The Great Escape

You can almost hear the imaginary monster truck-like announcer booming, "One man facing lethal traps and devices set against the shattering soundtrack of metal and hard rock tunes. No magic tricks! No illusions! No second chances!" Meet Steve Santini: The Dark Master of Escape who enjoys a chained-up, manacled life and limb-risking existence.

His Escapes from Hell shows pit him against real (and really harmful) devices that are truly horrifying. The devices he escapes from are straight out of horror movies, or what you'd expect to see in a medieval torture museum. In fact, Santini happens to own a few such torture devices - all of which he's escaped from. But he and his Dark Crew specialize in making their own ingeniously hideous contraptions. It's one thing to be an escape artist, but escaping from a certain, hideous death by power tools or explosions is a whole other matter. Thus, Santini's been dragged behind a speeding car, or restrained and pulled on an electric winch toward a running chainsaw. More recently, he was chained and locked in a vault torched with flamethrowers as part of a New Year's Eve show broadcast nationally from Nathan Phillip's Square in Toronto. His newest and most dastardly creation - called The Ripper-will see Santini's head locked in a vice while a conveyor belt slowly delivers a wall of pointy nails and three whirring power drills aimed at his eyes and mouth. "I just know it's going to have people screaming," he says.

So who is this guy?

It took a number of years to evolve his character as Dark Master of Escape, performing really scary stuff to heavy metal music. This is no Harry Houdini vaudeville act.

"We're night and day apart," says Santini. "Houdini wasn't visible. He would be shackled and then go behind the curtains of a cabinet, then an hour later, he would appear - Ta da! - and the audience would go nuts. They assumed, since it was such an improbable thing to get out of, there was something magical afoot," he says. Reading about Houdini as a young boy started Santini down his own puzzling path. "I didn't believe what I was reading in the book, even though it was a fact-based biography. I thought I was reading fiction about this guy that did all this stuff."

Santini soon began performing his own escapes, "which really bugged the crap out of my parents," he admits. Santini's parents often received phone calls from other concerned parents. "I'm 14 and people are phoning them saying, 'Look, your kid is over here wrapped up in our kid's bike chain and he's going to jump into our pool. What are you going to do about it? Oh my god, he's jumped!'"

While he was learning the art of extreme escapology, Santini says he didn't know there were such things as trick handcuffs, gimmick this, gimmick that. He learned to do it for real. To this day, when he presents his stage show he encourages the audience to grab, tug and hold the props. "They can see that they're actually watching a guy fighting for his life. That degree of honesty is something that's never existed before in this art form," he says. He really felt success about six years ago when comparisons to Houdini stopped. "What I do is just completely different, on a whole other level."

While Santini may draw inspiration from hideous horrors in movies, the bulk of his escape ideas are hatched in his own admittedly bizarre imagination. "I think of what bothers people - that's the one thing when we start thinking about an escape stunt. The more it disturbs someone, the better. It has to be something that affects people on a psychological, visceral level, it has to be something no one has ever done before - either in fiction or fact. And it has to be able to be performed in full view." Santini says if he can't take the audience with him mentally, step-by-step through the struggle and the stress, it's not worth it.

Performances like these have rocketed Santini to the limelight as Canada's premier escapologist. Last August, Santini was featured in the Ripley's Believe it or Not! book Expect the Unexpected! in which he was given the title "World's Most Extreme Escape Artist."

One of his rules with illusion and magic where escapes are concerned is that he uses normal everyday objects people can relate to.

It's definitely game on when the show starts. Each escape requires methodical thinking. "I have a series of maneuvers or contortions or whatever it is that I have to do to achieve the goal," he says. "You have to think rapidly because there's been times where plan A has gone completely south even though it's been rehearsed 1,000 times. It happens. Something will mechanically go 'oops' or you discover your body has grown stiff from doing 20 shows over the last month and suddenly one day you get a muscle cramp when your arm is supposed to reach up and undo a winch that's pulling you toward a flame thrower."

Only adrenaline junkies like extreme pursuits, right? Not necessarily; Santini doesn't see himself as one. "There are people out there that would absolutely love that rush of terror," he claims. "Some of these things are so intense for me that when the whole event is over I have to turn to my crew and ask, 'Did the audience applaud? What did they think?' The stuff I've created is so patently lethal that I would be absolutely lying to say that it doesn't frighten me, but the other question would be, why on earth am I doing it? It's because I want to see what I do evolve, and it's working."

You might not be surprised to learn that The Dark Master has a bit of a hard time sleeping, but performance anxiety? Getting onstage might be Santini's own darkest fear. "I have terrible stage fright - I've had it my whole life," he says. Before each act, he doesn't like to talk to anyone and his crew knows better than to bug him. "When I'm up there after the first five minutes it completely evaporates. It's almost like a minor panic attack, but it's really good because it ensures that you're really on the dime."

At the end of the day this is a way of life for Santini, but of course it's a job, too. "You know it's a job when you come off the stage and you're scuffed, bruised and bleeding. If I was doing card tricks I'd get the odd paper cut and that'd be it. But obviously these escapes are intense, and they take tremendous planning. I think the day, or hour or minute that I don't have that feeling of abject terror before I step on stage to do something, I'm quitting because I'll know at that point in time, I'm not being careful enough anymore."

With a career that's spanned more than 25 years, Santini has performed at thousands of venues. His expertise has also led him to assist numerous museums, historical groups and the motion picture and film industries by providing expert consultation and historical artifact displays.

The Dark Master has also used his knowledge to invent original restraints and devices for the law enforcement industry. One of these devices is currently manufactured and distributed to law enforcement agencies worldwide. Santini may be able to escape from such things, but not your average thug.

These are just a few of the gruesome objects from history’s darker days found in the Dark Master’s collection. Santini has escaped from all of them.

This dreaded torture device was first used by the ancient Greeks, then implemented throughout time in various cultures. It's designed to slowly pull apart the unfortunate prisoner, one inch at a time. Santini and his crew created their own version for shows. To date, Santini is the only escape expert to have ever freed himself bound at full stretch on this device.

This medieval device crushes one's digits at the slightest turn of its threaded wing nut, inducing a world of pain. They were even tightened down to bone crushing degrees and connected to a chain or rope, so the victim could be suspended in mid air.

In the days of ancient dungeons and prisons, victims were shackled and restrained in an iron waist belt - another way to hang someone up in the air. This would often be combined with lowering the victim onto the tip of a wooded torture pyramid, known as "The Judas Cradle."

The victim's hands were either bound over their head or behind their back and then drawn up to the ceiling of the torture chamber with a pulley and winch. If hanging by their own body weight wasn't torturous enough to make them talk, iron shackles were joined to a heavy metal weight and hung from the prisoner's ankles. Santini has used these in a number of his escapes.

Hand-forged leg irons had a very unique locking mechanism. Placed in the lock, the long key screwed counterclockwise before pushed to the very end, compressing four springs and releasing the manacle. Santini managed to free himself from these irons without the original key.

This ancient medieval restraint was a popular instrument used to confine one's spouse.. Santini has escaped from this on a few select occasions. Because this device is so rigid, it's impossible for the wearers to reach the padlock to free themselves even if they had the key in their hand.

When fastened, these allow no movement of the wrists or hands whatsoever, making them an ideal use for thumbscrew torture; the victim could not pull away while the screws were being fitted. Similar to the fiddle, it is difficult to remove them because of their rigidity. Once again, the Dark Master beat the odds and escaped where thousands in history could not.