The SHALLOWeen Series: Michael Jackson's Thriller

This Halloween season, I'm presenting a new feature: The SHALLOWeen series! I'll share a  series of very shallow assessments of all the movies (and the one music video) that have ever scared me. Get ready... I'm a true 'fraidy cat. 

🎃🎃🎃

So... when I was young, VHS tapes were a thing. They were also a very expensive thing, so what many people would do was to buy a few tapes and just tape everything off TV onto a single VHS.

This happened frequently in my household, so often, you'd have to fast-forward or rewind tapes to get to the thing you wanted to watch.

When I was about 3 or 4, one of my favorite things to watch was Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island. It was a full-length animated feature that had some new material along with some repackaged Looney Tunes shorts from the '50s. My parents had taped it off HBO or something for me, and they had used a VHS tape that we already had. Due to the circumstances I described above, there was a variety of programming already on that VHS.

You can probably tell where this is going.

At some point prior to the taping of the Daffy Duck movie, someone had recorded Michael Jackson's THRILLER. So every time I stuck the tape in to watch my cartoon, I (a toddler) was subjected to the horror of Michael transforming into a werewolf, a zombie, and then a nightmarish hell beast with yellow eyes. This was NOT COOL. 

We tried to fast-forward, of course, but it was hard to judge where Thriller ended and Daffy Duck began on the tape, so often my parents or I would have to press play and "check" ... and of course, Michael would be shuffling around with rotting flesh.  

So THRILLER will go down in history as the scariest thing I ever saw in my life... Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island would never be the same again.