TREMORS
IN 1989, KEVIN BACON, THE GUYS BEHIND SHORT CIRCUIT AND AN UNKNOWN DIRECTOR HEADED INTO THE CALIFORNIAN DESERT AND CAME BACK WITH AN UNEXPECTED CULT HIT.
Graboids ahoy! Thirty years on, Kevin Bacon tells us all about his underground cult hit.
THREE DECADES ON, WE EXCAVATE TREMORS
ON THE CORNER OF 86TH AND BROADWAY, KEVIN BACON FELL TO HIS KNEES AND SCREAMED.
It was early 1989, and he was out walking with his pregnant wife Kyra Sedgwick, discussing a movie he’d just agreed to do. Or rather, had to do. Recently married, with a kid on the way and low on funds, the 30-year-old New Yorker hadn’t had a hit since
Footloose five years earlier. His feelings about what he’d just signed up for were mixed. It was not the kind of movie he ever imagined doing. “I took myself very seriously,” he tells Empire. “I wanted Oscar-worthy work. But I was feeling a lot of pressure.”
Suddenly, all that pressure forced him down to the sidewalk. He looked at Sedgwick and wailed. “I can’t believe I’m doing a movie about underground worms!”
That movie was then titled ‘Beneath Perfection’: a quirky, low-budget creature feature that would be released in 1990 as
Tremors and become a Vhs-fuelled cult hit, spawning six small-screen sequels — with the latest (Shrieker Island) released only this year — and a TV series. Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino and James Gunn (whose Slither is a virtual Tremors tribute) are fans.
Tremors’ popularity ultimately belied Bacon’s anxieties. In the three decades since his Manhattan meltdown, there has been no stopping those earth-churning, people-gulping “underground worms” — or ‘Graboids’. In fact, their endurance has far exceeded the expectations of any of their creators, for whom the movie was tough to sell, challenging to make, and appeared, at first, to be a failure.
TREMORS’ WHALE-SIZED, TENTACLETONGUED behemoths first rumbled into life in the Mojave Desert during the late ’70s, where young filmmaker S.S. Wilson had taken a job editing footage of ballistics tests at the Naval Air Weapons Station. Wilson had grown up thrilling to Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion fantasies and the B-movie monsters of the ’50s, such as the giant mutant ants of Them!, which had terrorised a similarly arid terrain.
On weekends he would hike around this vast base, whose ranges had been sealed off from the public since World War II. During one excursion, he was resting atop a massive boulder when a thought struck: “What if there’s a creature under the sand and I can’t get off this rock?” He added a title: ‘Land Sharks’. And promptly did nothing with it for years.
By the late ’80s Wilson was something of a big deal. With USC college buddies Brent Maddock (with whom he co-wrote) and Ron Underwood (who directed), he’d gone from making educational films, with such thrilling titles as Dictionary: The Adventure Of Words, Library Report and Lice Are Not Nice, to striking gold with 1986’s Short Circuit, the tale of a malfunctioning robot who comes alive.
The last ended up too big for an unknown like Underwood to direct, so he dropped out, with John Badham taking the helm. It was
a $100-million hit, but Wilson and Maddock weren’t entirely satisfied with how it had turned out, frustrated at their lack of control over their material. They resolved to create something they could produce as well as write, and finally give Underwood his feature breakthrough. Their agent, Nancy Roberts, asked if they had any old ideas on file. Wilson suggested ‘Land Sharks’. “Oh, that’s pretty cool,” Roberts said.
Set in a dead-end but friendly small Nevada town named Perfection, the script (retitled ‘Beneath Perfection’, thanks to Saturday Night Live’s Jaws-riffing ‘Land Shark’ sketch) counterintuitively bathed its monster action in the broad desert sunlight. It also baked in a strong dose of character-driven humour, largely provided by unlikely-hero handymen Val and Earl; the kind of guys, Ron Underwood notes, “who normally would be eaten in the first scene”. Wilson was adamant they avoid all the monster-movie clichés. So there’s no ‘scientist guy who knows everything’, no “sheriff who takes charge”, and no explanation for the Graboids’ origin. “The people being attacked by these creatures would have no idea where they came from,” he points out.
Only, nobody got it. “We went into these offices to pitch the story and people just gave us blank stares,” Wilson says. “It was just too weird.” Thankfully, Roberts brought Gale Anne Hurd into the fold: alumna of the Roger Corman school of schlock, and producer of The Terminator and Aliens, directed by her then-husband James Cameron. Hurd loved the concept and found the project a home at Universal, where studio chairman Tom Pollock was happy to greenlight ‘Beneath Perfection’. On one condition: they find a star.
THE MEETING WITH JOHN CUSACK didn’t go well. Underwood had thought of him for the part of Val, but the Say Anything... star didn’t bite. “He said, ‘I just finished a movie with a first-time director and I don’t want to do that again right now’,” Underwood recalls. (That director was Cameron Crowe, so go figure.)
The meeting with Kevin Bacon went better. For all his ambivalence, Bacon dug the role. “I didn’t know if it was gonna work, but I thought Val was a really fun character,” he says. “So often in films, people are special. But Val is not an extraordinary person in any kind of way. He’s basically a kind of loser, who has this extraordinary thing happen to him.”
To complete the Val-earl double act, Underwood, Wilson and Maddock recruited