Special Effects

In the otherwise excellent book The Winston Effect: The Art and History of Stan Winston Studio, aside from a brief mention of the Friday the 13th sequels Stan Winston’s early work in the slasher genre was strangely omitted. This dismissal was not only reserved for the slice ‘n’ dice cycle, however, as both the overlooked splatter classic Mansion of the Doomed and the atmospheric thriller Dead & Buried were also overlooked. There was a section set aside from many of his earlier projects, ranging from the made-for-TV movie Gargoyles to the Star Wars Holiday Special, yet the first genre picture to receive significant page space was James Cameron’s sci-fi slasher The Terminator.

The production for Michael A. Simpson’s back-to-back Sleepaway Camp sequels, Unhappy Campers and Teenage Wasteland, would take place over a six-week period at Lakewood Studios in Atlanta and Camp Younts near Waco in Georgia, although the last day of filming would see the crew relocate to downtown Atlanta for the opening sequence of Sleepaway Camp III.

Tom Savini seemed to have had an obsession earlier in his career with destroying heads. First, the scalp of a zombie was removed by a helicopter propeller in Dawn of the Dead, then Betsy Palmer was decapitated at the end of Friday the 13th, whilst Farley Granger would meet his demise at the end of a shotgun barrel in The Prowler soon after. Yet, perhaps his most memorable decimation of the head saw Savini playing the victim, as his face would explode from a shotgun blast whilst making out with a young woman in William Lustig’s grindhouse classic Maniac.