Born Joji Tani in Osaka, Japan, in 1956, Screaming Mad George (a moniker styled after Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and MAD Magazine) moved to New York City at 18 to study at the School of Visual Arts and form the punk band The Mad, serving as its lead vocalist. He went on to direct music videos featuring stupefyingly gnarly effects that would become his signature, eventually attracting the attention of practical effects guru Rick Baker and leading to work on productions such as Predator, Poltergeist II, John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China—where he helped realize the pulsating, bug-nuts Flying Eye Guardian—and A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, where he turned Brooke Theiss into a cockroach.
While George is known as a horror artist, he preferred the term “surrealist,” a distinction that bonded him to director Brian Yuzna, with whom he collaborated as the director’s creature designer and makeup artist on Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation and Bride Of Re-Animator (both in 1990), Faust: Love Of The Damned (in 2000, working from comic co-creator Tim Vigil’s design), Beyond Re-Animator (in 2003, his last credited movie work), and, perhaps most infamously, 1989’s Society, which featured an impressively enormous mass of shifting, furious flesh in the film’s most notorious sequence, known as “The Shunting.” (Hang on, Billy: that link is especially NSFW.)
Based on George’s work on Nightmare 4, Bandai and Hero Communications offered him his sole credit as a feature director, co-directing with Steve Wang on the adaptation of Yoshiki Takaya’s manga The Guyver (with Yuzna as producer). Although the Mark Hamill-led film didn’t hit, it did merit a DTV sequel in 1994 and led to a productive decade in the 1990s, equal to George’s work in his formative ’80s. He brought his surrealist nightmares to such features as Alex Winter’s Freaked, designing those “Rasta Far Eyes” creatures; helping to realize He Who Walks Behind the Rows (aka that corn monster) in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995); and creating Clarence Williams III’s insane “Mr. Simms” devil look in Tales From The Hood (1995).
There is so much left to unpack and gawk at from Screaming Mad George’s life and career to fit into a single obituary. To those who worship at the altar of splatter, his genius will be missed and forever appreciated.
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