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Was Tremors written as a horror movie or a comedy?

Well, great question, and one that stumped the studio marketing people, too.  Nobody knew quite what it was.  Here’s what happened: S. S. Wilson had a love of old horror movies.  His partner Brent Maddock is mostly a comedy guy.  So it started as sort of homage to 50s horror,  but the first drafts kept getting more and more funny as we came up with jokes.  Later in the process (we did seven drafts), we felt that the comedy was ruining the scary moments, so we began taking jokes out until we ended up with only comedic moments that arose naturally out of the situation.  So it became a scary movie with genuinely funny moments.  Ultimately that hurt it when it went to theaters, because the ad campaign made it seem more like a goofy comedy.  But people who don’t like “monster” movies also avoided it.  It was only later that it found a big audience — and years later we started to hear studio people say they want something with “the Tremors tone.”

After Grady puts the noise-making chain in Earl’s truck, Pedro walks up to him as if he’s curious about what’s going on. Grady responds by saying “Moonstrose” (as it’s spelled in the DVD subtitles). What does that mean?

It is simply Grady mispronouncing the Spanish word for monster: “monstruo,” which Pedro said to him when he and Earl first arrived.  He’s just means that the chain is for attracting the “moonstrose.”  Pedro laughs politely at the attempt, even though in our minds he may not really understand Grady’s broken Spanish.

Did Burt take the assault rifle Earl and Grady originally had as their backup weapon before he gave them elephant guns?

We love the things you folks notice!  It’s a good question!  Actually, Earl points the rifle out the window when they hear Burt’s truck coming, and then leaves it in the office.  But it’s not there later when they could have used it against shriekers.  The truth is, I think we forgot about it either when we were writing or during production.  But we love the suggestion that Burt took it.  Perfect!  That’s exactly what Burt would do.  He’d add it to the arsenal in his truck.

How could Burt have been sure he took out all the shriekers, since there were 3 or so left after Earl and Grady killed the first one [at the radio tower] plus the one that ate Julio and the one on top of the car?

If we are correct about which scene you are referring to (when Burt returns after being ambushed by shriekers), it is Grady, not Burt, who says “sounds like you got’em all.”  Grady assumes this because Burt estimates he killed “a couple of dozen,” and that number roughly matches the number Kate earlier calculated have probably hatched.

Is their another graboid form you were going to create, perhaps as a super weapon made by the military? Would the next and final form have had arms with sharp claws, but still be able to fly and climb?

Uh, wow — I think you’re a little ahead of us on this one.  Certainly we did hint that the government was doing research on graboid life forms, but we hadn’t gotten to the point of giving them arms!  Honestly we probably wouldn’t have gone in that direction, since we loved getting together with the creature designers and trying to brainstorming the wildest stuff we all could.

How did the idea of the life cycle evolve? Back in ‘Tremors 2’ (before ‘3’) the pitch was that the shriekers would grow into graboids (the design clues being the translucent beak, the little spikes, and the tongues that look like three ‘fused’ tentacles about to separate). In ‘Tremors 3’ El Blanco can’t produce shriekers and they compare it to a sterile albino goat, and yet it’s the a**blasters laying eggs. So what’s the structure of the life cycle? Is the a**blaster an ‘adult’ stage, or is there no definite adult stage?

Truthfully, the life cycle evolved with Universal offering us more movies.  While we implied that a shrieker might grow into a graboid, we left it open, giving ourselves the freedom to come up with a new form if we got the green light for Tremors 3.  At that time Universal insisted that Tremors 3 would be the last movie, and that there was absolutely no financial incentive to do more.  So we decided to close the life cycle loop and have ABs be the egg layers.  So, yes, ABs are technically the “adult” stage, even though graboids seem more “adult.”  Ironically, very soon thereafter Universal asked us for Tremors 4 and SyFy asked us for the series.  Had we known all THAT was going to happen, maybe we could have invented a 4th form of graboid!

In a recent answer to another question, you mentioned Sara Botsford, from Tremors 4, read for a role in the tv series. What character did she audition for in the series? Also what was her reaction when you decided to cast her in your 4th film?

I’m afraid we no longer know what part Sara read for in the series.  If it was early, before production, she might have come in for the role of Nancy.  After that, were were reading dozens of actors every week for every guest part,  so it was pretty crazy.  I also don’t know what Sara’s reaction was when her agent told her she’d been cast in T-4, but I know we were really happy to get her!

