Who Is Screaming Mad George?

George left Osaka for New York’s School of Visual Arts, and formed The Mad in 1978, a theatrical punk band that became a fixture at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. The stage show already used foam-latex prosthetics and staged disembowelments.

Through the 1980s effects boom he moved between the big creature shops as a specialist sculptor and painter. At Boss Film Studios he designed and painted the floating eye in Big Trouble in Little China; his part in that film’s sewer monster is still unconfirmed. He was on the Stan Winston Studio crew that redesigned the Predator, and a later account credits him with the bio-mask’s surface paint. On The Abyss he was a sculptor on Steve Johnson’s XFX crew, which built the NTIs. On A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, one of several effects shops on the film, his own S.M.G. Inc. built Debbie’s roach transformation.

Nintendo, of all people, published the clearest account of this stretch of his life in 1998: the profile they put on their own site, which traces the path from the School of Visual Arts through Greg Cannom’s studio and Richard Edlund’s Boss Film to S.M.G. Inc. in 1986.

That profile leaves out how he got in the door. By his own account, given at an exhibition years later, he went to Rick Baker's shop, asked to speak to someone, and offered to work for free. He got the job, and the job was basically sweeping floors — running errands, buying supplies, doing whatever needed doing. He described it as the best thing that could have happened to him: everything he had made until then he had taught himself, and here he could stand in a working shop and watch every department at once. A Japanese television profile says it was a demo reel he made himself in 1983 that caught Baker’s eye.

Getting noticed took a second move. Working at Greg Cannom's studio, he asked whether he could use the shop after hours to build something of his own for Halloween. Cannom, he suspected, assumed he meant a few masks. He built something large enough that the whole shop ended up helping him finish it — deliberately, so that people would learn his name.

Producer-director Brian Yuzna handed him full creative freedom on several films: Society's shunting climax, Bride of Re-Animator's failed experiments — the finger-eyeball creature, the dog with human arms — and Silent Night, Deadly Night 4's insect transformations. Those films are why this site calls him an effects auteur: the designs were his, built in foam latex and shot in camera. For Society he pitched Yuzna a direction taken from Dalí, a painter the Los Angeles Times reported in 1985 he had loved since his childhood in Osaka. The partnership ran to 2003: Necronomicon, Progeny, then Barcelona for Faust and Beyond Re-Animator.

He co-directed The Guyver with Steve Wang. George directed the grotesque Zoanoid transformations, while Wang handled the armor and the action.

He didn't sculpt every creature himself. Partly that was because he was directing, and partly because he had a strong crew and wanted to use it that way: he gave each artist ownership of "their own" creature instead of running them as paid hands executing his designs. The masks themselves were built in two versions — a detailed "beauty" version for close-ups, and a tougher stunt version for the rest, because The Guyver was an action picture doing heavy Chinese-style fight work, and foam latex tears easily.

His music work between Hollywood and Japan included hide's third-eye mask, NIN's beating heart, NSYNC's doll faces, Manson's alien body, Slipknot's stitched masks, and the cover of Jealousy by X (the band became X Japan in 1992). The album’s credits give the front cover concept to George alongside Yoshiki, and George built the set himself, including the block wall and the rigging the chains hung from. He also designed the stage for the Jealousy dome tour: four oversized faces, one per band member, surrounded by a mass of sculpted eyeballs. The full run is its own page.

He designed and scored a first-person pinball game that runs through organs and bone, uses skeletal imps for flippers, and includes his own voice on the disc. This site grew out of a side project reverse-engineering it.

A film effect only has to survive the shoot. A gallery piece has to last, so it can’t lean on moving parts, and he wanted sculpture that stays put yet seems to move anyway. Walking visitors through an exhibition at the 2014 Japan Filmfest Hamburg, he pointed to the hollow-face illusion, the concave face that seems to turn and follow you as you walk past, which he knew from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. One piece he showed there puts two heads on one body, one sculpted as normal and the other concave, so that the hollow face tracks the viewer, up and down as well as side to side. He said he wanted to use the effect in his concept art too. (Paraphrased from the recording’s automatic captions.)

Back in Japan, George became a guest professor at the Osaka University of Arts in 2019, running a dedicated effects-and-creature shop where he taught sculpting, mold-making and animatronics under a course he called, in English, "special visual arts." The same year he held a solo exhibition, the Special Hallucinogenic Art Show, at Abeno Harukas in Osaka, and in October 2025 he brought it to Tokyo. In 2025 New York’s Ki Smith Gallery also mounted 50 Years of PUNK, showing surviving Mad-era masks and artwork. He died in February 2026. In memoriam.

The following classroom detail is paraphrased from his MAD CLUB teaching episodes, transcribed from Japanese audio; treat exact wording as approximate. He taught a wound in stages — roughly three progressive sculpts — so a single injury could visibly heal across a film's story continuity. On painting skin, he told students there is no one color called "skin color": look closely and skin is already broken into reddish areas and bluish areas. And on puppeteering, he pointed out how much easier the job has gotten: puppeteers used to hide behind set dressing, and now they work in green or blue suits that get removed digitally, which he called a genuinely good situation. His advice to students went past technique: keep making beautiful work too, he told them, not only the grotesque ("guroi") stuff people expected from him.