'Tremors: Aftershocks – The Lost Monsters!': Take A Look At The Monsters That Never Made It To The Screen

Tremors is the 1990s American monster horror-comedy film that became an iconic franchise over the years. The first film stars Kevin Bacon as Val McKee the repairman. It follows the story of Val and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward) who try to run away from their small Nevada town. But they stumble upon mysterious deaths occurring in their dull town. Rhonda (Finn Carter) finds unnatural readings below the ground and with the help of an eccentric survivalist couple Burt and Heather Gummer (Micheal Gross and Reba McEntire), this mismatched group then fights for survival against giant, worm-like monsters known as Graboids, hungry for human flesh.

After the success of the first film, six other sequels followed over the course of 30 years with the latest one releasing in 2020. The franchise also had a spin-off TV show that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. It picked off where the third installment of the film series, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001) ended. It followed the story of the residents of Perfection Valley as they tried their best to co-exist with a Graboid as they deal with the problems caused by failed government experiments and ruthless real-estate developers. There were a total of 13 episodes and the debut episode broke viewership records on the Sci-Fi Channel at the time.

Despite the records it broke, the series was short-lived. It was created by S. S. Wilson, Brent Maddock, and Ron Underwood. It was written by Christopher Silber starring, Victor Browne as Tyler Reed, Gladise Jimenez as Rosalita Sanchez, Marcia Strassman as Nancy Sterngood, Lela Lee as Jodi Chang, Dean Norris as W. D. Twitchell, and Michael Gross as Burt Gummer. The series was not renewed for another season and Wilson even said, "They were sad!  We were all sad. We felt like we were just getting things running smoothly, and had a lot of ideas we wanted to put into new episodes."

There was supposed to be another television series titled Tremors 2: Aftershocks – The Lost Monsters! following the release of the second film. It was set to be developed by Universal Television and Stampede Entertainment. The premise was set after Val and Earl's success in fighting the Graboids and they were then being sought out by the readers of tabloid newspapers, believers in UFO’s, etc. to battle other little-known creatures. The production company had even come up with an array of monsters to last the entire series. Unfortunately, the project was scrapped but Stampede shared their shelved project with the world anyway. Here are the monsters we never got to meet:

There was a reboot ordered in 2015 but it did not come to fruition. In 2017, there was a small ray of hope again when Syfy would be rebooting Tremors and even ordered a pilot. Bacon was supposed to reprise his role for the reboot series as well. This plan fell through as well bringing an end to another run of what could have been an iconic run. Before the series was canceled, Bacon said, as per The Hollywood Reporter, "This is the only character I’ve played that I’ve ever thought about revisiting. I just got to thinking, where would this guy end up after 25 years? Andrew Miller has a fantastic take on it and we hope to create a show that will be fun and scary for fans of the movie and folks that have yet to discover it. Let’s kick some Graboid ass!"

Even though the series did not happen, the fifth, sixth, and seventh movie sequels: Tremors 5: Bloodlines in 2015, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell in 2018, and Tremors: Shrieker Island in 2020 were released straight to DVD. While Gross has teased the possibility of an eighth movie, the future of a Tremors television series remains in the dark.