If graboids have really been around since at least the late 1800s, how can native animals ever survive? A full-sized graboid, sneaking underground, can take down a horse or cow! Swarming, mass-producing shriekers and flying ABs hunt above ground with sophisticated heat-seeking ability. How can any animal escape this deadly group? Have wild boars, cows, goats, sheep, birds, rabbits, rats, cougars, etc somehow adapted or evolved over the years to survive graboid onslaughts?

(Note: We get questions from all over the world, and sometimes the writers use English translation programs that don’t work so well.  In this case, I’ve attempted to re-translate the question from the original much longer version, because I loved that it offered yet ANOTHER fresh point-of-view from a fan.)

Our answer: as indicated in Tremors 2, graboids have actually been around much longer, since pre-history.  However, other animals have NOT adapted significantly to the various graboid stages.  The animals just get eaten, and eaten in large numbers.   That said, Graboids are quite rare.  Yes, they are deadly and voracious, as are the shriekers and ABs that follow, but their whole life cycle plays out in a fairly limited time frame over a fairly limited area, so while the local animal population gets decimated in the short term, graboids do not have the potential of causing any sort of widespread extinction.  Nature always strikes a balance.

I wanted to let you know that I have always appreciated and loved Tremors 1-4. I did not like part 5 and am currently watching 6, but I don’t know if I can finish it. I dislike the shaky/zoomy camera work, and they ruined the look of the creatures. They have Burt Gummer, but are missing the heart, soul, charm and likeable characters. You are all really missed, I hope you will be able to make it right some day. Until then, guess I’ll rewatch the old movies :) Thank you all for creating them, I’ll always love them! Kind regards.

Okay, I admit it, this is not really a question, but with the arrival of the “new” Tremors movies, we’ve been getting a LOT of comments like this, so I thought I post this one, all the way from the Netherlands!

Many thanks to our world-wide fans.

I am a huge fan of the Tremors franchise and loved everything about the original 4 movies. The practical effects were amazing back in those good ole days and the worms themselves had that sort of realistic vigor to them. Like, they had that weight to them when they emerged half way out of the ground, they would hunch over. The newer media of Tremors seems to have completely abandoned the original material and creature design, which seriously irks me. At least 5 and 6 were courteous enough to explain that the new Graboids are an Africanized variant, but Kevin Bacon’s series doesn’t seem to have that solid of an alibi as to why the creature looks so different. I mean, removing the beak on the Graboid is like removing the elongated portion of the Xenomorph’s head. Do you know why they didn’t keep the original design?

Sorry, we have no idea, since we were denied any opportunity to work on or consult with the creators of those versions of Tremors.

Did you guys ever figure out how many Graboids there were at the chiapas oil refinery? Was there a reason so many spawned in that location?

No, as much as possible we let Tremors fans do the math for us.  It’s exhausting!   I will admit, though, that in editing Tremors 2, we inadvertently implied that there were more graboids than we originally intended, because we fell in love with the idea of Burt blowing so many up with his remote control cars.   Our editor kept reusing explosions!  But since we also love answering graboid biology questions, here’s the totally scientific explanation:  The large number is easily explained by the rhythms of nature.  When conditions are right, almost any animal species can suddenly become numerous.  So,  many decades or even a century before the story in Tremors 2,  graboids spawned in the area (no people around back then) and a large number of their shriekers survived, producing a large number of ABs that also survived, producing a great many eggs.  When those eggs hatched in the time of Tremors 2, the saga of the oilfield began!

Was there any chance that Burt and company in the modern day (either in future episodes of Tremors: The Series had it not been cancelled, or in your version of Tremors 5) would have ever encountered the baby Graboids that Hiram and company dealt with in 1889 in Tremors 4?

This is a great idea.  I wish we’d have had time and opportunity to think of it!  But, yes, hopefully it would have occurred to us, if the series had continued, to have the townsfolk of Perfection meet baby Graboids!  It would have been a great surprise for Burt, especially.

Does Stampede own the likeness rights to the original graboids? I am trying to figure out, realistically, why the “African” graboids were so much different from the AMAZING ones you guys created.

Thanks for the kind words.  No, when you sell a screenplay you sell all rights to everything in it forever.  We have no say whatever in what Universal does with Tremors.  We don’t know why the creators of Tremors 5 chose to throw away the fantastic original design by Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis of Amalgamated Dynamics.

Burt drives a 2001 Ford Explorer Sport Trac. Later, he uses his truck to distract El Blanco and it crashes upside-down. But in that scene it is a completely different truck. The crashed truck appears to be the same truck that Miguel was driving in the beginning of the movie. Is this a coincidence or was it just to do with budgeting?

