We wouldn’t agree that the graboids of Tremors 1 have a distinct music cue of their own. Certainly not something like the shark of Jaws. In any case, we strove to give each sequel it’s own definitive music.
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Answer to “What has ole Twitch been up to?”
He changes his name and gets shot by Walter White.
[A fan posted both the question and the answer. No need for me to step in.]
Will we ever get any new Tremors content in other media like books, games, whatever — and if you could give us any more, which form of media would you prefer?
As we’ve said many times in this FAQ, we don’t own or control the rights to Tremors and have no say in what Universal does with the franchise. Over the years we have been approached multiple times by people wanting to produce comics, board games and video games, but always have to tell them to contact Universal and “good luck.” Since S. S. Wilson mostly writes novels now, he might be interested in some sort of expansion of the world in book form.
Any of you guys have bad dreams about the creatures like me and Kevin did?
Our bad dreams are about Hollywood rejecting our scripts.
Who/what company made the Tremors puppets?
The creatures for Tremors 1, 2, and 3 were designed, built and operated by the team at Amalgamated Dynamics.
sudioadi.com
The creatures for Tremors 4 were built and operated by KNB EFX.
knbefx.com
Not sure if this is something you can talk about yet, but I thought the 4K restoration of Tremors was phenomenal and I can’t wait to get my hands on the Tremors 2 4K release this weekend. Are there plans to work with Arrow to get Tremors 3 and 4 out on 4K discs as well?
We hope so, but we are never told anything about Universal’s plans for the franchise. It was Arrow who let us know that Tremors 2 was being done.
What ever happened to Night Crew?
This isn’t a Tremors question, but we try to accommodate. Night Crew was a script Brent Maddock and S. S. Wilson wrote. We jokingly called in “Tremors in a building” since it was about the night cleaning crew of a high-rise building finding themselves sealed inside with a creature pursuing them upwward, floor after floor. It got shopped around Hollywood for a few years, but never sold.
Do you know where Doc Jim Wallace was building his home? I know Burt and Heather’s was the most remote location, some 15 miles from Lone Pine. I am trying to locate real locations on Google Earth.
We assume you are looking for the shooting location, not where the house was in movie story terms. You may have some trouble, as that’s the one location that was nowhere near Lone Pine. The set for the house and the car sinking scene was just north of Los Angeles, along Route 14, somewhere just off Soledad Canyon Rd. No longer remember specifics.
Update: I recently learned of a Tremors crew member who kept a ton of original paperwork from the shoot. In that trove was this page detailing how to get to the Jim and Megan location!
Why did it feel like there were more like 8 graboids instead of 4?
Well — that actually hasn’t come up before. But perhaps it’s because of the number of people who get attacked as the movie gets going. Road workers, Old Fred, doctor and his wife. But it was just four — moving fast and — always hungry.
Were the snake things ever intended to be the actual creatures? If so how different would the film have been?
No, the tentacles are just part of the graboids, like tongues, or maybe octopus arms. From a script writing standpoint, we invented them so we could have the surprise that the graboids are actually much larger than everyone thought. Also, the tentacles saved us money during production, as they were easier to work with than the full sized puppets.
Do you know which graboids killed which characters in the first film?
Egad! No! I suppose we can postulate that it was Stumpy who got the road workers and line workers, but we really didn’t track the other three in that sort of detail!
When everyone is stranded on the rocks at the end, what do you think Earl would have said to Burt if Val had not butted in?
Earl is a less hot-headed than Val. He’s mad, but we think he still would have said something like he says later: “They’d have torn your place out from under you in half an hour.” Maybe adding, “Burt, you really don’t understand what we’re up against here.”
What is your opinion on Tremors 5, 6, And 7?
Tremors 5 is flat out awful.
Have not seen T6 or T7.
What made you guys decide to make Tremors a PG-13 rated monster movie with little gore instead of an R rated one with lots of blood and gore?
Well, 1) we’re not fans of blood and gore. 2) we’re family oriented and like to think we make family-oriented films.
I’ve got a graboid in my back garden. It’s really annoying and whenever I try to do anything whatsoever, it goes under the house and starts throwing itself around like a maniac. Any advice on what I can do?
