No, we saw Burt and Heather as deliberately childless, given their grim view of the world’s future.  I admit we never thought of a child grown up before their survivalist leanings took them to Perfection.  It could lead to the complete reversal of Michael Gross and Michael J. Fox on Family Ties!

We’ve always tried to treat the Graboids as real animals.  So as such, they are actually quite rare and limited in habitat.  So, contrary to over-running the world, they are more likely to go extinct.  Even a major Shrieker outbreak is not going to be a global disaster, for when Shriekers got into an urban setting, or met up with the National Guard (or Burt), they wouldn’t last long.

I like to think they’ve settled into a American small town routine.  El Blanco patrols peacefully.  There’s a steady, but not overwhelming stream of tourists to whom Jodi and Jack cater.  Mindy stops in a few times a year to see her Mom.  Burt still teaches survival skills and worries about the fate of the world.  And even though a movie wasn’t made about it, he did have a hell of an adventure in Australia.

Yes and no.  We own them in the sense that nobody has paid us for them, but we can’t use them or sell them to anyone else because they are based on characters/material owned by Universal

I don’t know the full legal answer to this.  Copyrights can be renewed by the original owners up to some maximum number of years.  I imagine all studios cling to them as long as inhumanly possible.  When you work in Hollywood, you have to assume you will never live long enough to regain control of your movies, since they will lapse into the public domain first.

The market in the series is a different shape (yes, I think closer to square), and the entrance is in a different place from the movies’ store.  They insisted we change the lay-out for the series to give directors more options for shooting people coming in and out week after week.

No. Graboids are not aquatic. They are adapted to dry, loose soil.

This is really sort of an Alien vs Predator question.  And we’re filmmakers, not paleontologists.  But how’s this?  If Tyrannosaurus was a fierce predator (as some think), he’d win. If he was a lazy scavenger (as others think), he’d lose.  It’d be an interesting battle, though, since the Graboid could duck under ground when it needed to; and maybe could chomp the T-Rex’s leg and trip him.

The specific vibration of a Graboid’s movement through the earth is very distinctive and is easily recognized by other Graboids.  Even though blind, they can readily tell friend from foe, or friend from prey.

Unfortunately, Tremors 1, 2, 3 and 4 were shot mostly on private land in Southern California. There is no access to the general public for most of the locations.  A small exception is the area of large boulders seen in Tremors 1.  If you drive the paved and dirt roads west of Lone Pine, CA, you will be in the general area where we shot the end of the movie.  If you’re diligent, you’ll discover the narrow spot where the road workers were killed.  Someone at the Lone Pine movie museum may be able to help you find that one.

I’m pretty sure the boulder where Val, Earl and Rhonda spent the night is a real one.  But it’d be pretty difficult to figure out now, all these years later, which one it was.  All I can say is it is probably near one of the dirt roads that go through the area.  Maybe if you drove around with a frame-grab from the movie, and a really good eye for shapes…?

The rocks on which they did their pole vaulting were fake (built by our production designer’s team) and are no longer there).

If you drive the dirt roads east of Lone Pine, you will be in the general area where Val and Earl fell off their horses and where the Graboid crashed into the concrete drainage ditch wall. Nothing remains of the sets, and we have no records of the exact locations, so even we probably couldn’t these exact spots today.

Very science-oriented question!  Given Graboids’ size, it is almost certain they can’t get all the liquid they need from prey alone.  Prevailing theory is that they must obtain water below ground by burrowing down to the water table, perhaps excavating a cavity, and sucking up that water that collects in it.

It does not appear so.  The metamorphoses seen so far don’t seem to be in response to the availability of different prey.  Rather they seem to be normal life-cycle events triggered by unknown circumstances.  However, given that the species is extremely ancient, it is certainly logical to assume each of the various forms serve some valuable purpose toward sustaining the species as a whole.  For example, Rhonda LeBeck has proposed that, since ABs are able to fly, their purpose may be to carry eggs long distances in search of new, fertile hunting grounds for the Graboids which will hatch from their eggs.

