Tremors
Horror comedy western too original to market never left your TV
TREMORS (1990) is a horror movie on horseback. Released almost a year before Dances With Wolves (1990) revived the western, it embraces frontier motifs while smuggling in several libertarian values: the joy of living off-grid, relying on neighbors in the absence of civil authority, and self-sufficiency as an identity. Steeped in the spirit of adventure and a comforting benevolence, its most selfless characters survive giant carnivorous worms that burrow under the ground. Sorted into the horror section of most video stores by default, Tremors doesn’t quite fit, which is why it never left.
Brent Maddock and Steven Seth Wilson met on the campus of the University of Southern California in the early 1970s. Though growing in prestige—its film program had graduated George Lucas, John Milius, Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale and John Carpenter—the department was housed in what had been a horse barn erected during World War I. Maddock, who’d started making movies with his father’s 8mm camera at the age of 10, was such a fan of physical comedy that he’d broken his neck performing a stunt for a student film when he was 19. He earned his BA from Colgate University in New York and drove to Los Angeles as a grad student. Wilson had done the same after a two-year stint in the U.S. Army stateside, editing educational films for Uncle Sam. Touring the rustic film department, Maddock recalled, “I wandered over to see what it looked like and I walked into the courtyard and there’s this guy sitting there with his big old briefcase, and I went over to introduce myself and it was Steve. I drove to L.A., walked in and met my writing partner. If I’d known that, it was like, oh, I don’t need to go to film school, we’ll just start working.”
Steve Wilson was born in Oklahoma but grew up all over, attending high school in Hawaii. He was so obsessed with movies—particularly the creature features of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen—that when Wilson enrolled in psychology courses at Penn State, his father intervened. “I went off to college and said, ‘I don’t know what I should do. I guess I’ll be a psychologist, like my dad.’ That’s what he was. And he came up after I’d been there a week or so and he said, ‘What are your courses?’ And I said, ‘This is what I signed up for.’ And he said, ‘Wow, this makes no sense. You’ve been making movies in the backyard for ten years. What’s going on?’ And he went to my advisors, and he said, ‘Do you have anything like film or movies or television?’ And he changed my whole course schedule.” At USC, another film student, Ron Underwood, entered Maddock & Wilson’s orbit. Underwood had discovered his ardor for film while a junior high school exchange student in Sri Lanka. He’d considered becoming a doctor, but after spending six weeks in pre-med courses at Occidental College, transferred to USC to study film. After graduating, Underwood moved to Milwaukee, where his wife was attending dental school. They returned to Los Angeles a couple of years later and Underwood applied to the American Film Institute as a producing fellow. Upon graduation, he began directing educational films.
Maddock and Wilson cut and supervised the special effects, respectively, for several of Underwood’s educational short films. One of them was titled Library Report. It was about a teenager whose robot — animated by Wilson using stop-motion effects — helps her write a term paper. The positive response to Library Report convinced the filmmakers that a feature-length screenplay about a robot, paired with their short, might finance a do-it-yourself movie, with Underwood directing, Maddock editing and Wilson supervising the effects. Maddock & Wilson got to work on a script. They’d settle on the title Short Circuit.
A student Maddock had met at an Advanced Screenplay Workshop in the UCLA Extension program mentioned that he knew the son of producer David Foster. He let Maddock know that Foster—producer of Caveman (1981) and The Thing (1982) — was looking for a script about a robot. Maddock & Wilson passed Short Circuit along and when Foster offered to take it off the market, they garnered interest from three agents to represent the sale. One of the agents was Nancy Roberts, whose background was business administration, and without clients, had founded her own talent agency in 1982. Roberts expected film students and found two seasoned filmmakers who, in turn, met an agent who'd actually read their script. In May 1985, Roberts negotiated the sale of Short Circuit to David Foster for more than he’d initially offered: $360,000. With a resume consisting of educational films, Ron Underwood wasn’t taken seriously as a potential director by anyone but Roberts, who agreed to represent him. Producers passed on Underwood and hired hitmaker John Badham to direct. (By 1998, after directing five pictures in a row that had tanked at the box office, Badham was being passed over for tentpole films like Mighty Joe Young in favor of Ron Underwood). Opening May 1986, Short Circuit was a hit, and Maddock & Wilson were commissioned for work on various drafts of projects at Amblin Entertainment, a couple of which would be produced: *batteries not included (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988), as well as a project titled Ghost Boy that Amblin washed its hands of and was rewritten for Bill Cosby as Ghost Dad (1990).
