Who Is Screaming Mad George?

Tani left Osaka for New York's School of Visual Arts to study fine art, 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 had the ingredients: foam latex prosthetics, simulated disembowelment, ritual violence as performance art. The effects career started as a punk set.

Through the 80s effects boom he moved between the big creature shops as a specialist sculptor and painter: working on Big Trouble in Little China's sewer monster and designing and painting its floating eye at Boss Film Studios, airbrushing the weathered copper-bronze patina on the Predator bio-mask at Stan Winston Studio, sculpting The Abyss's translucent NTIs at Steve Johnson's XFX. On Elm Street 4 — one of several shops on a crowded crew — his own shop built the roach transformation, which is where a lot of people first noticed his name. During these years he worked as a sculptor and painter inside other people’s shops while starting to take whole sequences through his own shop. 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 describes 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 dates the moment his self-made 1983 demo reel 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 suspects, 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 uses the label effects auteur: foam-latex, in-camera designs informed by Dalí and Cronenberg. The partnership ran to 2003: Necronomicon, Progeny, then Barcelona for Faust and Beyond Re-Animator.

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 stunt work, and foam latex tears easily.

This is also where he names his signature trick: the "hell face illusion," a concave face that appears to turn and follow the viewer as they walk past it. He traces the idea to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, and ties it back to the same surrealist thinking behind his concept art — a design meant to unsettle the eye as much as the stomach.

His 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 X Japan's Jealousy album cover, which he designed and built himself — the cinderblock wall and chain rigging in the shoot are his construction, not a set piece. 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 made 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 project reverse-engineering it.

Back in Japan, George became a guest professor at the Osaka University of Arts, 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." In 2025, New York's Ki Smith Gallery mounted 50 Years of PUNK, showing surviving Mad-era masks and artwork, and his Tokyo “Hallucinogenic Art Show” retrospective gathered the surreal paintings alongside the effects work. 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.