Prince Jackson says that seeing his dad, Michael Jackson’s, creepy music video for “Thriller” for the first time was a “traumatic moment” for him. The 24-year-old opened up about the experience during an Oct. 27 interview on Fox Soul’s The Mix. “I was very young,” he revealed. “We were at Neverland and we watched it on the big screen at the theater that we had there. The moment where it’s the transformation, where he’s like, ‘Get away!’, the eyes just terrified me!”
Prince also recalled how his dad kept the creepy theme going after showing his kids the video. “He’s like, ‘You guys should be careful. You can’t be around me when the full moon comes up because that’s real,'” Prince said. “And he told us the story of what would happen when the full moon came out and we’d start running away terrified.”
Halloween was a fun holiday for Prince when he was growing up. During the interview, he opened up about why it was such an “awesome” day for him and his two siblings. “When we were growing up, obviously we wore masks to conceal our identity, but Halloween is one of the few holidays where it’s normal for everyone to wear a mask,” he explained. “It’s the one day out of the year where we got to go out with my dad to some family friends’ houses and go trick or treating and have kind of a normal celebration.”
Prince also shared a fun anecdote about Michael and how he celebrated the holiday. “When we were younger, people were concerned about people putting poison or razor blades in the candy [they were handing out],” he recalled. “So we would go and collect candy, but [my dad] would always throw that away and give us a pillow case filled with candy. But he’d only give us one day to eat it, so I remember getting so sick trying to eat as much candy as I could!”
Prince was just 12 years old when his father died in 2009. He is the oldest of Michael’s three children, with a younger sister, Paris, 23, and brother, Blanket, 19.