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"Is This Scary" Short Film

Date range assessed by the facts that the first shooting day was on August 10, 1993 (since, according to a call sheet (Image 001) from Shana Mangatal’s collection, the 7th shooting day was on August 17, 1993) and that “after a few days of filming, Michael learned of the allegations, and he was devastated. He stopped showing up to the set.” (Shana Mangatal)

Stephen King, director, Entertainment News article (by Stephen King)

”Stephen?…Stephen King?…This is…ummm…Michael? Michael Jackson?” The voice is high, anxious, hopeful, excited, elfin. ”I’m, oh my God, I am such a fan!”

I assure him that the feeling’s mutual, but what I’m mostly feeling is flummoxed. It’s 1993, I’m on the set of the Stand miniseries, and out of the blue someone’s handed me a phone with the self-anointed King of Pop on the other end of the line. What he wants, it develops, is for me to write the scariest, the absolute SCARIEST, music video ever, called Ghosts. It will be like the old Frankenstein movies, he explains, only scarier! TERRIFYING! ”Stephen,” he says, ”we must do this. We’re going to shock the world.”

I gave it my best try, not because it was Michael Jackson and not because I thought we were going to shock the world, but because I’m always interested in trying something new, and for me, writing a minimusical would be new. The core story he described to me that day was about a mob of angry townspeople — buttoned-down suburbanites, not torch-carrying peasants — who want the ”weirdo” who lives in the nearby castle to leave town. Because, they say, he’s a bad influence on their children. I associated that with the view parents held toward rock & roll when I was growing up, and still held toward the odder artists of the breed, like Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson (who in 1995 would release an album called Smells Like Children). I didn’t know that rumors about Jackson and child abuse had begun to circulate, but probably would have pressed ahead even if I had. When you’re famous, everybody accuses you of everything, from petty theft to the murder of John Lennon.

The film shot for three weeks, then shut down for three years. I may once have known why, but if so, I no longer remember. My old pal (and Stand director) Mick Garris did the initial filming. One day during preproduction, I was in on a conference call about the choreography, and Michael fell asleep. On another occasion, he called my wife, wanting the phone number for wherever I was that day. She gave it to him. Michael called back five minutes later, on the verge of tears. He hadn’t had a pencil, he said, so he’d tried to write the number on the carpet with his finger, and he couldn’t read it. My wife gave him the number again. Michael thanked her profusely…but never called me.

Mick Garris, director, Movieline interview

Mick Garris: When I was shooting The Stand, Stephen King and Michael put together a script for another scary music video—one with huge scale, even compared to Thriller. King recommended me for it, and that's where I really met Michael on a one-to-one basis. We became friends through that experience.

Movieline: What did you think Michael wanted to achieve with [Is This Scary / Ghosts]?

Michael wanted to make the biggest, scariest music film ever. Well, I don't know that that's what happened; you can't really be scary in this context, but it's huge, the music and dancing are great, and it's quite the spectacle. And it definitely got its point across. That theme of the outcast stranger that he and King created was important, and stayed the focus through various incarnations.

Movieline: How did you get involved, and how did the collaboration between you, Michael, Stan Winston and Stephen King work?

Mick Garris: I was actually the original director. It was begun in 1993, and I worked with him throughout pre-production and two weeks of production. It shut down for three years before resuming under Stan Winston, who was doing the effects work when I was directing. I recommended him to finish shooting when it resumed, as I was about to shoot The Shining. So yeah, I was on set a lot. But I was not there when the production continued in 1996. I'd get midnight calls from Michael, who was so passionate about finishing it, making it special. He and Stan had become friends way back when they did The Wiz together.

In the beginning, he and Steve did the script together, and I wasn't really privy to what went on then. It was when it was greenlit that Michael and I and Stan would get together for hours on end, planning the complicated effects as well as the music and storytelling. But it started as something completely different. Nobody knows this, but it was originally going to be a video to promote Addams Family Values. In fact, Christina Ricci and the boy who played Pugsley were both in it. We shot for two weeks and never got to the musical numbers. It was very expensive and ambitious. And when the first so-called scandal happened, it was when we were shooting. Suddenly, Michael was out of the country, and the studio no longer wanted him to help promote that film.

