Tom Savini

Tom Savini's reputation is as the man who made the best gore of the 1970s and 1980s. The more interesting fact is where the reference came from.

Pittsburgh

He grew up in Pittsburgh, saw Man of a Thousand Faces as a boy and decided that Lon Chaney's job was a job. He was doing makeup effects as a teenager. Then he was drafted.

Vietnam

Savini served as a combat photographer. He has talked about this repeatedly and without much drama: his job was to photograph what had happened to people, and he coped with it by treating what he was looking at as an effects problem. How would you build that. What would you use.

Everything in his filmography comes out of that. The reason his wounds look different from his contemporaries' is that he was not working from other films.

The Romero years

He met Romero and did Martin (1977), which is a small film with a few precise effects and is better work than its budget suggests.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) is the one. Four months of overnight shoots in a Pennsylvania shopping mall, an enormous number of gags, and a decision that has aged interestingly: the zombies are grey-blue and the blood is bright orange. Savini has said he would do the blood differently now. It was mixed for the film stock and lighting available, and on a modern transfer it looks like poster paint.

He is also in it, as a biker, because the production could not afford another body.

Friday the 13th

He took Friday the 13th (1980) because it was work, and the arrow through Kevin Bacon's throat is the sequence everyone knows. It was achieved with an appliance neck, a tube, and Bacon lying under a false bed with his head through a hole while somebody pumped blood.

He turned down Part 2 to do The Burning (1981), which was the right call artistically and a bad one financially. The raft massacre in The Burning is the best sustained piece of practical work in the slasher cycle: five kills in about twenty seconds, in daylight, with no cutaway. It was also the reason the film spent nearly twenty years cut in Britain.

The thing about practical

The argument for practical effects usually gets made as nostalgia, and Savini's work is the best case against that reading. It is not that latex looks better than a render. It is that the actor is reacting to something that exists, the light falls on it correctly, and the fluid has weight.

He has been consistent that he is not against digital and that he uses it. His objection is to using it for something that has mass.

Now

He runs a special effects school in Pittsburgh, which has produced a large number of working effects artists, and he acts, mostly in things directed by people who grew up on his work. He was Sex Machine in From Dusk Till Dawn, which is the role most people under 40 know him from.