How Michael Jackson Reinvented the Music Video

Before Michael Jackson, the music video was mostly a sales tool. A band mimed a song, a director kept it cheap, and the clip did its job of nudging people toward the record. Jackson looked at that small format and saw something much larger. Over roughly two decades, he turned the music video into a form of cinema, with directors, budgets, and ambitions to match.

Thriller: the video as event

The turning point was the "Thriller" short film in 1983, directed by John Landis and running roughly thirteen to fourteen minutes. It had a story, a cast, elaborate makeup, and a spoken-word turn from Vincent Price. Most of all, it had scale. This was not a clip stitched together to fill airtime. It was a small movie built around a song.

He called them short films, and he meant it. The ambition was cinematic from the start.— The Moonwalk Archive

Bringing in real directors

Jackson understood that cinema needed people who made cinema. He worked with filmmakers of real standing. John Landis returned for "Black or White" in 1991, famous for its morphing sequence in which faces flow seamlessly from one to another. John Singleton directed "Remember the Time" in 1992, an elaborate story set in ancient Egypt.

By treating directors as collaborators rather than hired hands, Jackson raised the craft of the entire form. If serious filmmakers were making music videos, the videos themselves had to be taken seriously.

Spending like a filmmaker

With ambition came cost. "Scream," the 1995 duet with his sister Janet Jackson, was noted as one of the most expensive music videos ever made. The sleek, black-and-white sci-fi setting looked less like a pop promo and more like a feature film sequence.

Those budgets were not vanity. They reflected a belief that the music video deserved real production values, and that audiences would reward the effort. Time and again, they did. The bigger the vision, the more the videos became cultural events in their own right.

Story, spectacle, and dance

What ties Jackson's videos together is the blend of three things: a story you can follow, spectacle you can marvel at, and dance no one else could deliver. The "Smooth Criminal" sequence in Moonwalker (1988) is a clear example, built around choreography and a set rather than quick cuts. He trusted the performance to carry the screen.

That trust changed the grammar of the form. Instead of hiding weak dancing behind fast editing, Jackson's videos often held the camera and let the movement breathe. It was a harder way to work, and it demanded a performer who could actually deliver.

The template he left behind

The artists who followed inherited a new set of expectations. A major single now often came with a video that aimed for something: a concept, a story, a look worth discussing. Budgets rose. Directors mattered. The premiere of a video could be an event on its own.

That world is the one Jackson helped build. He took a format meant to sell records and turned it into a stage for storytelling, spectacle, and dance. The music video grew up because he refused to let it stay small, and the form has carried his fingerprints ever since.