Joji Tani or better known professionally as Screaming Mad George is a special effects artist, film director, and musician. Born in Osaka Japan in 1956, Screaming Mad George moved to the United State and attended the School of Visual Arts. Dubbing himself as Screaming Mad George to stand out from the any-other run of the mill person named George and was influenced by Mad Magazine and singer Screamin Jay Hawkins.
Screaming Mad George started his career as a member of a punk rock band named The Mad in the late 70’s. George’s band released songs called Eyeball, I Hate Music, Fried Egg, I Wanna Be a Devil, Mask, and others on their album We Love Noize. It was here when working on his band’s music videos where he himself would provide the bloody gore effects Hollywood took note of. Blood, guts, and gore were what Screaming Mad George specialized in and movie studios couldn’t get enough of it in the 80’s.
George’s work in the special effects gore scene began with adding his little touches to films like Big Trouble in Little China, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors where he provided the sick effects for the scene where a girl turned into a giant cockroach. In 1989, he returned home to Japan to oversee the special effects for the movie Tokyo: The Last War. Returning back to the States, George did the gore effects for such films as Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 in 1990, and in 1991 he went on to direct his very first Hollywood feature film The Guyver, a sort of superhero movie with monsters.
Other works where Screaming Mad George had his hooks in were Tales From The Hood, Faust: Love of The Damned, and Beyond Re-Animator. Others works also include are Hide and Go Shriek, Curse II The Bite, Freaked, Children of The Corn III: Urban Harvest, and Silent Night, Deadly 5.
His obsession with gore special effects has given Screaming Mad George his own little notch on the Hollywood makeup effects roster and the legacy he gave the world will live on forever. He’s the makeup artist with an outstanding name and his work is even more outstanding than that.