Complaining to their agent how little control they’d had over their work—which included the poorly received Short Circuit 2 (1988)—Roberts suggested Maddock & Wilson develop another original screenplay, its sale contingent on her attaching them as producers. The screenwriters dug through their files for ideas. Wilson recalled, “One of my early jobs was working for the navy which had a base out in the middle of the desert, very near where we ended up shooting, and I worked as a film editor on this big navy base in the desert. And on weekends I would hike around the base and just hang out in the desert. And there were these big mushroom-like rocks, very much like ones we used in the movie. And one day I said, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be interesting if there were some creature that could move through the sand as if the sand were water and I couldn’t get off this rock?’ That was ten years before I even sold Short Circuit.” Nancy Roberts thought this “monster in the ground” idea, which Wilson referred to as Land Sharks, had the most potential. Ron Underwood had, since the sale of Short Circuit, directed a live-action/ stop-motion adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s children’s book The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1986) as an ABC Weekend Special, winning a Peabody Award, and had directed a sequel, Runaway Ralph (1986). Maddock & Wilson began working out the story for Land Sharks with Underwood, making it a non-negotiable that he would direct it.
Their idea led to a pitch, which was passed on by everyone the team delivered it to. Maddock & Wilson and Underwood expanded their pitch to a three or four-page treatment. That was rejected by anyone in a position to commission a screenplay. Despite their track record as screenwriters of several modestly successful science fiction or fantasy pictures, Maddock & Wilson were surprised by how few studio executives knew what to make of Beneath Perfection. Nancy Roberts recalled, “Brent, Steve, Ron and I had a meeting, and I said, ‘I’ve done everything I can to get this to people who should get this movie, but they don’t—you’re going to have to write it. And you’re going to have to write it on spec, even though by that time they were being paid great sums of money, but if you want to do this movie, they won’t get it unless it’s on the page.’ And it’s a risk. It meant time out of their schedule.” Maddock & Wilson lived twenty to thirty miles apart and wrote the script by using CP/M word processors and dial-up modems to stay in contact. This “cutting edge” technology enabled transmission of a 120-page document over the phone line in just an hour and a half, if neither writer received a telephone call, which would terminate the file transfer and force them to start from 0%. Roberts continued, “So, it took about a year to get the script really in shape. In fact, it took six months to get The Draft after that meeting we had had. And I kept waiting for the script and one day I said, ‘I don’t care where you are in this script, I’m going to send the script police to your houses, and whatever you have, they are going to pick up. And you’re going to bring it in to me and I want to read it so I can see if we have a movie.’” Maddock & Wilson considered Graboids as a title, which would’ve made their script sound more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a movie. They settled on Beneath Perfection, a play on the name of the isolated town where their action took place: Perfection, Nevada.
Brent Maddock’s forte was character with a preference for writing physical comedy, while Steve Wilson was good with story and loved monster or horror pictures. They’d conceived Beneath Perfection as a homage to 1950s science fiction movies, in which radiation, outer space, experimentation or Mother Nature unleashed giant, voracious monsters on the citizenry. Maddock recalled, “The question then is: What is it? Is it a drama? Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? Do we want it to be scary? And you have to constantly remind yourself of those, ask yourself those questions. So what we did is we wrote a number of drafts of this. And we had, I think an important moment, which was, looking at the script you go, ‘It’s pretty funny. There are some really funny gags, some funny stuff.’ And we wondered, is that going to make you take the creatures less seriously? Are they going to be less of a scare?’ Because nobody’s taking them really seriously. And we thought, yes, probably, but we’re not going to take that chance. So we went through and we did something we rarely do with a script: we made it less funny. And took out a lot of jokes and a lot of sequences that would’ve been wonderful visually, but would’ve—you would’ve enjoyed them in a comedic way—so we made it more serious.” The screenwriters agreed that they didn’t want their giant carnivorous worms to be creatures the residents of Perfection would laugh at.
