The 10 Grossest Makeup Effects In Horror Movies

Today, November 3rd, horror die-hards should all head to a bar, order a cold pint of brew, and have a toast to one of the genre’s coolest and most generous legends: Tom Savini, who’s celebrating his 65th birthday. Why’s he so cool? Well, for one, he once played a character named Sex Machine (in 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn). But the Pittsburgh native has also co-starred as less-provocative named folks in a slew of horror classics, including the original Dawn Of The Dead and Creepshow, as well as fan favorites like Martin and Grindhouse.

He's always capable of stealing scenes as an actor, but Savini’s best contribution to the field, which also exemplifies his aforementioned generosity, has been his unbeatable talent as a makeup effects artist. Inspired by the nightmarish slaughter he witnessed as a combat photographer in Vietnam, Savini applied the imagery he retained from the battlefields onto the zombies, corpses, and slain actors he was tasked with touching up for gory staples like Dawn Of The Dead, Creepshow, and Friday The 13th (that’s him working on young Jason Voorhees in the photo above), amongst others.

Without Savini’s gifts, lovers of cinematic blood and guts would have much less to cite as “the greatest,” let alone casually applaud. So, in honor of the man’s born day, we’re counting down The 10 Grossest Makeup Effects In Horror Movies, some of which are Savini’s doing, but all of which are sure to mangle that pit in your stomach.

RELATED: 30 Celebrities Who Aren't So Hot Without Makeup

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Head of Special Makeup Effects: Tom Savini

At the end of last Sunday’s Walking Dead episode, the walkers snacked on Otis (Pruitt Taylor Vince) with a gory, viscera-exposing panache that’s not typically seen on television. Unsurprisingly, inexperienced zombie viewers were aghast, yet we’re here to pay homage to the granddaddy of such living dead carnage, George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. We’re certain that anyone involved in The Walking Dead, especially Robert Kirkman, would gladly cite Dawn’s grossness as the Otis scene’s primary inspiration.

Direct all props toward Tom Savini. The mastermind behind Dawn’s nauseating visuals, Savini (who also co-starred as the lead biker) really took his gloves off during the film’s third act, in which a renegade biker gang infiltrates the protagonists’ mall fortress. When the invaders finally vacate the premises, a few unlucky ones get left behind and serve as zombie dinner.

One dumbass gets his arm chewed off while he’s idiotically taking his blood pressure from a sit-down monitor. The sickest kill, though, comes when a pack of dead-heads open up one biker’s stomach and shovel his gooey intestines out as he screams. You’ll never look at a plate full of spaghetti with marinara sauce the same way again.

Special Makeup Effects Artist: Giannetto De Rossi

There’s no shortage of choice gore moments in Alexandre Aja’s wonderfully hardcore High Tension. On any given day, the scene where the father’s cranium gets lopped off by a dresser could make this list, as could the one in which mommy’s throat is sliced open and blood sprays onto the closet door with a sprinkler’s force. But we already have a couple of unforgettable head shots on this here countdown, and, frankly, High Tension’s third act money-shot is the one that really makes us cringe.

It’s also the main reason why we’re able to forgive Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur for the script’s clichéd and totally ludicrous plot twist that immediately precedes the chainsaw sequence. Just when we think High Tension has officially jumped the shark and crapped on everything it’d previously done so greatly, this scene’s unbelievably raw nature leaves us stunned.

In it, the killer (whose identity we won’t divulge here, in light of spoilers) jumps onto the hood of a car, cuts through the windshield with his trusty chainsaw, and slices into the driver’s chest and neck, and the blood covers the damsel-in-distress seated in the backseat (which you can see above). Without High Tension’s revolting power, we wouldn’t have the tits and guts of Piranha 3D (also directed by Aja) to love, so be thankful.

Special Makeup Effects Workshop Supervisor: Geoffrey Portass

In Clive Barker stories, nobody dies peacefully. Horror’s foremost purveyor of sexually perverse and eye-gouging butchery, the prolific English author took a stab at directing with 1987’s now-classic Hellraiser, the heartwarming tale of a hot chick who lures dudes into her attic so her dead lover can harvest their blood and please an otherworldly race of demons known as the Cenobites. Yeah, real family fun.

