I’m a big fan of the 1990 horror comedy Tremors, and was invited to do an introduction to the movie for a screening for it at Thrillema last night. I did a pretty terrible job! It’s funny, I’ve recently had some very good public speaking moments; I felt I spoke well at both Book Expo America and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, to much larger crowds of complete strangers, but when it came to standing up in front of 20 very nice Halifax locals, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn’t remember any of the things I’d meant to say.

So here’s what I actually meant to say about Tremors and what I would have said if my tongue wasn’t sticking to the roof of my mouth.

I saw Tremors for the very first time when I was in college. I went to this really obnoxiously difficult animation college where the professors seemed to take great pleasure inflicting ridiculous deadlines and workload on the students – it prepared me very well for my job in comics, where you tend to work about 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. I’m supposed to be working now, actually. If I miss my deadline, it’s your fault, Tremors. I love you.

I was in the middle of this totally bullshit deadline, I had about a million things to do and it was Friday night and I needed a break or I would die. Instead of doing what any sane overworked animation student would do, get totally drunk on my living room floor, I decided to go down to my local video rental store and rent a movie.

So I rented Tremors from my local video store. I grew up in this super small town, so small that we didn’t have a Blockbuster if we wanted to rent movies, we had a Super A Video Store. So that’s where I went, and for some reason, rented Tremors. On VHS, no less, because even though DVD was the preferred format (I am not THAT old), I’m about 10 years behind the times technology-wise. All I had was a video player.

I think I’d read about Tremors in Entertainment Weekly, how it was supposed to be this fun, goofy monster movie, something college kids really enjoyed. I thought, hey, I’m a college kid, may as well watch it. So I took it home and watched it.

It scared the crap out of me. That scene where the station waggon gets dragged down underground by the Graboids? That shit is terrifying!

I am kind of terrible at horror movies. It’s weird, because there is a lot of stuff in horror movies I really like. I love movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing where you have this group of very different people all banding together to fight some evil, but I’m chicken when it comes to the actual horror part of horror movies. I don’t like blood, I don’t like gore, and I don’t like being scared.

And Tremors totally scared me the first time through. But I also really really loved it. And here’s why: Tremors has fantastic characters. First off, we have Valentine and Earl, played by Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and they are not heroes. Actually, they’re kind of losers. They’re really not in any kind of shape to save the day, or be all heroic, they’re just a couple of working stiffs who aren’t even working most of the time. If I was given a chance to bet who’d win in a fight, Val and Earl vs. A giant underground worm, I’d pick the worm every time.

I also really like Rhonda, our resident geeky underground worm expert. She’s a lot smarter than Val and Earl, but she’s not really a hero either. She’s just a girl who knows things about graphs. Which is awesome, and she’s actually had a lot of impact on my own comic making, which I’ll tell you about later.

And then we also have Burt and Heather Gummer, who are really, really prepared for the end of civilization. A while ago I did this comic called Zombies Calling which was about university students trapped at their school by a zombie invasion. It was set in Canada, and there was a line in it about the characters trying to find guns to fight the zombies with, but being unable to because …. well, they live in Canada, and people like Burt and Heather, people who are prepared for the upcoming zombie invasion are probably a little less common … anyway, I put that line in that comic pretty much just because of Burt and Heather. The characters in my comic didn’t have Burt and Heather to lean on, which didn’t turn out too well for them.

But anyway, I love all the characters in Tremors. And I love that they all yell and fight with each other while dealing with this underground worm menace in a way that’s completely hilarious. I really love a horror movie with a sense of humour; more horror movies should be fun. Not fun-silly, but funny by allowing the characters to be funny, having the humour come out of the characters interacting. You really start rooting for Val and Earl and Rhonda because they seem like ordinary people completely over their head in this horrible situation, trying to deal with it as best they can. I hope if I ever get trapped by oversized man-eating worms, my one liners are as good as Val and Earl’s.

Oh, one last thing about Rhonda, or rather Val and Rhonda. Sorry, I’m going to mention a little bit of a spoiler. This is something that’s had a huge impact on the comics that I make, this one thing that Tremors did really well and that I noticed the first time I watched it: the geeky girl gets the hot guy.

That was something I thought was really cool, and something I hadn’t seem before the first time I watched Tremors, or much in movies afterwards, the geeky, graph loving girl who’s kind of weird and dorky and the first time she and the hot boy meet, he’s not really that into her, but later he’s totally impressed by the usefulness of her geeky-ness and they make out. That’s something I like to put in my comics, and something that Tremors directly influenced.