Seeking a producing partner who had a strong track record in genre film, prestige, and the ability to nurture a first-time director, Roberts partnered with Gale Ann Hurd, producer of The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986). Hurd’s company Pacific Western Productions had produced genre pictures in the $10 million budget range. Roberts recalled, “The reason Gale was important is because she was a writer and a creator, and understood the blend. Obviously, you can look at her work … And I just felt that ultimately, either Gale or someone like her needed to come on board because you have to have a senior force like that to vouch for the director. Particularly a director who only has an afterschool special which is not even remotely in the tone of the script that he has been attached to direct. And you also need that force because they have demonstrated already that they can do it … They know the crews who would be able to execute, physically execute a movie like this and support a young director. Studios are not going to give away even ten million dollars unless they have some sort of guarantee that it’s okay.” Wilson elaborated, “And the studio was like, ‘What? We’re going to hand off this movie to a guy who’s only directed films for schools and libraries?’ And Gale looked at the movies. ‘Guy’s a filmmaker, don’t worry about it.’”
Gauging the market, Roberts zeroed in on James Jacks, senior VP of production at Universal Pictures, who the agent believed would cotton to Beneath Perfection. Jacks’ first motion picture credit (as executive producer) was the first studio-backed film by the Coen brothers, Raising Arizona (1987). Jacks would steward their next two pictures, Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991), through the studio system. These were days Roberts recalled with nostalgia. “At that time, Universal was kind of a wonderful place. It wasn’t layers and layers. In fact, the studio system wasn’t layers and layers of suits. There were a lot of really passionate people in the studio jobs. They really loved movies. And they fought for movies, and Jim was one of them. Universal was in my opinion very fortunate to have hired him.” Underwood recalled, “I was just so reserved for what they expected as a director, so they were kind of worried about it, because I’d never made a film before. I’d been doing children’s television.” After a meeting with the studio brass that had not gone very well, Jacks pulled the rookie director into another office for a huddle. “It was very funny. He said: ‘Just jump around, and jump up the coffee table!’ or whatever, ‘and they’ll respond to that.’ … So, through Jim Jacks’ coaching I came in, jumped around and they greenlit the movie.” Universal agreed to acquire and produce Beneath Perfection as a negative pickup, purchasing the film from Pacific Western upon completion at a production budget just shy of $12 million. (By comparison, Gale Ann Hurd’s epic production The Abyss had a price tag of $43–47 million, while a knockoff deep sea thriller titled Leviathan also released in 1989 had cost between $22–25 million to produce.) With Brent Maddock & S.S. Wilson credited as writers/ producers and Ron Underwood as director, Hurd assumed the role of executive producer and assembled a crew. Ginny Nugent, who’d gotten her start as assistant to Roger Corman as Hurd had and worked for her as an associate producer on Bad Dreams (1988), was hired as line producer. Director of photography Alexander Gruszynski had lit Bad Dreams. Creature effects designers Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. had met Hurd while they were all getting their start with Corman on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). After they joined Stan Winston Studios, Gillis and Woodruff worked with Hurd on The Terminator and Aliens.
