YMMV / Michael Jackson's Thriller

• Award Snub: It lost the inaugural MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year to The Cars' "You Might Think", which was a pioneering video when it came to using CGI in music videos, but today the video is only remembered by the band's fans and CGI enthusiasts, while "Thriller" remains known as a landmark in music videos.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The iconic zombie dance sequence counts as one - it comes in the middle of the music video's plot out of absolutely nowhere, featuring no explanation to why Michael Jackson turned into a zombie (as he isn't shown being bitten) and why the girl isn't. The zombies, which were earlier shown having typical Zombie Gait, are somehow able to pull off elaborate dance moves in unison, while the girl is absent from the scene. In the midst of this, there's Michael's Unexplained Recovery to turn back into a human - another BLAM within a BLAM. Once the scene ends, the girl is back, Michael is a zombie again, and nobody acknowledges that the scene ever occurred. This doesn't stop it from being one of the best scenes recorded in a music video, though.
• Franchise Original Sin: As beloved as the video is, almost everything that would come to be mocked in his later "short films" starting with "Bad" begins with it: extended Talky Bookends that could be excised without affecting the Excuse Plot, celebrity cameos (Vincent Price's "rap" here), state-of-the-art special effects lingered upon for minutes on end, and a big-name director behind the camera. The difference is that beyond the novelty of all this in 1983, these elements work together as a piece — it's a horror movie pastiche befitting a song about horror movies. Later "short films" would have increasingly ridiculous and random Excuse Plots and Talky Bookends, name directors hired solely to give Jackson "street" credibility, celebrity cameos that left them extremely dated within five years or so, and (in the more fantastical examples) then-state-of-the-art effects shoehorned in every nook and cranny because Jackson was the greatest entertainer in the world and nothing less would do for him.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • One of the great pre-internet ones, the video popularized the concept of dancing zombies in pop culture, and even today if zombies dance, odds are they're doing something at least highly reminicent of the Thriller Dance.
  • And then in internet forums, a GIF image of Michael eating popcorn in the theater is used a lot, as a way of saying Pass the Popcorn below in a thread.
• Nightmare Fuel: The initial Jump Scare in the music video where he turns around to reveal that he's turning into a werecat, followed by the transformation itself.
• Second Verse Curse: The bridge does not appear at all in the music video, largely because there's no way to make the lyric fit with the plot.
• Signature Scene: The zombie dance, naturally.
• Special Effect Failure: When Michael looks at the audience at the end of the video to reveal his werecat eyes, you can see that the lens on his left eye is a bit crooked.

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