the video various acts of torture are displayed, and various members of the band are usually on the receiving end. At some points the video looks like a horror movie. At a later point a group of skeletons—that are supposed to represent the Jacksons—are shown dancing. Neither Michael nor Jermaine appears in the video: Michael was busy with other obligations, and Jermaine refused to be in the video. The rest of the group decided to shoot the video without them. Jeff Stein was the director, and Bryce Walmsley the scenic designer. Jackie Jackson also oversaw the production, acting as an advisor. The dancing skeletons were animated at Peter Wallach Enterprises. Stein recalls the shoot as "an experience that lived up to the song title", and that sentiment is shared by others involved in the production. It finished over schedule and over budget. By the end the Jacksons themselves had stopped showing up. Stein says it was so stressful that one of his crew members lost control of her bodily functions. "The crew motto used to be 'Death or victory'," he says. "I think that was the only time we ever prayed for death." After Michael had sketched out his ideas for the shoot at a meeting with the production company and his brothers, Stein and producer John Diaz had a feeling he would skip the actual shoot, so they rented a wax dummy of Michael from Madame Tussaud's museum in Nashville. "[It] was put through the wringer," Stein says. "Its head ended up in the salad bowl at lunch one day." The dummy was ultimately used in three separate sequences, including the ending sequence that shows the rest of the group standing in a shot similar to the album cover. The television show PM Magazine later discovered the dummy had been used through a close analysis of the video. "I was so young and naïve, I just figured this is what they normally do in music videos," recalls Paula Abdul, who eventually became the choreographer. She replaced Perri Lister, an alumna of the British dance troupe Hot Gossip, who had choreographed and/or danced in many early 1980s videos, including playing the bride in "White Wedding" for her boyfriend at the time, Billy Idol. Lister and Stein had worked together before and the Jacksons approved her. A few days afterwards Field told her that Jackie wanted his girlfriend, who he said