Denis Villeneuve has a Kevin Bacon number of 2. This is the only common ground (get ready for all the puns) between the 1990 hit monster B-movie, Tremors, and the upcoming two part sci-fi/fantasy film, Dune. Or is it?

The Canadian born film director is on a great run of films since his arrival in Hollywood less than a decade ago. His penchant for dark themes at large scale has filled the niche for sci-fi fans and moviegoers who are worn out by Christopher Nolan’s PG-13 gamut. Large scale sci-fi has a patchy track record of over-ambitious remakes, lofty space operas, and as-of-late… tent pole superhero movies inundated with sci-fi revelry. Guys and gals such as Denis Villenueve, Christopher Nolan, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Johnathan Glazer, Claire Denis, Shane Carruth, etc… are pushing “post-2001 A Space Odyssey” science fiction forward into new realms. Spectacle aside, the sci-fi film genre has a lot to offer and few filmmakers are bold enough to take on the challenge. I get it. Challenging sci-fi is just that. Challenging. The few films that have succeeded at pushing audiences while giving them the ride of their lives is few and far between. Ridley Scott? Spielberg maybe? But the dinosaurs didn’t eat everyone and Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theory only had about two minutes of seductive screen time. No challenge there. Where is our generation’s culture shifting sci-fi epic? All we get are leftovers. In the words of Kevin Bacon in Tremors, “What the hell is going on? I mean what the hell is going on?!”

John Waters famously stated that his films are campy, meaning—“tragically ludicrous or ludicrously tragic.” Tremors falls under the ludicrously tragic. It’s a unique moviegoing experience with all pistons firing… peak Kevin Bacon, worms, beautiful desert vistas, non-stop jokes, great dialogue, action, romance, guns… so many guns, and Reba McEntire… why not? What else do you need other than an 80ft “graboid” that devours anything that moves? Well, if my setup reveals anything, it’s that digging a little deeper (… see what I mean?) makes up for a lot of cheap thrills. Great monster movies ride the line between profound and mundane. The choices made within this specific bit of storytelling is where some get it right and others get… well, nowhere. A campy monster movie like Tremors transcends the form through style, tone, wit, and the power of its monster. In the first twenty or so minutes, with no monster in sight, we get to know Val and Earl and their mundane existence in a deserted mining town deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. IMO, the performances are so charismatic and full of life that you forget that worms are about to fuck things up.

The advantage of most monster movies is that anything can be projected onto its larger-than-life antagonist. The monster is a metaphor for anything. The simple premise allows the audience to read into the predator/prey dynamic. The graboid worm in Tremors is one of my favorite monsters of all time. The Stay Puft Marshmallow man is runner up, but something about subterranean terror feeds into my childhood “the floor is lava!” vibes. I loved and hated it with equal measure. Rewatching it over the years and most recently on Netflix, I’ve come to love it more and more. Graboids are fucking terrifying. A giant worm under the ground that plunges out like a shark and shoots gooey pink horned eels from its mouth that pull you into its giant squid-like beak? Geez…

After rewatching it for like the 4th time in the past month, I’ve noticed something. To bring back my point of digging a little deeper—which is not only a bad pun but the motivation for writing this—I can’t help projecting my shit onto this harbinger of childhood trauma. Maybe I’m trying to intellectualize my way out of dealing with my fear of graboids and sandworms. I’m somewhat disappointed/relieved they haven’t released a still of the sandworm in the new Dune. The nauseating magnitude of graboids on steroids. Graboids are just sandworm knock offs. Here are descriptions of these two similar monsters for those who, like me, need to know every little detail about what they fear most…

Sandworms are similar to lamprey. They are cylindrical creatures with teeth used for rasping rocks and sand. Its mouth is eighty meters in diameter and grow to hundreds of meters in length. They burrow deep in the ground and travel swiftly. They possess a “high-voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment of its body.” A fucking atomic bomb is the only way to really kill them. Water is poisonous to them. Most importantly, they produce a byproduct called Melange, which is a “tree of life” spice that’s high in demand and the entire universe is after it. To escape a sandworm attack, a desert traveler must "walk without rhythm", because sandworms mistake any rhythmic vibrations in the sand for prey.

Graboids are ambush predators, preferring to sneak up on prey. They erupt from the ground and use their tentacles to ensnare prey, pulling them into their mouth. The tentacles wrap around the prey, biting into its flesh or hooking the prey with their horn-like spikes. When the prey attempts to flee by climbing, graboids will simply dig away the earth under the hiding place, undermining it until it collapses or sinks low enough to allow the Graboid to pluck off the hiding prey. When they are unable to break down the prey's hiding spot, the Graboids will continue circling it like sharks until it ceases making vibrations. Usually, they wait so long the prey dies of dehydration or starvation, i.e. several days.

Also, if you’re like me, fear quickly turns to anger followed by obsessive emasculation of the cause of fear. I read a tome in college called, A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for a philosophy class. It’s fucking dense. I’d rather read the Bible, honestly. The one cool thing that I managed to pull from it is that post-modernism could be thought of as a paradigm shift in how we perceive information. The book was published before the internet, but the ideas that Deleuze and Guatarri lay out are timeless in their radical approach to how we read text and process knowledge. Here lies the idea of rhizomatic thinking/learning. Worms. Fucking worms. They have always been there, man. Shit. I thought I was going to conquer the fear. I’m done.

Distraction! Remember the actress from Tremors? She’s been up to no good. New lead for season 8 of Orange is the New Black, anyone?

Rhizomatic Fear