TOM SAVINI
They call him The Godfather Of Grue. The Doyen Of Destruction. The Second Cousin Of Splatter.
TOM SAVINI IS one of the greatest make-up artists of all time, and the man behind some of the bloodiest and most inventive kills in horror. With the reissue of 1981 slasher The Burning, he talks us through his scarlet-soaked triumphs…
1 BACON WELL DONE
The Film: Friday The 13th (1980) The Victim: Kevin Bacon
Yes, this is a young Kevin Bacon, bumped off in the first Friday The 13th courtesy of an arrow through his neck. “I had done Martin for George Romero, and in that a stake goes through a guy’s neck. I used the same neck and body on Kevin Bacon. A happy accident: I was pushing the arrow through Kevin’s neck and the blood tube came off the pump, so my assistant grabbed it and blew. That’s why blood gurgles out of Kevin’s neck.”
2 END OF THE RHODES
The Film: Day Of The Dead (1985) The Victim: Joe Pilato
An iconic moment as Joe Pilato’s Captain Rhodes is ripped in half by a group of ghouls while he yells, “Choke on ’emmmm!” His anguished expression wasn’t a put-on. “We were shooting in Florida, and back in Pittsburgh somebody had unplugged the fridge with the pig guts in it. But we had to use them. Joe Pilato was locked under the floor. We couldn’t get him out if we wanted to. The stench was constant. But we weren’t rushing. We had only one chance at the body being torn apart. He was ready to puke by the time we were done. ”
3 BUG OUT
The Film: Creepshow (1982) The Victim: EG Marshall
In the final part of Romero’s horror anthology, EG Marshall’s Upson Pratt finds his paranoia about cockroaches is well-founded as bugs consume him. “I was worn out by that point on Creepshow. I couldn’t figure out how to get the roaches to come out of EG’S chest, and George suggested precutting a hole in the chest, filling it with toilet paper, painting it with make-up and then it would be easy to squeeze roaches through wet toilet paper. When they came out, thousands of them, we all screamed and applauded. It was glorious.”
4 GOODBYE, JASON
The Film: Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) The Victim: Jason Voorhees
Savini returned to the Friday The 13th franchise for the fourth instalment, and promptly killed off Jason Voorhees (not quite once and for all) with a machete to the face. “One of my crew guys,
John Vulich, was walking around with the Dawn
Of The Dead machete and he had it on his head. I saw that and I said, ‘Okay, that’s how we’ll kill Jason: smack him on the head with the machete and he’ll fall to his knees and slide down the blade.’ We worked endlessly to build a rubber Jason. That’s one of the masterpiece deaths of my career.”
5 THE CANOE MASSACRE
The Film: The Burning (1981) The Victims: Fisher Stevens, Ned Eisenberg, JR Mckechnie, Sarah Chodoff, Bonnie Deroski Eighties slasher-movie victims are usually picked off one-by-one; this lake-bound massacre saw shears-wielding nutso Cropsy (Lou David) kill five teenagers — including Fisher Stevens — in one gory go. “The guy who gets the shears in the throat, that was the same neck/shoulder appliance from Martin. I even cut off Fisher Stevens’ fingers. We had blood tubing going through gelatin fingers. It was pretty spectacular.”
6 CHOPPER TOP
The Film: Dawn Of The Dead (1978) The Victim: Jim Krut The signature death in George A Romero’s
Dawn Of The Dead sees a zombie taken out by the whirring rotor blades of a helicopter. “People applauded that in the theatres. I used a friend of mine, Jim Krut, because he had a very low forehead. The top of his head was made up of eight pieces and there was a long string running off it. I had a friend take that and run when George said, ‘Action,’ to whip the top off the head.”
7 SAVINI ON SAVINI
The Film: Maniac (1980) The Victim: Tom Savini Savini’s cameo in William Lustig’s grisly chiller ends prematurely with a shot to the head. So he killed himself, so to speak. “We stole that shot. You’re not allowed to fire a gun in New York City. It has a five-year mandatory sentence. So, after I blew the head off we were gone in 60 seconds. That car was dumped into the river in New York. Somebody’s going to find that and wonder what the hell this was all about.”
THE BURNING IS OUT ON 10 OCTOBER ON DVD AND BLU-RAY