Technically, they can keep producing babies as long as they get an unlimited amount of food. But in reality there is an upper limit. Studies were done by the scientific team which brought the Shriekers to Perfection Valley in the series. They found that it requires tremendous effort to “birth” the baby and this takes quite a toll on the Shrieker’s body. After producing ten to twelve babies, an adult often dies suddenly of apparent heart failure. In the wild a Shrieker would rarely be able to get enough food to reach that state.

A lot of it just has to do with the way they were filmed. In the series the directors tended to use quicker, closer shots of the Shriekers than we did in T-2. Outwardly the series puppets are almost identical to the T-2 puppets, but the ones in the series have more range of motion.

Surprise: because they don’t really exist! It was a fairly complicated thing to shoot. The “baby” is actually a full sized Shrieker in a special cage we built extra big to make the Shrieker look small. (You’ll notice there are no people seen in the same shot with the baby. That would have given away that the cage was huge). We didn’t have the time or money to make real baby Shrieker puppets, so the effects team came up with that clever “cheat.”

No, it’s a muzzle brake, a device that reduces felt recoil (kick) when the gun is fired. Some of the expanding gasses blasting out of the barrel are directed slightly rearward through the holes, sort of little “jets” which pull the gun forward at the same time it is kicking backward against the shooter.

Yes, but the fact is, most of the creatures who have lived on earth are NOT preserved in the fossil record. Only a fraction get fossilized. So we thought it would be fun to propose that at least one higher, more complex animal, with a very unusual life cycle, arose in the Precambrian and was lost to history until Tremors 2. If you’d like an alternate theory, at one time there was on the SciFi Tremors series website a much more detailed and scholarly analysis of where in pre-history Graboids may have arisen (the writer proposed that Kate White was mistaken in her original judgment about the Precambrian origins).

On a side note, one thing that is definite is Graboids and their two metamorphic forms were NOT the result of the compound Mixmaster being released into the Perfection Valley environment (revealed in Tremors, the Series). Graboids predated that event by hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Well – if you think about it, all the Graboids are dead by the time the Shriekers are running around, since Shriekers come out of Graboids. In Tremors 3, El Blanco did sense the Abs, and he even ate the last one!

Actually their beaks are fairly sharp. Ever been bitten by a parrot? However, the real secret is the great strength in their jaws and legs. Once they clamp down, it’s almost impossible to force their jaws open. Repeatedly yanking backward with their powerful legs, they can tear or rip just about anything. That’s how they rip open sheet metal.

It was a cannon shell. Sorry we’re not sure of the exact size now, but it was something like a 90mm round which would be fired from a tank’s cannon. When the Mexican Military said he could take whatever he wanted to help fight the Graboids, Burt slipped the cannon round into the truck, hoping to add it to his weapons and cartridge collection. It was of course destroyed in the Big Blast at the end.

Yes and no. Burt dropped it in front of the tractor in which he took cover from the Shriekers. The whole area was turned into a crater in the big blast. However, Burt, knowing that his rifle is a massive, tough chunk of stainless steel, figured it might have survived. Plotting its approximate trajectory from the blast site, he searched laboriously through the rubble and finally recovered the rifle. Cleaned up and re-barreled, it appeared again in Tremors 3.

It’s great that you fans notice stuff like this. And there IS a reason. When the Mexican government offered Burt whatever he wanted, he loaded up his T-2 truck with all the fun stuff he’s not allowed to have in the U.S., high explosives – TNT, C-4, and the like. When REAL H.E. goes off, it makes very little flame and creates a devastating shock wave. That’s the effect S.S. Wilson wanted and that’s what Peter Chesney created for the end of Tremors 2, using real high explosives, by the way. If you look at the grass in the foreground of the building when it blows up, you can see the shock wave.

Now, in Tremors 3, we wanted the look of Burt’s ammo, reloading powder, black powder, and gasoline blowing up. All those things “explode” more slowly, with a lot more flame, than H.E., so Larry Fioritto and his team created that kind of explosion, with LOTS of gasoline, black powder, etc.

It’s a fabulous piece written for the movie by composer Jay Fergusen. We wanted something which was the opposite of the usual monster movie music, something lyrical and soft, with a Mexican flavor – before the mayhem started.

They are “born” (ejected from the mouth of an adult) nearly one fourth full size, and grow very rapidly. Nancy Roberts currently owns the baby Shrieker made by Amalgamated Dynamics for the “birth” scene.

Can’t tell you exactly what the cost was, since it is buried in the lump-sum creature effects budget for the film, which also included Graboids, human body parts and other things. The articulated Shreikers had metal cable-controlled skeletons and bodies of foam rubber. The skins are other kinds of molded rubbers and the beaks are fiberglass.

At the time we came up with the idea for Tremors 2, it seemed better to set it in a new location. Way back then it seemed too co-incidental for Graboids to show up in Perfection again. It was Michael Gross who encouraged us to go back to Perfection for Tremors 3, because he missed the emotional connection of people fighting for their home. He said while we were making Tremors 2, “What are we fighting for, an oil refinery?”

