The Dead Walk: Remaking a Classic

Patricia Tallman:
Tom Savini is a madman, he is one of these extraordinary people that have this dark side obviously, but the real Tom Savini is a pussycat, he is as sensitive as he is dark.

Tom Savini:
I was a combat photographer in Vietnam, I was seeing horrible stuff through my camera lens and the camera lens to me was a separation between me and this horribly anatomically correct gore I was seeing, real stuff. I had to click off my emotions in Vietnam as a combat photographer and not go nuts. Well when I came back, those emotions were still turned off, I *was* a zombie, coming back from Vietnam I was an emotionless person walking around, seeing that stuff affected how I was to create makeup effects from that point on. To me, if the stuff I created didn't give me the same feeling I got from seeing the real stuff in Vietnam it wasn't real enough to me.

Tom Savini:
Because of the parodies of zombies, there were beer commercials with zombies and Michael Jackson's "Thriller", you know, how can we make these things scary AGAIN? And my approach was we have to really remind people of what death was. I didn't want to ever use the word 'zombie' in the remake, these are dead things, death is the most important thing to try and make people scared of, AGAIN. So remakes are a difficult concept.