SMASH AND GRABOID

S.S. WILSON TAKES US THROUGH THE BLOODY WEIRD LIFE CYCLE OF TREMORS’ BLOODY WEIRD BEASTIES.

1 ___ GRABOID TREMORS (1990)

“Coming from my love of Ray Harryhausen, I wanted the thing to look completely bizarre and alien. So it’s a cigar shape, with spikes that move it through the ground. Its mouth is described in the script as opening like a bizarre flower, with ‘petals’.”

2 ___ SHRIEKER TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS (1996)

“Rule number one was: there will be no Queen Graboid. Instead,

I thought, ‘What if it fragmented into something small?’ We wanted a way of having multiple Shriekers quickly. So we said, ‘The Graboids metamorphose, like a butterfly.’ They just turn overnight into smaller creatures.”

3___ ASS BLASTER TREMORS 3: BACK TO PERFECTION

(2001)

“The Shriekers moult to become the Ass Blasters. We called Alec Gillis and Tom [Woodruff Jr] and said, ‘Guys, we gotta do another Tremors. What do we do?’ Alec says, ‘Have you ever heard of the Bombardier beetle? It mixes chemicals in its butt and shoots out this acidic blast.’ We loved it.”

4___ ASS BLASTER EGG TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS (2004)

“We closed the life cycle with the Ass Blasters. Then

Universal said, ‘We have to do Tremors 4.’ I said, ‘Do you care if we make a prequel?’ So I got to do my Western, into which we fit in the idea that an Ass Blaster has an egg in it, and we looped back to the beginning that way.”

5___ DIRT DRAGON TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS (2004)

“They really are just baby Graboids. But we thought it would be fun that they could launch themselves out of the ground, something we never wanted to do with the Graboid — they were the size of a whale, there had to be some rules. But we thought: ‘Maybe the babies can.’ They go really fast.”