Today marks the 26th anniversary of Ron Underwood’s underrated creature feature, Tremors, which surprisingly wasn’t the box office success you’d think it was.
Release on January 19, 1990, Tremors starred Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter and Michael Gross as natives of a small isolated town who must defend themselves against strange underground creatures which are killing them one by one.
What you may not know is that it was produced by none other than Gale Anne Hurd, who has become a horror household name because of “The Walking Dead.”
Tremors spawned four sequels and a short-lived television series. For the film’s 25th anniversary last year, Universal Home Entertainment released the fifth film in the franchise, Bloodlines.
It’s still impressive that this franchise is going strong after a quarter century, especially considering box office mojo shows the initial film as a flop, taking in only $16 million domestically, while wiki states it took in a whopping $48 million on a $11 million budget.
Wiki shares this interesting tidbit regarding the film’s poster (below):
Film poster and DVD cover art for Tremors was designed by Universal Studios. This was originally going to feature an actual graboid, but Stampede Entertainment believed Tremors would be better if audiences did not see the creature until it is revealed to the characters in the film. Universal agreed initially, but then decided to use a close-up of a graboid tentacle, with sharp teeth, on the poster.
Here’s a nother fun blurb from Wiki:
The creature designs for Tremors were done by Amalgamated Dynamics. The full-scale graboid, that is seen after Val digs it up, was cast in lightweight foam. It was placed in a trench, then buried, and dug up again to achieve the desired “used” effect.
In a 2013 interview with the Telegraph, Bacon admitted that the film was a career low for him:
“I broke down and fell to the sidewalk, screaming to my pregnant wife, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing a movie about underground worms!'”
While it was a theatrical bust, it was a monster success on home video.
