical effects, the physicality of a human body appearing to change into something else on screen.
He wanted that experience inside his own world. Landis was brought in. The budget climbed to half a million dollars, more than any music video had cost before. The production ran for weeks. The foam latex appliances alone required hours of work each morning before a single camera rolled. When it was finished, everyone who had been there understood they had made something that didn’t fit into any existing category for the medium.
Zombies rising from the ground, a werewolf metamorphosis detailed enough that people who saw it decades later still remembered the specifics. Vincent Price’s voice pulling the temperature of the room down in the final minutes. Michael himself leading a formation of the undead through choreography that was precise and disturbing in equal measure.
It was 14 minutes of material that wanted to be taken seriously as a film, not just a video. For the audiences who were about to watch it, it was an extraordinary piece of entertainment. Something to watch at a party, something to rewind and watch again, something that made the living room feel different at night.
For the leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was something they had a specific word for. When teasers for the Thriller video began circulating, the elders moved quickly. They contacted Michael and delivered a clear message. If the video was released as it was, he would be disfellowshipped. Disfellowshipping in the Jehovah’s Witness community is a formal ecclesiastical process with a defined and enforced outcome.
Once it is carried out, every other member of the congregation is required to sever contact with that person entirely. Not limited, not manage it with care. End it. The requirement does not flex for old friendships. It does not bend for family. Katherine Jackson was a Jehovah’s Witness. Several of Michael’s siblings had grown up inside the faith.
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The people he had known since childhood, before the record deals and the tours and the decades of crowds were members of this community. His past was built inside it. Disfellowshipping was not a procedural consequence. It was a mechanism for converting a person’s entire history into silence. Michael understood precisely what was being placed on the table.
He went to his bedroom and closed the door. He did not come back out for 3 days. John Landis received a call from Michael’s head of security. Michael wasn’t eating. He wasn’t picking up his phone. Landis drove over himself, knocked on the bedroom door, and stood in the hallway until something came through it.
After a long silence, a voice. I just wanted to do something fun. Not self-pity, just a statement. He had spent months building something he was proud of, something that pushed against the limits of what the form had ever been. And now it was positioned as the instrument of his own expulsion. The two things he had organized his entire life around, his faith in his work, had arrived at a direct collision, and there was no version of the resolution where he walked out intact.
At some point in those three days, he picked up the phone. He called John Branca, his lawyer. The call came in the middle of the night. Michael’s breathing was audible through the line. He had reached a decision. “Destroy the negatives,” he said. “No one must ever see it.” Branca did not destroy the negatives.
He gathered the production team. They agreed to protect the footage, and they locked everything in Branca’s office. He then called Michael back and started talking. What he proposed was a middle path. They wouldn’t release the video unchanged, but they wouldn’t destroy it, either. Instead, they would add a formal statement at the very beginning of the film, a declaration from Michael himself, in his own name, explicitly stating that the content did not reflect his personal convictions. A single screen of text
before anything else. Visible, unambiguous, and permanently attached to the front of the video. Branca also suggested Michael write a statement for Awake, the official Jehovah’s Witnesses publication. He would address his community directly in their own magazine, on the record, making clear where he stood on the content.
Michael later said in interviews that he genuinely wasn’t comfortable with what the video contained, that he intended a fun short film and had not been trying to promote anything the faith prohibited. He also said he would not make something like it again. He wasn’t performing for the elders when he said that.
The discomfort was real, but the footage would survive. He said yes. The world premiere was December 2nd, 1983. When Thriller aired on MTV that night, the response arrived in a way the network didn’t have a template for yet. People called asking them to play it again. Then again after that. Record stores the following week had customers walking in asking if the video could be purchased separately as a product on its own.
The album, which had already been posting historic numbers, doubled in sales in the weeks that followed. Billboard’s tracking systems had not been designed to accommodate what was happening to a record that had been out for over a year. The disclaimer ran at the front of every screening.
Most people read it once and moved on to the zombies. The Jehovah’s Witness elders read it and accepted it as sufficient acknowledgement. The crisis formally was resolved. The institution got what they asked for. Michael got to keep what he made. But the mechanics of what had happened were not something Michael could put down and walk away from cleanly.
He had seen with complete clarity how the leverage worked. An institution had looked at something he made and told him it needed to stop existing. They had made that demand using the people he cared about most as the instrument of enforcement. And he had modified his work in order to satisfy them. He kept attending meetings.
He kept doing the visible work of a practicing member. On the surface, nothing changed. His career continued at a scale that had no real precedent. Tours, records, the Bad album. The kind of commercial reach that no single artist had managed before or since. For 3 years. Then he wrote a letter. He didn’t wait to be removed.
He didn’t approach the elders looking for another negotiated outcome. He formally disassociated himself from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Under JW doctrine, disassociation and disfellowshipping carry the same practical consequences. The shunning, the severing of contact, the theological requirement that every member of the community treat the person as though they no longer exist within it.
But disassociation is initiated by the member, not the institution. Leaving voluntarily does not soften the outcome. In several interpretations of JW practice, it is treated as carrying more weight than being expelled. A deliberate act, rather than a disciplinary one. It is the difference between being shown the door and choosing to open it yourself.
Michael knew this when he wrote the letter. He wrote it anyway. The elders who stood in front of him in 1983 believed they held leverage over him that could not be navigated around. For a while, they were right. The threat landed. He didn’t sleep for 3 days. He called his lawyer in the middle of the night and asked for his own work to be incinerated.
What they did not account for was the 3 years of quiet that followed. Michael did not leave in a moment of anger. He had time. He used it carefully. Then he chose. Thriller became the most watched music video ever produced. The first to be inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. More than four decades after it was made, it is still the standard against which the form measures itself.
The choreography, the production, the 14-minute structure that everyone said was too long for a music video, all of it is intact. The institutions that try to suppress art tend to compress it. This one made it permanent. The men who delivered the ultimatum in 1983 are not named in any account of the video.
Their position in this story is a footnote in a footnote. The leverage they held dissolved so completely that most people who have seen the video 100 times have never thought to ask why that text is there. And at the start of the video, still in place, exactly where Branca put it. Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
Most people still assume it’s a formality. Now you know what it is. It’s a record of how far they got. An evidence sitting at the front of the most watched music video in history of exactly how much further they failed to go.
