Experimenting with whatever medium he could find, the young Savini practiced creating makeup effects on himself, later convincing his friends to let him practice his craft on them. He also discovered another passion: acting. Combining his makeup applications and homemade costumes, he especially enjoyed scaring his friends.
Among the many talents Savini nurtured as a young man were fencing and gymnastics.[5] He is also accomplished with a bullwhip and can do motorcycle stunts. Many of his characters would be bikers or madmen who are hardened and eerily evil.
Savini served as a combat photographer during the Vietnam War.[6] In a 2002 interview, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "When I was in Vietnam, I was a combat photographer. My job was to shoot images of damage to machines and to people. Through my lens, I saw some hideous [stuff]. To cope with it, I guess I tried to think of it as special effects. Now, as an artist, I just think of creating the effect within the limitations we have to deal with."[6] He continued to practice with makeup in Vietnam, often frightening indigenous peasants by appearing to suddenly transform into a "monster".
Using the lens of his camera, Savini separated himself from the real-life horrors of war,[7] although the images still haunted his mind. Savini said his wartime experiences influenced his eventual style of gory effects: "I hated that when I watched a war movie and someone dies. Some people die with one eye open and one eye half-closed, sometimes people die with smiles on their faces because the jaw is always slack. I incorporated the feeling of the stuff I saw in Vietnam into my work."[8]
In 1970, while on guard duty, a flare was triggered in the jungle area Savini was watching. Against military protocol, Savini fired into the bush without informing his superiors. Other soldiers likewise began firing until a duck wandered from the bush completely unharmed. Due to his failure to follow orders, Savini was taken off guard duty from his bunker on the following evening. That same evening, the bunker came under attack and several soldiers were wounded or killed. As a result of this incident, Savini earned the nickname "Duck Slayer" and to this day will not eat duck.[9]
After his tour in Vietnam, he attended Carnegie-Mellon University,[10] as the first undergraduate to be awarded a full fellowship in the acting and directing program. He appeared in stage productions throughout college and continued on stage long after his tour of duty in Vietnam.
Career
Savini is primarily known for his groundbreaking work in the special make-up effects known as prosthetic makeup.[11] His signature style and techniques bring vivid realism to genre films.
Early in Savini's career, Dick Smith—known for his groundbreaking work in The Exorcist—became an inspiration and a guide, and later an associate at Savini's Special Make-up Effects Program.
Savini got his breakthrough working with Pittsburgh filmmaker George A. Romero, providing a convincing wrist-slashing effect in the opening scenes of Martin (1978). The following year, working with a larger budget on Dawn of the Dead, Savini created his signature palette of severed limbs and bite-marks. In the 1980 slasher film Friday the 13th, Savini expanded his repertoire of blood and gore.[12] He continued to perfect those techniques in 1980's Maniac.[13] and 1981's The Burning and The Prowler.
Savini has also worked on films by Italian director Dario Argento: 1990's Two Evil Eyes and 1993's Trauma. In the 1991 film Heartstopper, he created special effects for director John A. Russo. In 2011, he supervised the effects for the Australian film Redd Inc.
Savini has also acted in many of the same films he created effects for. His first appearance was a relatively straight, innocuous character in Martin in 1978. He then played Blades, a menacing biker, in Dawn of the Dead, a role he reprised in zombie form with a cameo appearance in the 2005 continuation of the series, Land of the Dead. In Maniac, he briefly appeared before facing the maniac's shotgun and having his head blown off in a spectacular display. Savini had a more prominent role as biker and antagonist Morgan, the Black Knight, in Romero's Knightriders (1981).[13] Savini played the whip-wielding, vampire-fighting biker "Sex Machine" in the 1996 Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez film From Dusk till Dawn.[14]
Tom Savini in 2007
In 2007, Savini had a role in Planet Terror, one of two stories in the Grindhouse film, directed by Robert Rodriguez. Savini plays Deputy Tolo, who fights to save his town from an infestation of zombie-like creatures. In another Rodriguez film, Machete,[15] based on a fake movie trailer played during the film Grindhouse, Savini played Osiris Amanpour, hired to track and kill the protagonist Machete. Savini reprised his role in the sequel Machete Kills.