That’s a tough one. Add lots of sound-proofing to your house?
Where did you get the idea for shriekers
We worked backward from a self-imposed rule: There would be no Queen Graboid. At the time Universal asked for Tremors 2, that was already a major cliche in monster movie sequels and we were determined not to go that route. But then we had to answer the question: if no Queen, then what? Somewhere along the line we thought, okay, if not bigger then smaller, and from there went to the idea that there’d be a quickly growing horde and that’s what would make them dangerous.
How old was Fu Yien during the events of Tremors 4?
I no longer have the script (!), which probably specified his age, but about 10 or 11.
What was your next idea involving “The Key” from the end of season 1?
By the end of the season, a lot of things were up in the air. We don’t remember having worked out where we might go further with that idea.
What were the shriekers made of, how did they make them and what materials, what was their size like the head, the body and the legs and finally what happened to the animatronics and the shrieker parts?
How about a full answer from Alec Gillis of Studio ADI, the designers and creators of the shriekers? —
The Shriekers were puppets whose outer skins were foam latex and fiberglass, and innards were cable articulated aluminum mechanisms. They stood about 4′ tall with heads about 2′ long. Most of their mechanisms were eventually salvaged and re-used on other creature builds.
Though most got repurposed, one may still be on display in the Lone Pine Movie Museum.
Finally, check out the awesome behind the scenes videos Studio ADI has done on the shriekers.
Does the TV edited version of TREMORS contain any new footage or alternate takes not in the theatrical version? When Earl asks, “Hey, Melvin! You wanna make a buck?” Melvin has a sarcastic laugh in the TV version instead of flipping Earl off and yelling, “Eat it!” I also thought the TV version included a montage of the townsfolk jumping into the back of the semi trailer in town, before they drive the Caterpillar to Burt & Heather’s. Am I misremembering these details?
Ron Underwood thinks “Yes, and No.” We have not saved a TV version of the movie, so can’t double check. But he’s pretty sure they did use an alternate (non flip-off) take of Melvin for TV. On the other question, we did not shoot footage of the townsfolk jumping into the semi trailer, so TV version could not have had that.
The last time we had seen Burt Gummer was in TREMORS: The Series. Did your original script for TREMORS 5: Gummer Down Under have any references to the events of Burt’s experiences in the tv series? Did it feature any other returning characters?
No, our version of Tremors 5 was a stand-alone story. We all felt that, except possibly for the series going forward, the franchise had about run it’s course, and the idea in T5 was to introduce a younger character who seems like he might carry on Burt’s traditions.
Have other writers and directors in the filmmaking industry expressed or articulated their love of TREMORS to you in interesting or unexpected way?
Well, we’ve gotten lots of positive comments from other industry folk over the years. Can’t say any were out of the ordinary. One fun event was Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino hosting a screening of the film in LA. And of course it’s been gratifying to have studio execs sometimes talk about wanting “the Tremors tone,” meaning the mix of comedy and horror that was pretty fresh when we did it back then.
During the earliest scripted drafts of BENEATH PERFECTION, were there any other sequences that you wrote which you would have liked to have seen filmed, but had to be cut during the scripting phase so the film could come in on its $10-11 million budget?
Yes. When Val is racing to get the bulldozer, we wrote that Melvin’s little shed gets knocked apart. Only the metal roof is left and he ends clinging to it as it is slid around like a surfboard by a graboid underneath. Val arrives and saves him.
I couldn’t help but notice that Tremors 5-7 and the trailer to the Kevin Bacon tv pilot do not use the classic Graboid lifecycle designs. Do you have any idea why the original creature designs from Tremors 1-4 wouldn’t have been used? Are those original creature designs owned by ADI or would Universal using them have required ADI to get compensation?
As we had nothing to do with those films we can’t say why creature designs were changed. Generally, studios lock up all rights to material like that, so it’s unlikely they were unable to re-use the old designs, and more likely they just wanted to change things up.
What was your next idea involving “The Key” from the end of season 1?
Sorry to say that in the chaos toward the end of the season, if we had an idea where we were going with that, it has faded away.