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Kevin Bacon Calls Working on Tremors a "Magical Time" Spent with "Ingenious" Graboids
Tremors is now streaming on Peacock.
Your common earthworm doesn't post much of a threat. A giant earthworm with mandibles, on the other hand...?
In 1990's Tremors (now streaming on Peacock!), audiences marveled as Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward fought off malicious giant night-crawlers digging through the ground of their dusty, dilapidated town in the American Southwest. The campy movie has since become a cult classic and spawned a franchise, even though it was a project that Bacon was initially none too excited to act in.
Kevin Bacon on working with "ingenious" Graboids in 1990's Tremors
"I had begrudgingly done it," Bacon told Entertainment Weekly in a 2022 retrospective on a handful of his most famous films. "I was broke, I had a kid on the way, and my mom had gotten sick, and I felt like I didn't have a choice — I was like, 'Jesus, this is a movie about underground monsters, how far I've fallen.'"
Bacon’s feelings about the movie turned around once they started filming — he now looks back at the Tremors production as a “magical time” when he not only became a father for the first time, but also got the chance to work with his co-star, Ward.
What was also magical about Tremors is that Bacon got to act against killer worms who are christened with a ridiculous name — Graboids. These Graboids were all up close and personal with Bacon since the movie came out before the heyday of CGI.
"The super cool thing about Tremors is that Tremors is all practical effects,” he said. “It was all guys in puppets or people with things on their hands, and wires being pulled. It was ingenious. Acting with a puppet requires some acting, but we're professional pretenders."
The Graboid puppets were designed by the talented team at Amalgamated Dynamics, the special effects studio co-founded by Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis. In a 2020 interview celebrating the original movie's 30th anniversary, Woodruff recalled that he and Gillis "were smitten by the heads of snapping turtles, which did survive in the look of the finished Graboid — that kind of hooked beak sort of thing."
However, the initial sketches looked way too phallic, which producer Gale Anne Hurd was quick to point out. "So, we circumcised the worms and exposed the head ... We were actually riffing on what [James] Cameron did with the Queen [in Aliens], where when you first see the Queen, the head pushes out from under this shell. But it was a totally different application [in that context]. Gale was right, she was correct. She said, 'I showed this drawing to the women in the audience, there's no way we're making a movie like this.' We learned our lesson and were grateful to Gale for that observation."
You can once again see Bacon act against worm puppets on Peacock, where the original Tremors is now streaming.
Originally published Aug 1, 2022.