Movieline: Did Michael hope [Is This Scary / Ghosts] would break out as big as Thriller?

Mick Garris: Michael always seemed to hope to make something that would be huge. He thought big, because his whole life seemed to be surrounded by magnitude. I don't know what his hopes were in terms of comparing it with Thriller, but I know he thought it would be very special.

Movieline: [Is This Scary / Ghosts] and Thriller see him as a charismatic, playful "monster". Do you think he kept having fun with that reputation, even when the media turned on him?

Mick Garris: He was very playful with that image, though as the press got meaner, he was definitely hurt by it, and pulled back and became more reclusive. But though we were friends, it wasn't like I saw him all the time. A couple years could go by without seeing or speaking with one another, but when we did, we always had a good time.

Movieline: Your enduring memory of him will be...?

Mick Garris: Making him laugh. When Michael laughed, when you got to him for more than just that giggle behind the hand, it was a sight to see. He just loved to laugh, and it was fun to tease him gently. Maybe one of my favorite memories was on the set of [Is This Scary]; we'd finish a take, and if I wanted another, I'd put on Bullwinkle's voice and say, "This time for sure!" The first time, he just laughed and laughed and laughed. Then he'd keep asking, even after the good takes: "Mick, do Bullwinkle!" That's how I like to remember him.

LaVelle Smith Jr., co-choreographer, Christina Chaffin 2012 interview, from Chris Cadman’s “Michael Jackson the Maestro”

The initial ideas for GHOSTS began on the Dangerous tour when Michael discussed it with choreographer LaVelle Smith. Michael then said he wanted ghosts coming out of the Walls and dancing on the ceiling and to be 3D-like. In an interview with Christina Chaffin in October, 2012 LaVelle said that Michael used to phone him at 3am in the morning bursting with ideas and in one conversation said he’d be casting for dancers 8am that same morning.

Paul Rudnick, screenwriter, Buzzfeed article

The original plan was for Michael Jackson to record a horror-themed song for Addams Family Values and film a music video to promote it, but when dentist to the stars Evan Chandler accused Jackson of molesting his son the summer before the film was set to be released, plans shifted. “I think he completed the video for it, but it was just a little too risky to include it in the final movie at that point,” Rudnick recalled of the circumstance. “I think it involved him living in the Addams Family mansion and all of his neighbors storming the place with pitchforks and torches. So it was a little too close. (laughs) That’s why it wasn’t included.”

Shana Mangatal, actress, Damien Shields’ blog

According to actress Shana Mangatal, the song that was set to play during the closing credits of Addams Family Values was not actually titled “Is This Scary.” Jackson’s longform music video was to be called Is This Scary, but not song, Mangatal told me.

“He dictated the lyrics of the song that was going to be used as the theme song for Addams Family Values to me, but the song was never recorded,” Mangatal explains. “It’s a completely different (to ‘Is It Scary’ – released years later) and never-before heard song.”

The song was also to be released as a brand new Michael Jackson single accompanied by a long-form music video – funded and issued independently by Jackson – to support both the single and Addams Family film.

Mangatal, who was cast in the film and was also working for Jackson’s manager at the time, vividly remembers the experience of being on set during the 1993 filming, explaining that Jackson was excited and enthusiastic going into the project and revealing that Addams Family characters were to have made cameos in Jackson’s short film.

“What is not included in this (leaked) snippet are the scenes with the Addams Family kids,” explains Mangatal. “Christina Ricci and the other two kids were in this too. It included creepy live animals as well. There was an armadillo that the director had crawl right over my feet. We filmed at the CBS/MTM Studios in Studio City, California.”

“Michael was very excited to film this,” she adds. “His goal was for it to be ‘scarier than Thriller.’ We filmed for about 2 weeks. But, after a few days of filming, Michael learned of the allegations, and he was devastated. He stopped showing up to the set. We filmed as much as we could without him, and we did get a lot of footage, but the main piece that we did not get was Michael’s dance sequence.”

Despite not finishing or releasing the song or film in 1993, Jackson wasn’t about to let the project fall by the wayside.

“He was determined to finish Is This Scary,” recalls Mangatal, “mainly because of the reason we had to stop. It became his passion project and he really wanted everyone to see it and understand its meaning.”