With a movie he’d co-written and directed titled Pumpkinhead (1988), Stan Winston had signaled to his workshop that they’d start working on pictures Winston was planning to direct. Feeling fenced in, Gillis and Woodruff launched their own company, Amalgamated Dynamics Inc., in 1988. They were waiting on pins and needles for their first job when Hurd phoned to tell them she was sending them a script they were going to love. Gillis dove in. “Well, the design of the graboids was very loosely described in the script. I believe it was a really nice, kind of loaded little sentence. It said, ‘The worm’s head opens up like a grotesque flower.’ And we thought, ‘That’s evocative, right?’ It doesn’t take a lot of words. That’s really all the description was. There was a conversation, ‘What are they? Are they prehistoric? Are they alien?’ So we liked the ambiguity and the script never answered the question as to what their origins were. So that gave us a lot of freedom to start designing, and then, Steve Wilson, Brent Maddock, Ron Underwood and Nancy Roberts were great partners in the design process because we just saw things automatically in the same way. We wanted it to be biologically feasible and reality-based. So Tom and I would bring these books to meetings and spread these nature books out and everybody would page through them. We would go through and put Post-It marks on images of creatures we like, and then it became sort of this blender of, well, here’s what everybody likes, here’s textures that people are responding to and things they don’t respond to, and what the director doesn’t respond to is every bit as valuable as what the director responds to.” Instead of being limited creatively working with first-timers, Gillis and Woodruff were inspired.
It fell to AMI to design, build and operate graboids that would perform not only in a studio, but desert locations. “One of the first ideas Tom and I had, we were kind of smitten by the heads of snapping turtles, which did survive into the look of the finished graboid, that hooked sort of thing. But something some snapping turtles have that is pretty neat is that they can draw their heads back into this pile of flesh around them as sort of extra protection. So we thought that would be cool, if they ram up and they’re just sort of like, you don’t know what this thing is, it’s just like a giant muscle that comes up and this head extrudes out from inside this flesh. And we did some sketches and Gale said, ‘This is not going to be a movie about giant dicks chasing people through the desert.’ And we were like, ‘Ohhh. I guess it does sort of look like that, doesn’t it?’ So we circumcised the worms, and exposed the head of the worm … Gale was right. She was correct. She said, ‘I showed this drawing to the women in the [office]. There’s no way we’re making a movie like this.’ So we learned our lesson and were grateful to Gale for that observation.” Gillis and Woodruff’s shop built four graboid heads and one thirty-foot body, as well as quarter-scale puppets, which miniature effects artists Robert and Dennis Skotak animated for shots requiring more movement.
To play the heroes Valentine McKee and Earl Bassett—handymen and the unlikely first survivors of an encounter with a graboid—Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward were cast. Ward belonged to a vanishing class of actors who’d served in the military (U.S. Air Force) before they considered performing arts. Ward’s supporting roles in The Right Stuff (1983) and Swing Shift (1984) seemed tailored for his modest swagger, when in reality, his versatility had earned him work. Bacon had broken through as a film leading man in Footloose (1984) and had since signed on for the lead in one commercial disaster after another. Quicksilver (1986) was ignored by critics and audiences, White Water Summer (1987) orphaned by its studio, and She’s Having A Baby (1988) delayed by eight months, opening to awful reviews and scattered attendance. Bacon recalled, “I could tell you, to be brutally honest, I was running out of money, and I was feeling at a real kind of low point careerwise. I suffer from the actor’s curse which is I always think that every single job I do is my last. And after Footloose came out, I had a series of leading roles that just all bombed. Just kind of one after another after another after another. And I felt like my career was really close to ending. And my wife was pregnant with our first child. And my mother had also been diagnosed with cancer. And I was at a sort of terrified point in my life, both in my personal life and careerwise, and I saw the bank account dwindling and was feeling a lot of financial and kind of personal pressure. So when my agent called me up and said that there’s this movie—I don’t know if you’re going to like it. It’s kind of a horror movie but it’s sort of funny. And it’s about giant worms underground. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, my career is in the toilet.’ If this is what it’s come to, this is like the bottom of the barrel.”
