In the Margins #11: Tremors at 35
Celebrating 35 years of Tremors and 30 years of Hamish Macbeth
Hello from a chilly Edinburgh!
This month - in fact today as this newsletter is published - marks 35 years since Tremors first burst into American cinemas, while July marks the 10th anniversary of my book Seeking Perfection: The Unofficial Guide to Tremors.
To celebrate, I thought I’d share some previously unpublished material from my archives in the coming months.
Dr Jim returns!
I spoke to around 55 people involved in the Tremors franchise for Seeking Perfection, but didn’t get to everyone I wanted to. In the years following the book’s release I carried out some more interviews for a potential second edition, one of whom was Conrad Bachmann, who played Dr. Jim in the first film. I’d met Conrad at a Seeking Perfection book signing in 2016, and we finally spoke in 2019.
Speaking from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, where he runs the Louisville International Festival of Film, Conrad shared how Tremors continues to resonate with fans decades later.
“I get recognised more for Tremors than I do for anything else. I was in a restaurant just the other day and the waitress came up to me, she said two things. She said ‘Weren’t you on Mannix?’ I said yes. Then she said ‘But aren’t you Dr Jim in Tremors?’ I said yes. She said, ‘I told them that was you!’”
“I never had more fun than I did with Tremors, it was just a hoot,” he told me, recalling how he landed the role through an audition story involving a headache-suffering casting director:
“Just before I went in, Pam [Dixon, casting director] turned to me, she said, ‘I have the most god awful headache, if you don’t mind not screaming.’ And I thought, Wow, that’s the whole point of the audition. So I went in, and we ran the lines... when it got time for me to start screaming, I stopped and said, ‘I would love to scream for you, but Pam has a really bad headache and she asked me not to.’”
Conrad also shared some career advice from industry legends - he’d doubled for Bing Crosby and did his stunt work on 1966’s Stagecoach:
I asked Bing Crosby, ‘What advice would you give a young kid like myself?’ and he said, ‘Never go for the lead.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because when the picture falls on its ass, the lead looks for work and you go to the next job.' The other great piece of advice I got was from Robert Mitchum. He said to me, ‘Remember kid, that yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and collect.’”
As for being eaten by a Graboid…
“They had an air mattress, so that when I hit the mark they let the air out of the bag and that's how they dropped me into the hole. And the wood that I was hanging on to was balsa wood.”
I’m hopeful I can bring more of the interview to fans in the second edition I mentioned above, though right now I don’t have a concrete plan for that.
Speaking of Tremors books, I’m excited to share news about a new Spanish-language book that’s just been published: Graboid Hunter: A History of the Tremors Saga by Octavio López Sanjuán. The book features interviews with writers and directors from all eight films plus the TV series and unaired pilot. Michael “Burt Gummer” Gross is also interviewed about his work on each project.
Octavio asked me to provide a foreword for the book, which I was honoured to do. While we wait for an English translation, you can find it through Applehead Team's website. I also filmed a very short review on my Instagram:
Return to Lochdubh
The reason I’ve been so quiet with my newsletters is that I’ve been hard at work on two new books that I started a number of years ago but which were derailed by contracts for other books and the pandemic.
The first one I’ll be releasing is on the making of the subversive 1990s BBC police comedy drama, Hamish Macbeth. On the surface it’s a cosy cop show set in the Scottish Highlands that stars a young Robert Carlyle, but underneath there’s a lot more going on including the supernatural and some very suspicious lobsters. Like Tremors, it’s another production featuring a tight knit small community played by a cast of character actors.
The book is almost complete and it’s scheduled for a spring release to coincide with the series’ 30th anniversary in the spring. After conducting around 40 interviews with cast and crew, I can’t wait to share these stories with fans.
If you’re in the UK then check the series out on BBC iPlayer right now, I think it’s on on Prime Video in other countries.
Looking ahead to May, I’m planning to publish my collection of interviews with people who either worked with Jim Henson or were inspired by him to join the Muppetverse. More details on that coming soon.
A few other books are in the early stages and I hope to have at least one more out in 2025 and a couple in 2026.
Other bits and bobs
I’ve moved away from posting on X and I’m now on Bluesky. I’m still on Facebook for the moment, but I plan to reduce my time there and focus more on this newsletter.
I don’t have many recommendations from my recent viewing and reading as I’ve spent most days working on the books, but I am enjoying the third series of The Traitors (the UK version) and this morning I rewatched Scorsese’s The Departed, which I don’t think I’ve seen since its release.
I’d also recommend the Apple+ film The Instigators, which I watched over the holiday, a crime film starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. I finished my first fiction read of 2025 the other day, Philip Kerr’s Berlin-set police procedural March Violets, and hope I can start the second in the series soon.
Until next time, keep watching the ground!
Jon
Find out more about my Tremors, Highlander and Local Hero books:
My books
I write books about films I love, films I’ll watch again and again and recommend to other people. They’re also films I wanted to read more about. So I started talking to the people who made them and these books are the result.