His film work began when he happened to run into writer Alan Ormsby in a bar – the writer was working on Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972) – and after Savini showed him his portfolio, invited him to work on 1974’s Deathdream as his debut. After being a guardsman he became a war photographer, but in an amusing anecdote credits a duck with saving his life after he mistook one for a Vietcong platoon, which had him taken off guard duty. Eventually, he joined the army to support his pregnant wife and was sent to Vietnam, where he was exposed first-hand to the real horrors humanity is capable of. Obsessed with creatures, it was the 1957 film Man of a Thousand Faces, which told the story of legendary makeup man Lon Chaney, that showed Savini that there were people who made these fantastical monsters.įrom there, Savini became the local neighbourhood monster guy and would pore over the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland with his friends before making them up, and as a teenager, he got to do this as a job of sorts with a local magician troupe. Growing up in Pittsburgh with five siblings, the film looks at each of them and how they influenced their little brother, as well as tales of his mother letting him sneak down after his father had put him to bed so he could watch horror movies on the black and white TV, and taking him to Godzilla movies and Universal monster movies, something that he would eventually bring full circle so he could scare her.
The film posits Savini as not just an effects master but also an actor, a magician, and a teacher. And it’s told righteously, in the documentary Smoke and Mirrors.
Romero as well as a king of splatter cinema in his own right, the story of Savini is ready to be told. Notorious as a major part of the films of George A.
#SAVINI JASON MOVIE MOVIE#
With the golden age of practical movie effects sadly long behind us, there are only a handful of effects make-up geniuses that count as legends, and very few of them are like Tom Savini.