The character of Uncle Frank, the one who needs the harvested blood, sets the film in motion by an ancient puzzle box, summoning fish-hooked chains to pierce into his flesh and pull skin off bone. And the truly sick part: Frank actually likes it, as you can from the above picture. We, on the other hand, want to hurl.

Special Makeup and Effects: Tom Savini

Some might call Maniac’s infamous shotgun-to-the-head scene a case of twisted masochism, but we simply call it badass. Handling the discomforting effects on director William Lustig’s vile (yet awesome) exploitation flick, Tom Savini had to create several woman-skewering visuals, since the film’s slasher is a disturbed sicko who loves scalping hot chicks. But one sequence, where the horrid Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) must first kill the boyfriend before getting the girly, required a male victim—a change of pace.

So, naturally, Savini opted to play the guy himself, thus sealing his place in horror’s pantheon as one of the genre’s most memorable casualties. He and his sexy blonde friend are necking in a parked car when Zito, hooded and armed, leaps onto the car’s hood, points his sawed-off weapon directly at Savini, and fires away. The result, which you can peep above, isn’t pretty. Well, it is pretty fucking epic.

Prosthetics/Makeup Supervisor: Marjory Hamlin

Before he stepped foot into The Shire for the Lord Of The Rings movies, and years prior to winning an Academy Award, Peter Jackson was a splatter movie champion. His magnum opus of goo: Dead Alive, Jackson’s third feature film shot in his native country of New Zealand, and one of the ickiest zombie flicks ever made.

Approaching the undead genre with a maniacal glee, Dead Alive sprinkles little bits of nastiness throughout, including one scene where an old woman shoots pus into a man’s custard bowl, which he unknowingly eats, while a decaying lady’s ear falls into her custard—and, yes, she devours it.

Somehow, though, Jackson wasn’t satisfied with making viewers want to vomit in that set-piece, so he saved the bloodiest bits for last. During the film’s climax, a mob of wretched zombies break into a mansion, forcing the hero to eviscerate them all with a lawnmower, which Jackson shows in all of its gruesome glory. Screw the Lord Of The Rings—Jackson deserved some kind of Oscar for Dead Alive. We’d like to see the Coen Brothers match that.

Head of Special Makeup Effects: Tom Savini

George Romero’s series of Dead movies are known for their inevitable zombies-feast-upon-antagonists climaxes, such as the aforementioned biker’s last stand in Dawn Of The Dead. But in Romero’s third, and most extreme, flesh-eater flick, Day Of The Dead, makeup killer Tom Savini outdid himself once the ghouls turned the villainous soldier characters into an open buffet. And for Day Of The Dead’s meanest bad guy, Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), the walking corpses gave Romero’s filmography its crowning achievement in gore.

The heart of Day Of The Dead rests in the character of Logan (Richard Liberty), a mad scientist determined to calm the zombies down and restore humanity into them; his best pupil is Bub (Howard Sherman), a former soldier who listens to a Walkman and salutes his military superiors even though he’s deceased.

Rhodes, completely against Logan’s work, hates Bub, so it’s only right that Bub cause Rhodes’ demise. After Rhodes abandons his men and tries to flee on his own, he runs into Bub, who shoots him badly enough to disable the cap as a swarm of zombies pop out from behind Door Number One. They make quick work of Rhodes, tearing his body in half, though not without the strong-willed asshole firing off one last “Fuck you” in the form of “Choke on 'em!” One look at the picture above should prove that Romero’s zombies have plenty to cough up.

Special Makeup artists: Chris Walas and Tom Schwartz

It wouldn’t be a proper list about cinematic makeup effects without the inclusion of at least one David Cronenberg film. The master of bodily harm and perverse mutations, Cronenberg has blessed gore fanatics with all kinds of wicked grotesqueries, from the titular beast in The Fly to James Woods sticking a gun into his creepy vagina chest in Videodrome. When pinning down the filmmaker’s nastiest handmade effects, however, there’s really no contest—Scanners has the prize locked down.