Production designer Ivo Cristante, another veteran of Bad Dreams, spent two months building Perfection near the town of Lone Pine, California, a three-hour drive from Los Angeles in Owens Valley, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. One of the sets Cristante constructed was a rock formation in Alabama Hills Recreational Area, where films like High Sierra (1940) and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) had utilized the region’s striking geological features. Filming commenced in April 1989 on what Hurd had assigned a working title of Dead Silence. Working at 3,700 feet above sea level proved to be a challenge. Wilson recalled, “All movies have their difficulties, but choosing to shoot in the desert, in broad daylight, in the dirt, with monsters and machinery that was susceptible to the dirt and forever breaking down was really hard. And then on top of that, the desert did not cooperate, in the sense that we had snow on some days, we had hail on some days, and then later in production we had 105, 110 degree days. And we had people sick from getting heat—not heat stroke, but heat suffering—and we had an enormous dry lake bed nearby us, and periodically, the somewhat toxic dust would boil up off the lakebed and just envelop the set, to the point we couldn’t shoot, and there are pictures of me somewhere wearing a dust mask trying to find my way to a car. And we had the jets from the navy base that I worked at all those years before, which was not too far away, flying over us fairly frequently.”
Wilson added, “This was so long ago that we had one telephone on the set. It was a radio telephone rented from some fellow there in that valley where we were near Lone Pine, California. And that was a difficult thing. And it was there primarily because Kevin Bacon’s wife was pregnant with their first child. And he did not want to be out of touch, because there were literally no cell phones. There was no way for him to know that Kyra [Sedgwick] might have gone into labor. And in fact, that happened in the middle of a shot one day, I remember very well the scene we were shooting. Kevin and Fred were on top of the Pepsi cooler in Walter Chang’s little store, and the runner came running in from the production office and said, ‘Kyra’s going into labor!’ Ron called cut and Kevin ran out the door.”
According to Wilson and a story he heard second-hand, when Tom Pollock received a crew jacket for Beneath Perfection, the studio chairman not only threw it across the room, he vehemently opposed his studio releasing a movie under that title. Universal would settle on a horror appropriate title: Tremors. Maddock & Wilson had left the origin of the graboids up to the viewer’s imagination, writing a scene in which the characters generate their own hypotheses before moving on to more pressing matters. In the event either the studio or test audiences needed an explanation, Maddock & Wilson wrote a scene in which, like many science fiction films before it, a vehicle from outer space is found. Their department heads hated the scene so much, it was never shot. The studio would take longer to satisfy. Underwood recalled, “Universal was going through the purchase by Matsushita at that time. And earthquakes are such a big thing in Japan. It was the studio’s idea to name it Tremors to make it sort of tie into earthquakes. And actually they were very happy with the movie. We tested the movie and the audience just loved it. And the studio was very excited. But they wanted to know where these creatures came from. The studio executives. And they wanted to tie it into earthquakes. So they wanted us to shoot a new opening where an earthquake happens and that unleashes creatures from the core of the earth. We didn’t want to do it, but our agent advised us that the studio was very adamant about it. So we did it to the best of our ability. But in that opening, the setup involved a coyote being killed by the graboid. And we go out and preview the film after that and the audience is just turned off from the very beginning about cruelty to animals.” Reminded that nothing too horrible could happen to a person who encountered a giant worm but that canines were a protected class, Universal dropped the prologue.
Tremors opened January 19, 1990 in 1,472 theaters in the U.S. Critical response leaned negative. The nation’s two most famous film critics didn’t review it for print, but gave a split decision on their syndicated television program Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. Gene Siskel stated, “There are elements in Tremors that are great fun. The idea of making giant worms kind of credible villains is funny enough by itself, and Fred Ward in particular is a solid, slightly goofy presence in the picture, but I can’t really recommend Tremors. Some of it goes an awfully long way.” He concluded that the movie “would make a cute short subject” but didn’t sustain itself. Roger Ebert disagreed, marginally. “I liked it enough to recommend it, just barely but I did like it that much. I thought Kevin Bacon did a good job, and I loved the married couple of Michael Gross and Reba McEntire who are survivalists who have a basement full of hundreds of high-caliber weapons and they empty every gun in their arsenal into one of those worms, including an elephant gun until they finally blow it up, I thought those characters were funny, and I enjoyed the film.” When Siskel challenged his partner on his ruling, Ebert clarified, “I would say it’s a goofy, dumb, fun movie. And for people who are looking for a movie like this, I’ve seen lots worse in this category.” Writing for LA Weekly, Rod Stringer barely took the picture seriously. “Someone at Universal must have fought real hard to get the MPAA to tack the 13 onto Tremors’ PG. Still, Tremors’ engagingly cornball story of a little kid, a teenage kid, and six or a dozen big dumb grown-up kids getting chased around the Nevada desert by giant smelly pumpkin-pulp-oozing worms might be just unthreatening and, in spots, Hee-Hawlarious enough to qualify as some sort of family entertainment hit.”
