Eerie real-life twist that buried Michael Jackson film that Stephen King wrote
nypost.comKing of Horror 30 years ago. That’s what happened when Michael Jackson enlisted Stephen King to work on a short film tentatively titled “Is This Scary?” In it, the “Thriller” singer would play a man in a mansion who has to defend himself against an angry mob of townspeople accusing him of scaring their children.“People in this town felt that this person on the hill was weird and strange and scary,” says King in “Think Twice: Michael Jackson,” a new podcast available on Audible and Amazon Music. “And the kids were kinda like, ‘Yeah, we sorta dig this guy!’”But in an eerie twist, 12 days into shooting “Is This Scary?” — on Aug.
23, 1993 — news broke that the late music legend was under investigation for allegedly molesting a 13-year-old boy. The production was brought to a halt, and the short film was never finished (although a similar plot was revisited by Jackson in 1996’s “Ghosts”).“What’s most amazing about it to me is that Michael was moved to make this film before anyone had ever accused him of sexually molesting children,” says Leon Neyfakh, who co-hosts “Think Twice” with Jay Smooth.“Is This Scary?” was conceived by Jackson as a “spiritual sequel” to his epic 1983 “Thriller” video.
But, Smooth adds, “he wanted this one to be even scarier.”The project was originally part of a promotional deal that Jackson had struck with Paramount Pictures for 1993’s “Addams Family Values.”“Michael’s idea was to shoot a short film in the Addams Family mansion and to feature cameos from some of the characters,” says Smooth. “Paramount would then play the promotional spot in theaters as an extra for fans.”Jackson turned to King — who had written horror classics such as “The Shining,” “It” and “Pet Sematary” — to write the treatment.
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