The things you people notice!!!  We checked, and we admit the crashed truck is different from Burt’s “real” truck.  Certainly its wheels and rims are totally different.  That said, none of us can remember why!  Yes, probably it was a budget issue, it being perhaps the closest wrecked truck the transportation team could find with limited money and time.  We now assume that none of us noticed how different it was, or possibly that transpo asked if it was close enough and we said yes.   Director Brent Maddock adds that he does not remember being asked about it at the time, and certainly didn’t realize it when we shot.

I will say, at least, that the wrecked truck is black and clearly is not Miguel’s green Ford 150!

When Mindy and Nancy battle the AB in the store, Mindy heats up a ham in the microwave to distract the monster. But the ham could not have been in there for more than 2 seconds before she takes it out, acting as if it’s hot. How is that remotely enough time to heat a ham?`

Well… dang it, this is a valid question.  In the script we tried to write it so that you didn’t know what Mindy was doing for a few minutes; then you find out what she’s done.  But sometimes you get into the editing room and realize don’t have the footage you need to make the idea work.  We loved the idea of Mindy being smart and using the microwave, and didn’t want to cut it.  But there was no way to make it work realistically.  We couldn’t have the AB just stand there doing nothing for five minutes.  And we hadn’t shot any other action to allow for the time really needed.  So we had to go with what we had and hope no one would ask this question!!

Now, on big expensive movies you can go back and re-shoot scenes, or shoot new scenes to solve problems.  But on our low budget, that was never an option.  Most of the time our sets were torn down just days, or even hours, after we left a location.  If we didn’t catch mistakes while we were shooting, we had to do the best we could in the editing room.

All excuses aside, I timed it, and the ham is in the microwave for almost FIVE whole seconds!  So there!

In Tremors 3 how does the AB see Nancy and Mindy up on the roof when they are hidden by the box? Were they just up there so long their body heat heated the box?

For this one I had to go back to the script to see what we intended.  In the script it says the AB lands on the roof behind them, they look out of their box,  see it, and run.  But I re-watched the scene and the AB does seem to fly down as though it knows right where they are.  So, I checked with director Brent Maddock, and he replied with just one word to the second part of the question (was the box heated over time by their bodies):

YES!!!!

In all honesty, we don’t remember why we shot it the way we did, except that it probably seemed more dramatic than, “they look out and see the AB.”  My hope is we were thinking it was sort of an accident that the AB hit the box.

What is with the creature design on the box art for Tremors 2? They look like psuedo graboid creatures. Were these an initial but unused concept?

No, this design is not something ever created or considered by us or the creature effects team. Even on the first movie we did not control what the marketing department did for poster artwork.  They agreed not to show a full-sized Graboid (since we argued that was a big surprise in the movie) and so came up with the infamous “Jaws tentacle.”  For Tremors 2,  when it would have been okay to show a regular Graboid, for some reason they decided to create the extra-jaws-super-toothy Graboids, presumably to make the artwork similar to the original poster.

Any chance a deal could be worked out with home video distributors, like Scream Factory to do New home video releases of the Tremors movies with some new bonus features like commentaries for Tremors 1,2,3 or previously unseen footage that is mentioned in the book Seeking Perfection?

As we’ve said many times in answering these FAQs, we are impressed at the great ideas that come in from Tremors fans.  But, as long-time FAQ readers know, for this idea to happen, someone would have to convince Universal Studios to do it.  We don’t have any control over what they do or don’t do.

I’ve been a huge fan of the series since catching Tremors on tv in the early 90’s. I eagerly awaited the release of Tremors 2: Aftershocks in 1996 and thought it was great. Would you consider posting the full original script for Tremors 2 on the website for fans to read (the original draft with Val, Earl, Heather and Burt)?

Sadly, that’s a legal issue.  Universal Studios technically owns the script, so we can’t just put it up online without their permission.  We were surprised to discover we do still have it lying around, though.

Any Intel you can shed on tremors 6? Is it a series or a movie? Because you said in above comments Universal was already working on tremors 6 without you, but also stated they will be starting a new series with Kevin Bacon. Is Valentine the only original character it will have in it, or will it also have characters from any of the other movies/series?

As we keep having to say, Universal Studios has decided they don’t want us working on Tremors at all as of Tremors 5.  They prefer to have new people make the movies now.  So we don’t even know as much as the fans about what’s coming up.  Likewise, our representatives contacted the company making the series with Kevin Bacon to offer our services as collaborators, but they refused to meet with us.  They did not say why.

April, 2018, we have seen news reports that Kevin Bacon announced that his series was cancelled and will not be made.  But we have no other information.