Prince Jackson vividly remembers the first time he sat down with his dad to watch his classic music video for the song “Thriller.”
“That’s a very traumatic moment for me,” he joked with Fox Soul’s “The Mix” this week. “We were very young. We were at Neverland. We watched on the big screen in the theater that we had there. And the moment where he, not the full were(wolf) cap, but in between, the transformation, where he goes, like, ‘Get away,’ the eyes — it just terrified me.
“And then after we had finished the music video, he said, ‘You guys should be careful. You know, you can’t be around me when the full moon comes up because that’s real. He told a story about what would happen once the full moon came out and sometimes you’d be like, ‘Ahh!’ and then he’d start running away terrified.”
Jackson, 24, is one of three kids Jackson had, along with daughter Paris, 23, and son Prince II, 19. Jackson said Halloween is an important holiday in his family, dating back to when his father was a child in Gary, Indiana.
“When I was growing up, my dad would tell me stories about my grandpa always scaring him and his brothers,” he said. “He’d creep up to the window in Gary with a mask on and my grandma would not expect him to be coming, so she’d be terrified.
“And then when my siblings and I were younger with our little cousins, we’d always try to hop up out of like dark rooms and stuff like this. So, it’s kind of like a family tradition to try and scare, you know.”
Jackson also said Halloween was a fantastic day for him because it represented the chance to be like everyone else.
“Halloween is such an awesome holiday for me because when we were growing up, obviously, we wore masks to conceal our identity, but Halloween is one of those few holidays where it’s normal for everybody to wear a mask, that one day of the year where we got to go out with my dad to some family friends’ houses and do some kind of ‘trick or treating’ a little bit and do kind of a normal celebration of Halloween,” he said.
“But, also, when we were younger, and I don’t know if you remember, but people were concerned about some people putting like poison and razor blades in their kids’ candy. We would go and collect the candy, but my dad would always throw that away and he would give us a pillowcase filled with candy.”
He said his dad would give them one day to eat it.
“I would remember every year getting so sick juts trying to eat as much of the candy as I could,” he said, laughing.