Scanners, written directly from Cronenberg’s own brilliantly twisted mind, presents a world in which people with strong telepathic abilities can kill others simply by using their minds. One “scanner” in particular, played by Michael Ironside, has gone rogue, and he decides to show his rebellious power by making a speaker’s head explode during a press conference.

First, the poor guy begins nervously shaking, glancing over at a deep-in-thought Ironside and knowing that he’s a wrap; and then, boom! His head detonates as if someone hid a stick of dynamite in his brain. Try dealing with a migraine without panicking after watching Scanners.

Makeup Effects Supervisor: Jacques Olivier-Molon

It’s a moment so gruesome, so get-the-fuck-out-of-here, that there’s not a single still image available online. Our guess: No one wanted to stomach the scene again to freeze-frame a snapshot. We can’t blame them—proving that writers/directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are fearless and crazy bastards, the deservedly cult-beloved French knockout Inside’s climax is the culmination of 70 minutes’ worth of “They’re not going to go there” speculation. And boy do they go there.

The film’s premise is rather straightforward: An enigmatic and psychotic woman, dressed in all black, breaks into a grieving pregnant lady’s home on Christmas Eve night to steal the unborn baby from her stomach. And she’s armed with scissors for the majority of the movie’s running time. And she hacks her way through the homeowner’s mother, boss, three police officers, and one arrestee. But then, she’s just left with poor Sarah (Alysson Paradis), though she’s not going to actually cut Sarah’s belly open, right?

Viewers’ jaws, already smacking the floor from Inside’s previous oh-shit moments of gore, uncontrollably slink even lower once the intruder starts a-snipping; cutting Sarah’s stomach open like a pumpkin, the psycho chick pulls the fetus out of the now-dead Sarah, and Maury and Bustillo show the whole thing, steady cam and all. Just one of the many reasons why Inside is arguably the best horror movie of the last 10 years.

Makeup Artist: Pat Hay

You know an effect is dynamite when the actors on set freak out worse than any audience member ever could. That’s exactly what happened during the filming of Alien’s most infamous sequence, in which actor John Hurt’s stomach gives birth to a little “chestburster” alien.

Considered one of the greatest shocks in cinematic history, director Ridley Scott’s death blow of a moment was designed behind-the-scenes as a surprise to Hurt’s in-scene co-stars, particularly Veronica Cartwright. To achieve the effect, Hurt was positioned underneath the table, with his head and arms sticking out, and the fake stomach was rigged with bloody makeup and red-spewing squibs; only, none of the other actors knew about the impending blood geysers—they just thought that a freaky puppet was about to jump out.

So once the chestburster popped up to say “Hey,” the splashes of faux blood jolted the performers, the wet blast to Cartwright’s face causing her to scream frantically—a genuine reaction that’s seen in the actual film.

Special Makeup Effects: Rick Baker

The bottom line: Rick Baker’s groundbreaking work in John Landis’ excellent horror-comedy An American Werewolf In London was the first-ever recipient of the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup. A real bar-setter, in other words. And what’s most impressive about Baker’s still hard-to-fathom transformation sequence is that it’s just as astounding today as it was 30 years ago.

If you don’t squirm while watching the cursed and unfortunate David Kessler (David Naughton) mutate in real time, you’re either comatose or blind. Or some kind of “sick” that we don’t even want to consider. For us “normal” folk, Werewolf’s calling card is an excruciating yet superlative example of practical makeup effects—you know, the type of man-made visuals that have become a sad thing of the past no thanks to Hollywood’s current CGI jones.

With Sam Cooke’s soulful “Blue Moon” ironically playing in the background, Naughton’s fingers and hands extend straight up, much to his own horror; as do his feet, followed by his bubbling back-bones and spine. By the time Naughton’s nose stretches outward and his teeth become pointy fangs, Baker’s legacy as a makeup genius is cemented.