The seed of the idea to cover “Thriller” was planted when one of my piano students was learning the song and started playing the iconic bass line with a shuffle feel. I said “No! That's not how it goes!” and proceeded to show him how it is played with straight eighths. Later on, the shuffle groove came back to me as an ear worm and got me to thinking, “what if?”

When I found the video of “House on Haunted Hill” and discovered that it is in the public domain, I decided to go ahead with the project. I'm playing all of the instruments: piano, guitar, organ, organ bass, drums and singing. I also recorded, mixed and mastered the track in my humble basement studio.

The Film:

House on Haunted Hill, 1959, Directed by William Castle “House on Haunted Hill” is such a great fit for the lyrics. The clock, the screaming ladies, the “dancing” skeleton, the self-playing organ, and of course Vincent Price. I was lucky to get a mini-monologue by Price, without any background music to use at the end of the video. Carol Ohmart is the screaming blonde at the end, and received second billing in the movie. Carolyn Craig, who received much smaller billing in the original, is the other screaming lady, and I edited the video so that she gets a starring role in the first half of the video.

The exteriors were shot at the Ennis House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 in Los Feliz, CA., and the interiors were shot on a sound stage. The film received notoriety when first released because director William Castle rigged some theaters with a pulley system to fly a skeleton over the audience and frighten them at just the right time. Allmovies called House on Haunted Hill a horror classic that is “campy and creepy in equal measures.” The movie was remade in 1999, but received dismal reviews. http://publicdomainmovies.net/science_fiction_and_horror

The Song:

As you most likely already know, “Thriller” was first recorded my Michael Jackson in 1982. It was the title track to the album which became the biggest selling album of all time. In 1983 Jackson produced a 14 minute video for the song, directed by John Landis. The video won 3 MTV video awards, and was the first video added to the National Film Registry. Both VH1 and MTV have cited the “Thriller” video as the “greatest video of all time.”

The song “Thriller” was written by British songwriter Rod Temperton. The song was originally titled “Starlight Sun” then was changed to “Midnight Man.” Producer Quincy Jones asked Temperton to come up with a title Jackson's new album, because Temperton had come up with the song “Off the Wall,” the title track to Jackson's previous smash hit album. After kicking around hundreds of titles, he came up with “Thriller.” (And the rest is...)

Other huge hits by Rod Temperton include Michael Jackson's “Rock With You,” George Benson's “Give Me The Night,” Brothers Johnson's “Stomp,” Heatwave's “Always and Forever” and “Boogie Nights.”