Opening among films held over from 1989 and continuing to sell tickets—Driving Miss Daisy, Born on the Fourth of July, Tango & Cash, The War of the Roses, Steel Magnolias—Tremors seemed to alienate fans of both horror and comedy. It spent three weekends among the top ten grossing films in the U.S. before dropping out of sight. Wilson placed much of that on Universal, “The marketing department—who did not see it until it was finished—said, ‘Good heavens, what do we do with this? Is it a monster movie or a comedy? We just don’t know to sell this!’” Interviewed for the Indie Film Hustle podcast on July 11, 2023, Wilson added that Kevin Bacon viewed Tremors as a flop and disowned it for many years. The actor conceded, “Funny scary is very, very difficult thing to market. It always has been. There are exceptions to the rule and when those exceptions happen, they are an anomaly. I like it as a genre myself. I love things like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. There’s a lot of cool movies that live within that world, but it’s a lot easier from a marketing standpoint to tell people, this is a scary movie, or this is a funny movie. Because then they know what they’re doing on their weekend. They know they can talk to their date and say, ‘Do you like scary?’ or whatever.”
Bacon continued, “So the marketing materials and the way in for Tremors was a little confusing. The original poster I guess when you look at it now it seems like it was really cool, but I don’t know if it quite told the story about the fact that the movie had a certain tongue-in-cheek kind of attitude to it. I think they leaned a little bit more into, it was just a monster movie. So for whatever reason, people really didn’t go. I remember going to the premiere, I think the premiere was in Westwood, and you can just feel the studio’s not really behind it, that it’s probably not going to get any kind of love from the critics, and the chances are, from my standpoint, ‘Yep, here we go. I’m in another bomb.’ And that’s exactly what it was.” Underwood summarized, “It was so different that that audience didn’t come out on opening weekend. So I got a call Saturday morning. It was released Friday and the executive Jim Jacks, who was a big supporter of the film, called the next morning and said, ‘Ron, we just can’t support the film, unfortunately.’” The film’s fortunes began to change in July 1990 when it debuted on home video (ironically, VHS was rendering the educational film market that Underwood, Maddock & Wilson had worked in obsolete). Tremors was a huge seller on video, so much so that Universal Pictures Home Entertainment—which would begin producing straight-to-video sequels to hit tapes like Midnight Run (1988) and Darkman (1990)—petitioned the writer/ producers for a sequel.
Maddock, Wilson and Roberts, who with Underwood had formed Stampede Entertainment, co-wrote or directed three direct-to-video sequels to Tremors, while another three were produced without them. In 2025, thirty-five years after the release of the original, a clause in U.S. copyright law allowed Maddock & Wilson to file a claim for the rights to their screenplay. While Universal kept theatrical rights to the film, precluding Stampede from licensing Tremors comic books, video games, toys or apparel, Maddock, Wilson & Roberts were given runway to write and produce a new film. Kevin Bacon—who for all the movies he’s made, has yet to appear in a sequel to one—has expressed a willingness to reprise Valentine McKee. In 2022, Fred Ward passed away, but Stampede has promised that a new Tremors would neither be a remake nor feature an all-new cast. Maddock has also admitted a reluctance to make a sequel that, while the fans might enjoy, wouldn’t top Tremors.
