Following the posthumous albums Michael and Xscape, it would appear the well of unreleased Michael Jackson material is running dry. There was a flurry of excitement as a “new album” was announced earlier this year, entitled Scream, due to go on sale on 29 September. But the only new music on it is a mashed-up version of five relatively deep cuts, tacked on to the end of a compilation – one that is fascinatingly awkward in its presentation of Jackson.

He is one of the few stars to have become so big that they burn brightly long after they’ve died. He has earned more than $100m every year since his death, the jukebox musical Thriller Live still plays on the West End, and his iconography – gloves, light-up pavements, “cha’mone”, etc – remains etched in our culture. But perhaps mindful of the way that another seemingly permanent supernova, Elvis, is dimming in our collective consciousness, Jackson’s record label Epic is using Scream to repackage him for a new generation.

Timed to mine maximum Halloween coin (“Scream reflects the King of Pop’s affection for this time of the year and its themes of costumes and disguise, darkness and light, character transformations and surprise,” reads the press release), Scream’s artwork features bats and a full moon, and trades on Thriller’s celebration of cinematic horror. By framing Jackson as theatrically phantasmagoric – a kind of horror movie character – it attempts to deflect our attention from his real-life freakishness.

But it ends up underlining it all the more. The title track is not about a scream of delighted Halloween fear, but of pure frustration. One of the most interesting things about Jackson is how everything seems to tighten as his career progresses, from his dance moves to his chest and throat as he sings; initially lithe and in control on Rock With You, by the time of 1995’s Scream he is audibly contorted in his pent-up rage. Leave Me Alone is similarly wretched, a psychological study rather than a funhouse ride. Dirty Diana and Dangerous, both also included on the compilation, are howls of a different kind – those of a man repelled by his own lust. On the latter he says, “she came at me in sections” – he seems so terrified by women that he has to disassemble them.

Jackson’s use of horror movie tropes, meanwhile, is catnip for armchair psychologists. His joy in Thriller’s chorus, singing of the thrill of cinematic fear, is perhaps the joy of escapism; the scares are safely hemmed in by the four sides of a screen. But elsewhere he uses the vocabulary of horror films to directly express his personal fears. On Ghosts, he characterises jealousy as a phantom who stalks his house; Jackson himself becomes a ghost on Threatened, a fantasy of control where he moves omnipotently around a love rival. Is this man, so famously denied a childhood, having to grasp at film imagery to make sense of how he feels, in lieu of a proper grounding in emotion?

By framing these songs together, Epic have further underlined how complicated Jackson was, and further defined him as the strange, sexually fraught person that the compilation is perhaps trying to make listeners forget. The unavoidable fact is that his music was a scream, in every sense.