Tom Savini

Thomas Vincent Savini (born November 3, 1946 ) is an American prosthetic makeup artist, actor, stunt performer, and film director. He is best known for his makeup and special effects work on films directed by George A. Romero, including Martin, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Creepshow (1982), Day of the Dead (1985), and Monkey Shines (1988). He also created the special effects and makeup for cult films such as Friday the 13th (Parts I and IV), Maniac (1980), The Burning, The Prowler (both 1981), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).

Savini directed Night of the Living Dead, the 1990 remake of Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. His other directing credits include three episodes of the television series Tales from the Darkside and a segment in The Theatre Bizarre.

As an actor and stunt performer, he has appeared in films such as Martin (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Knightriders (1981), From Dusk till Dawn (1996), Planet Terror (2007), Machete (2010), Django Unchained (2012), and Machete Kills (2013).

Tom has a son and two daughters . In mid August 2026, he lost his home and 2 pets, both cats, in an electrical fire, alongside many of his work and props. Him and his wife were reported as both surviving the fire. A $50,000 fundraiser was started to help in reconstruction and replacement Efforts.

Early life Thomas Vincent Savini was born on November 3, 1946, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is of Italian descent. He was raised Catholic and graduated from Central Catholic High School. As a boy, his inspiration was actor Lon Chaney: Savini attributes his earliest desires to create makeup effects to Chaney and the film Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).

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.

Savini practiced fencing and gymnastics. 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 attended Point Park University for three years before enlisting in the United States Army.

Savini served as a combat photographer during the Vietnam War. 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." 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."

In 1969, while on guard duty on Cantho Airfield, 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.

After his tour in Vietnam, he attended Carnegie Mellon University, 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. 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 (1973)—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 (1977). 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. He continued to perfect those techniques in 1980's Maniac. and 1981's The Burning and The Prowler.

Savini earned the nickname "The Sultan of Splatter". In 1982, he created more traditional horror effects in Creepshow, a movie directed by Romero from a script written by Stephen King. In 1984, he agreed to work on Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, where he killed his creation Jason Voorhees. Returning to the zombie genre in 1985, Savini won the year's Saturn Award for Best Makeup Effects for his work on the Romero's Day of the Dead. In 1986, Savini worked with director Tobe Hooper on the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. In 1998 he was the Media Guest of Honor for the World Horror Convention.

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).

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, 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.

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. 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.

In the 2008 novel Bad Moon Rising by Jonathan Maberry, Savini appears as one of the real-world horror celebrities who are in the fictional town of Pine Deep when monsters attack; other celebrities include James Gunn, Jim O'Rear, Brinke Stevens, Ken Foree, Stephen Susco, Debbie Rochon, Joe Bob Briggs and blues man Mem Shannon.

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.

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".

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.

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. Around the same time, Savini was approached by wrestler Bray Wyatt to design the mask for his new "Fiend" character.

Savini also collaborated with David Bertolino, founder of the New England horror and Halloween theme park Spooky World in 1991, helping to design the attraction's stages and later haunted houses branded with Savini's name and a horror memorabilia museum.

FX education

Savini runs the Tom Savini's Special Make-Up Effects Program at the Douglas Education Center in Monessen, Pennsylvania. Savini says he refers offers he receives for movie make-up effects projects to his students and graduates of his school.

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. 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.

Filmography As an actor Films Year Film Role Notes 1978 Martin Arthur First film with George A. Romero Dawn of the Dead "Blades" Second film with George A. Romero Effects Nicky 1980 Maniac Disco Boy 1981 Knightriders Morgan Third film with George A. Romero 1982 Creepshow Garbage Man #2 Fourth film with George A. Romero (cameo) 1985 The Ripper Jack the Ripper Direct-to-video; shot in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma 1986 Twisted Sister: Come Out and Play Teacher Cameo 1987 Creepshow 2 The Creep 1990 Two Evil Eyes The Monomaniac (Uncredited) Fifth film with George A. Romero 1992 Innocent Blood News Photographer 1994 Heartstopper Lieutenant Ron Vargo 1995 The Demolitionist Roland 1996 From Dusk till Dawn "Sex Machine" 2001 The Monster Man Uncle Joe Web of Darkness Rouge Children of the Living Dead Deputy Hughs 2002 Eyes Are Upon You Eddie Rao Ted Bundy Salt Lake City Detective 2003 Blood Bath Stranger Zombiegeddon Jesus Christ New York City Horror Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award 2004 Vicious Kane Dawn of the Dead County Sheriff Cahill Remake of the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead Death 4 Told Man Cameo Unearthed Victor Tonelli 2005 Forest of the Damned Stephen Land of the Dead Blades (Zombie) Sixth film with George A. Romero 2006 A Dream of Colour in Black and White Caddy Beyond the Wall of Sleep Sheriff The Absence of Light The Higher Power Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film Himself Documentary film 2007 Grindhouse Deputy Tolo Segment Planet Terror Loaded Dice The Bishop 2008 Silent Vengeance Daniel Phillips It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To Uncle Tom Lost Boys: The Tribe David Van Etten Sequel to the 1987 film The Lost Boys Zack and Miri Make a Porno Jenkins Sea of Dust Prester John 2009 Eldorado 2010 The Dead Matter Sebed Machete Osiris Amanpour Horrorween Killer 2012 The Theatre Bizarre Dr. Maurey Django Unchained Tracker Chaney The Perks of Being a Wallflower Mr. Callahan 2013 Machete Kills Osiris Amanpour The 4th Reich SS-Standartenführer Oskar Dirlewanger Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th Himself - Special Make-Up Effects Documentary film 2015 The Sadist The Sadist 2020 In Search of Darkness: Part II Himself Documentary film 2024 Terrifier 3 Interviewee at Mall 2025 Queens of the Dead The Mayor First film by Tina Romero

Television

Video game Year Video game Role Notes 2013 LocoCycle Holt Ryebach Live acting only 2024 Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The Game Himself DLC character

As a make-up artist/special effects technician

Films

Video game Year Video game Notes 2017 Friday the 13th: The Game Savini Jason design, when Savini was writing lore for Jason, wanted to have the idea be that Jason killed The Devil, stole his Pitchfork to come back into the mortal realm. 2022 Evil Dead: The Game Savini Ash design

As a director Year Film Notes 1984–1988 Tales from the Darkside TV, three episodes 1990 Night of the Living Dead Remake of the 1968 film 2004 Chill Factor: Housecall 2011 The Theatre Bizarre Segment "Wet Dreams" 2019 Creepshow Episode 6. Segment "By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain" TBD Nightmare City Remake of Nightmare City (1980)