The qualities that worked against Tremors building favorable word of mouth when it existed as a pitch, work-in-progress or box office draw that boys were left to sell to girls (“It’s funny! It’s Kevin Bacon! It’s not that scary!”) are the same qualities that launched a franchise and allowed the film to earn its status as a classic. Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), which Fred Ward and Michael Gross returned for, is considered by some the greatest direct-to-video movie ever made. (According to Bacon, when he recommended Tremors to his then eight-year-old son Travis, his boy reported back that he loved Tremors 2, which his old man had zero involvement in.) Without its categorical confusion, the movie would be very easy to forget. The horror keeps the comedy grounded. In the film’s best sequence, a graboid bursts through the wall of Burt and Heather’s basement unaware it’s chosen to attack the couple in their armory. It only works because an earth-moving monster is coming through a wall. Absent a legitimate threat, it’s a sight gag about gun nuts. There’s an argument to be made that the most gut-wrenching moment in the movie occurs when Val and Earl get distracted emptying a septic tank. It’s levity like this, or Chang appraising a dead graboid and asking the handymen how much they want for it, that prevent the movie from curdling into doom. The western motifs serve as a ballast for both the horror and comedy. The backdrop provided by the Sierra Nevada location is worth every penny and gives Tremors a frontier look, bright and open, something few horror movies or comedies cultivate. The film is an outstanding feature film debut for its director. Ron Underwood was immediately offered the job of directing City Slickers (1991) for Castle Rock Entertainment and grabbed it.
In the out-of-the-closet horror thriller version of Tremors which might exist on a floppy disk in Brent Maddock or S.S. Wilson’s garage if it exists at all, the viewer would’ve been attacked with suspense right away. This would’ve tracked with their script’s roots as a creature feature, whether the monster is out in the open like The Blob (1958), or hidden for technical reasons as in Jaws (1975). Tremors lopes out of the gate with character and atmosphere worthy of a quirky comedy titled Beneath Perfection. The lawmen or scientists who are conventionally summoned to deal with monsters in these movies are absent, even though Finn Carter—who either rejected or was passed over for the girl-next-door parts that Julie Warner would start booking in movies like Doc Hollywood (1991)—gamely plays a plucky seismologist from “Mesa State University.” The odd job men of the working title are what set the movie apart, not graboids. The conceit that two grown men who use Rock Paper Scissors to divide job duties and are at best armed with shovels are what’s standing between us and mutant annihilation is the best joke in the movie and represents its sense of humor. Other movies are about monsters running amok. What critics or those who were taking the poster at face value missed is that Tremors is celebrating under-qualified and unglamorous people depending on each other.
Reba McEntire, whose presence in movies and television makes it seem like she was a comic actor first and country/western artist second (her 1986 single ‘Why Not Tonight’ plays over the end credits), is a grounding presence. “Reba” is perfect for a movie about survival of the most connected as opposed to the fittest. In Tremors, characters live off grid and with no civil authority, depend on each other for survival. The graboids of the original film have mass, menace and personality that software-generated monsters in movies like A Quiet Place (2018) are devoid of. Maddock & Wilson devote most of their story to their working class heroes, Val and Earl. Mere handymen, the characters possess neither guns nor diplomas. Blue collar gentlemen, they’re called on to do the shit jobs—literally—of Perfection. The screenwriters cleverly place Val and Earl in a position to tackle the biggest shit job in the history of the town. The obstacles thrown in their way—determining that the graboids are under the ground, that they track their prey by sound, and can work in coordinated attack to bring down heavy equipment—force the pair to develop abilities they didn’t know they had. Name a horror movie with a janitor as its protagonist. Character actors as experienced as anyone in blending into an ensemble, Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward achieve great chemistry, seemingly without effort. It’s not that they’re the exact guys in a desert town of 14. They’re the exact guys for a western horror movie with comedic relief. No shelf in the video store was ever built for it, which is why Tremors outlasted the store.
Video rental category: Horror
Special interest: Doomsday Preppers
The production history in this article is sourced to an article by Blake Harris published in slashfilm on July 24, 2020 and to Tremors: Making Perfection, a series of retrospective interviews with the film’s principals in 2020.