Who Is Screaming Mad George?

Tani leaves Osaka for New York's School of Visual Arts to study painting and illustration — and forms The Mad in 1978, a theatrical punk band that becomes a fixture at CBGB and Max's Kansas City. The stage show is the prototype for everything after: foam latex prosthetics, simulated disembowelment, ritual violence as performance art. The effects career starts as a punk set.

Through the 80s effects boom he moves between the big creature shops as a specialist sculptor and painter: sculpting Big Trouble in Little China's sewer monster and eye guardian 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. Journeyman years — with a fingerprint already showing.

Producer-director Brian Yuzna hands him full creative freedom, and the signature style detonates: Society's shunting climax, Bride of Re-Animator's exposed-tendon Bride, SNDN4's insect transformations, the Elm Street 4 cockroach nightmare. Critics start using the phrase effects auteur — Dalí by way of Cronenberg, executed in foam latex, always in-camera.

Co-directs The Guyver with Steve Wang — George owns the grotesque Zoanoid transformations, Wang owns the armor and the action. A cult object to this day.

The bridge years between Hollywood and Japan produce some of the most recognizable music imagery of the era — X Japan's Jealousy cover, hide's third-eye mask, NIN's beating heart, NSYNC's doll faces, Manson's alien body, Slipknot's stitched masks. The full run is its own page.

His PlayStation fever dream: first-person pinball through organs and bone, skeletal imps for flippers, his own voice on the disc. Deep dive here — this site grew out of a project reverse-engineering it.

Back in Japan, George becomes a guest professor at the Osaka University of Arts, running a dedicated effects-and-creature shop to hand practical craft — sculpting, mold-making, animatronics — to the next generation. In 2025, New York's Ki Smith Gallery mounts 50 Years of PUNK, showing surviving Mad-era masks and artwork, and his Tokyo “Hallucinogenic Art Show” retrospective makes the thesis explicit: physical craft over AI generation. This site agrees.