We’ve known the original Tremors team has been working on new material beneath the surface recently – as creator SS Wilson revealed when he joined GB on the Fast Forward podcast – and now we have their first release.
After thirty-five years the original 1990 Tremors movie gets its very first official novelization and brings some new moments from the original script that even the writers thought had been lost.
Titled Beneath Perfection, this long-awaited project marks the first new production from Stampede Entertainment since Tremors 4, and promises to reveal unseen moments, forgotten dialogue, and story details.
Wilson, who also directed Tremors 2 and 4, said: “There is much here to enjoy for even hardcore fans of the movie. Working closely with us, and from an early longer draft of the script he found that, ironically, we had not kept, Christian Francis has converted the old classic to prose with many added details, new scenes, and new character moments.”
The project began when screenwriter SS Wilson, who co-created the original Tremors with Brent Maddock, was regaining US rights to their original screenplay. That’s when writer Christian Francis got in touch to point out that Universal had never produced a novelization – meaning the authors still held that right. Wilson and Maddock immediately partnered with Francis, known for his talent in expanding classic horror worlds, to bring Tremors back to life in a new form.
The result, according to Wilson’s introduction, is a faithful but expanded take on the movie – “the original expanded story of the first film you never saw on screen.” Working from an early, longer draft of the Tremors script that had been lost to time, Francis added new jokes, deeper character moments, and even entire scenes that were cut from the production decades ago. Long-time fans can finally see how Tremors might have looked if every idea had survived the editing room.
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Set in the dusty, isolated town of Perfection, Nevada, Beneath Perfection follows handymen Val McKee and Earl Bassett as they plan to skip town, only to stumble upon a string of gruesome deaths and a lurking terror beneath the earth. What begins as a mystery quickly escalates into an all-out survival story as the townsfolk discover the existence of monstrous subterranean predators later dubbed “Graboids.”
Where the film balanced humour and horror through kinetic visuals and clever dialogue, the novelization digs deeper – literally and figuratively. Readers will get richer backstories, sharper banter, and a closer look at the residents of Perfection as they improvise, argue, and unite against the impossible. Even die-hard fans who know every line of dialogue by heart will find something new to unearth.
The book’s cover even seems inspired by the original – and bizarrely rejected – poster by the legendary Drew Struzan, who recently passed away.
For Wilson, this project is more than nostalgia — it’s the continuation of a creative journey that began in the late 1980s. “There is much here to enjoy for even hardcore fans of the movie,” he writes. With the blessing of Universal Pictures, which still holds the original film rights, and the full involvement of the Tremors creators, Beneath Perfection stands as an official piece of Tremors canon, decades in the making.
Releasing on October 29 in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook editions on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books, Beneath Perfection is a perfect gift for long-time Tremors devotees or newcomers ready to meet the Graboids for the first time. It’s rare that a beloved cult film gets to tell its story again – rarer still when it brings something genuinely new to the table.
Perfection, it seems, still has a few secrets left underground.
Preorder at echohorror.com/books/beneath-perfection and be sure to check out the SS Wilson episode of the podcast.
You can listen in full below, at Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your pods.