Cameos include roles as the vampire David Van Etten in Lost Boys: The Tribe; as the sheriff in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake; and the tongue-in-cheek Jesus Christ in Zombiegeddon (2003).
In 2006, Savini essayed the role of Prester John, the mythical villain in the dreamlike Sea of Dust. That year also saw the release of Johannes Roberts' Forest of the Damned, in which Savini played a mad hermit surrounded by angels cast from heaven. In 2008, he made a brief appearance in Zack & Miri Make a Porno as a thieving slumlord. He also appeared in The Dead Matter, along with Andrew Divoff and Jim O'Rear. Savini voiced himself on The Simpsons episode "Worst Episode Ever": While making an appearance at Android's Dungeon, Savini performs the "Gutbuster" gag, covering the crowd in "blood and guts" and consequently humiliating the Comic Book Guy. In 2012, Savini appeared as a shop teacher, Mr. Callahan, in the Pittsburgh-set teen drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Logan Lerman. Savini also appeared as one of the Trackers in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Future projects include Savini starring in the Nazi zombie film The 4th Reich directed by Shaun Robert Smith, playing the role of SS-Standartenführer Oskar Dirlewanger.[16]
As a film director, Savini helmed episodes of the syndicated television series Tales from the Darkside, the 1990 color remake of Night of the Living Dead; and Housecall, the pilot of the proposed series The Chill Factor, which starred Pittsburgh actor Bingo O'Malley. In 2011, he directed "Wet Dreams", one of six segments to the horror film The Theatre Bizarre. In 2009, Savini announced his plan to direct a new film, Death Island, with special make-up effects by his former protege Greg Nicotero.[17] On September 1, 2013, Savini began a crowdfunding project on Indiegogo for Death Island. His plans were to begin filming by the end of 2013.[18]
Savini also briefly took part in Jerry Lawler's 2010 revival of the Memphis Wrestling pro wrestling television show. His on-screen character sent horror-movie monsters (played by wrestlers from the Memphis area) onto the show to get revenge for Savini who blamed Lawler for the death of Savini's friend Andy Kaufman; the monsters' handler was manager "Hollywood" Jimmy Blaylock.
In 2012, American filmmaker Jason Baker published a biography of Savini entitled Smoke and Mirrors: The Story of Tom Savini.[24]
He said during a Q&A with fans that the hardest movie he has ever worked on was Creepshow because it was "five movies in one".[25]
In 2018, Savini announced via his Instagram that he would be directing a horror web series, in collaboration with others, including Tina Romero, Romero's daughter. Special effects for the web series were to be completed by Savini's students at Douglas Education Center.[26][27]
In May 2019, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor said in an interview that Savini worked to produce and create his new masks for the upcoming We Are Not Your Kind album and subsequent tour cycles.[28] Around the same time, Savini was approached by wrestler Bray Wyatt to design the mask for his new "Fiend" character.[29]
Savini is the author of several books on special effects, including Grande Illusions I and II (1983, 1994), which detail the production and mechanical workings of many of his famous film effects.[32] In Horror F/X, a 1989 direct-to-video interview conducted by frequent collaborator Russo, Savini explains many of his effects techniques, illustrated by film clips and behind-the-scenes video footage. He is also associated with other books in the horror genre including Book of the Dead and Horror 101 for which he wrote the foreword. Savini has also appeared in public demonstrating his effects, including appearances in the 1980s on Late Night With David Letterman in which he demonstrated such effects as "fire gel" and a gunshot to the head on Letterman himself.
Bizarro! (A reissue of Grande Illusions, arbitrarily re-titled by its publisher) ISBN0-517-55319-8
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