Any animal learns to sort out the data it can sense from the “noise” of the environment.  For clarity in the movies, we show the heat signature of a human as red against a non-red background.  But what’s really happening is the Shrieker or AB is seeing the difference between the two temperatures.  The creature is actually seeing infrared coming from both sources, but because the human is usually warmer than the desert background, the shape stands out.  It would work on a 105 degree desert day, too, because the human would be cooler (giving off less heat) than the background and would still stand out.  The only time the creature might have trouble would be on a day when it was exactly 96 degrees and humans were neither hotter nor cooler that the surrounding objects.

A Graboid’s cylindrical shape has great strength to resist pressure (like a submarine does).  Also, moving deep into earth is not quite the same as moving deep into  water.  Various things can mitigate the amount of force the dirt applies.  Under the right soil conditions, a Graboid could theoretically go down several hundred feet.  The real limit to a Graboid’s ability to “dive” is that, like a sea mammal, it has to surface every so often to breathe.  It doesn’t have to actually break the surface because it can slowly pull air through a few inches of sand).  We don’t know how long one can hold its breath.

No, a Graboid can go faster than a human can run, but not much. They max out around 15-20 mph in good loose soil. A Graboid cannot not catch a car, dirtbike, or galloping horse.

We know what you mean.  Looks weird to us, too, sometimes.  But there’s no cheating on set.  We used the same puppet(s) in all cases.  It’s an illusion due to the fact that when closed, a Graboid’s 4-part beak is actually fairly small.   But because it can open super wide, somehow the whole head looks bigger when upright and swallowing a person.

Short answers:  We don’t know.  We don’t know.  No.  No.  They’d ignore it.  And it still wouldn’t help.  However, we are deeply touched that several fans have, in various forms, proposed fan-financed Tremors movies.  The harsh Hollywood reality is that studios almost never sell the rights to any material they own, even if they never do anything with it.

When you sell a screenplay (as we sold the original Tremors) you almost always have to sell all the rights with it in order to get a studio to buy it.  Once that has been done, they own all the rights to anything ever done with it ever again, sequels, remakes, spin-off, the whole shootin’ match.

I’m not sure it was exactly square in the series, but, yes, the shape of the market was somewhat different.  Also, the front door is in a different place.  So to make a model, you kind of have to pick one or the other and go with that.

1.  We never knew about that series (we were hard at work on Tremors 1).
2. Very cool idea.
3. See the several other places in the FAQ where we point out that fans are more creative the studio people.
4. Same old same old: probably won’t happen.

Perfection is North West of Las Vegas, toward Carson City, but it’s not very near either one. Present day Perfection is nearest the town of Bixby (not a real place).  In Tremors 4, we mentioned Carson City as the closest large town (but still a long ride), since we felt Bixby wouldn’t have existed yet.

No.  Each time an opportunity came up, we’d talk to Michael about it.  We’d always try to add new dimensions to Burt’s character, so that Michael would have new subtleties to work on.  It also helped that the movies are true continuations, so that Burt’s character always changed based on what happened in earlier films.  Still, truth be told, toward the end Michael was getting a little tired of Burt.  He once joked (we’re paraphrasing a bit from memory), “I’m very flattered that people keeping asking to see more of Burt, but let’s not keep doing this until they stop asking.”  However, the opportunity to play Burt’s grandfather in Tremors 4 was exciting to him, since Hiram was really an entirely new character.  He and SS Wilson had great fun discussing how Michael would bring Hiram to life; and great fun shooting Hiram’s scenes.

A number of design changes were made in the market to accommodate series style filming. Most notably, the front door was moved from the end of the building to the center. Space was also added in back to allow for Jodi’s living quarters. I don’t have any of the series store plans, so I can’t say for sure if these changes also made it more square.

Hmm. Well, they are there. The design of the Graboids did not change. In fact we thought the spikes on the mini-Graboids in T-4 were rather prominent. It may be that in Tremors 1 we made a point of shooting a close up of them. Also, in T-1, Val dug up the whole length of one, so we saw more of its body that we normally do.

Great question. Absolutely yes. Graboids are unable to hunt during rain storms. Wish we’d have thought of it! It would have been a cool lucky escape for someone being tracked by a Graboid. BTW, scientists recently learned that rain is one of the loudest sounds underwater in the ocean.