Transcript for the Piece Audio version of This is "Thriller."

Terry Chasteen remembers exactly where he was the first time he heard Thriller.

CHASTEEN: ?I walked into a disco club in Columbus, Ohio, and I heard this laugh??

CHASTEEN: ?It would, like, pierce from every corner of the room, and I wondered ?what in the world is this???

So he looked up at the huge floor-to-ceiling video screen.

CHASTEEN: ?And there?s Michael and the zombies doing the Thriller routine, bigger than life, right there in front of me, and it just blew me away.?

What blew him away were the dance moves. Chasteen has been a dance instructor for almost 40 years. He could teach you almost every kind of dance, from ballroom to latin, swing to salsa. But when he saw Michael?s performance on the big screen, he wanted to learn the moves himself.

CHASTEEN: ?It took us three and a half months, just playing it over and over and doing the routine, and realizing how we turned the wrong direction or one thing or another.

Frame by painstaking frame, they pieced the dance together. It was then that Chasteen realized he had something he could use ? in the classroom.

Chasteen had been trying to come up with unique ways to get middle school students interested in ballroom and other more ?traditional? types of dance.

CHASTEEN: ?And that was the year Hot in Here by Nelly was hot.?

So he taught the kids hip-hop moves to Nelly?s song. And they loved it. And when Chasteen ran out of hip-hop moves to teach, he turned to something near and dear to his heart: Thriller.

CHASTEEN: ?The nice thing about this routine is that none of them dance the same. Every single character has a different way of doing it, which makes it really fun.

CHASTEEN: ?Let?s face it ? there?s not a soul on this earth who hears that music and doesn?t want to dance to it. Even if you do the [STOMPING] zombie walks, I mean, everybody knows those.

Thriller blasts in the background as Chasteen?s legion of zombie students writhe across the dance floor. And as the music stops, one student admits:

GIRL: ?When I tried to dance to it, I almost cried because it was so fast.?

For Intern Edition?I?m Andrew Prince.

Backannouce: Intern Edition a program that is part of NPR?s Next Generation Radio project.