Hundreds of prisoners at a detention centre in Cebu performing Michael Jackson's Thriller in the exercise yard, filmed from a balcony. In January 2010 it was among the ten most popular videos on YouTube, with over 20 million views. The record's entry for the mass-choreography video as a genre.
Died as a shareable curiosity around 2013, roughly when the coverage started asking about conditions rather than counting dancers. Survived by twenty million views and an uneasy footnote.
The video is not a prison talent show. The rehearsals were part of an institution's daily regime, and the question of how voluntary any of it was is the part reposts always leave out.
What made it travel was scale and setting: a routine everyone recognises, performed by more people than a stage could hold, in a place that does not usually appear on video at all.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