It went like this: Universal had asked us to come up with an idea for Tremors 2. We knew that most fans expected to meet a Queen Graboid of some kind, since that’s the way most monster sequels tend to go. So we wanted to come up with something else. We were stuck for quite a while. Then one day we said “What if the Graboids got smaller instead of bigger?” From there we realized that, if they were smaller, there’d have to be more of them to be dangerous. From there we realized that we wouldn’t want to have to watch Graboids lay eggs, watch the eggs hatch, and wait for the Shriekers to grow to dangerous size. Boring! So that’s what led us to sudden hermaphroditic metamorphosis. See?

Why don’t warm blooded Shriekers attack each other? All animals are equipped to easily recognize others of their kind. Honeybees can identify bees not from their own hive, for example. It is not known for sure how Shriekers avoid attacking one another, but it is likely they they can either the shape of the heat image or possibly the exact body temperature (which is much higher than that of most other animals).

Can Shrikers “see” with their heat-seeker closed? Yes, Shriekers can sense some heat through the bony shield on the heat seeker organ. They open it to get a more accurate iamge and “sight in” on their prey. They close it before they attack, because it is delicate and vulnerable to injury.

Well, life sometimes refuses to imitate art.  Reba McIntire is a very busy country star and hasn’t wanted to reprise her stand-out role.

They got married and are running the theme park established by Earl and Grady with the money they made Graboid hunting.

Why did we choose the L.A.R. Grizzley over, say, the Barrett semi-auto?  It had more to do with timing than anything.  Tremors 2’s pre-production was very rushed.  The prop people brought me a picture of the L.A.R. target gun and I loved it.  Fifty caliber target shooting was relatively new then, and frankly we didn’t know much about it.  At the time we didn’t happen to see any other guns built for the sport.  We’ve since checked out a number of special guns for Burt and would love to use the Barrett.  But it’s LOT heavier than the L.A.R. so in some ways would be impractical for Burt to lug around.

We’ve gotten some complaints that Tremors 2 was less gory than Tremors 1. And when SS Wilson was visiting some grade school kids last year, he was approached by an eleven year old who had only one piece of advice for Tremors 3: “Make it gross!”

Well, we’re in kind of a fix, folks. The people paying the bills are Universal FAMILY Home entertainment. Not only that, parents e-mail all the time telling us how great it is that we make monster movies that aren’t so gory. And we have little kids ourselves we’d like to be able to watch the movies (well, they were little when we started the series!)

So the Tremors movies will have to be a little less gross than some of you might like. We’re trying to please all of our fans. But keep an eye out for other Stampede movies. We’re trying to set up a feature a couple in the next few months that will be really scary, and more gross. Wish us luck.

When Brent and I were working on the script, we needed a way to identify the new monsters for the people reading the script. We didn’t want to keep calling them “new little monsters” all the time. We came up with the name Shrieker because that’s what they do: they shriek (scream real loud) whenever they see food with their heat sensors.

A name is useful on the set, too, even if it isn’t used in the movie. Often times the crew will invent names for things so they all know what they’re talking about when setting up a shot. You’ll hear them say things like, “We’ll have a Shrieker over there, and Graboid back there, and the hero Shrieker will be in foreground. When filmmakers refer to something as the “hero”, they mean the one that is used for close-ups. We had several Shrieker puppets, but two of them could perform more actions than the others, so they were the “heroes.”

There are only two cut scenes. One was a short scene in which Earl said good-bye to Kathy before the first Graboid hunt. The other was the last part of the night scene in which Burt’s truck is attacked by Shriekers. We tried to a do a joke in which you see Shriekers all over the truck, then Burt blasts every one with his semi-auto pistols. Unfortunately we just didn’t have the budget to do any more computer animated shriekers and tried to do the scene with our floppy dummy shriekers. They looked like rubber dummies — which they were. I tried editing the scene a dozen different ways to keep it in, but eventually my writing partner, editor, and producer ganged up on me and made me take it out. Even worse, I had stood in for Michael Gross in the master shot, firing the pistols inside the truck, so I was cutting myself out of the movie! No Alfred Hitchcock moment!  That outtake did not make it onto the DVD and I’m afraid it would be hard to dig it out of Universal’s storage areas now.

Fans continue to ask about the “Miss October” seen and mentioned in Tremors 2.  Here’s the scoop.

We had a number of arguments about what year Playmate we should pick.  We decided on 1974 because it made the Kathy character about the right age for Earl (about 40).

Then we cast Helen Shaver as Kathy.  But it turns out that the real Miss October, 1974, Ester Cordet, doesn’t look remotely like Helen.  So, we searched through Playboy files and selected the Playmate actually seen in the film, Miss September, 1970, Debbie Ellison.

It took a long time to get the sequel made because the first movie, while successful, was not a HUGE box-office hit. It’s easy to get a studio to greenlight a sequel for a HUGE hit (like BATMAN). But we had to work a long time to convince the studio that the fans really wanted a Tremors II. Ultimately, it was Universal’s video division that really supported the idea, because the first Tremors had been HUGE in video and on TV.