Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Tremors Map

"Tremors" is one of my favorite movies, so I was excited to see that Mike Jenkins is tackling a recreation of the prop map from the film.  That includes some impressive detective work tracking down the original, truly obscure, source material.
I thought this might have been based on a real map, just retouched through some old-school cut & paste. I Google searched a couple of the unusual place names (Zumwalt Meadow) and managed to confirm that this is a real location. The location is the Cedar Grove area of Kings Canyon National Park.

But what was the exact version of the map was used for Perfection Valley?



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, thanks for the notice :)

I dunno if I'm gonna replicate it. Certainly not right away.

I unbound my booklet by cutting apart the staples from the back side with small wire clippers, I was so worried about damaging the map. It's across the center of the center spread. The screencap shows a white line down the center of the prop, which suggests the 'real' one was maybe taped together from two sheets of paper, or they cut theirs out of the booklet, or just white-out'ed over the crease & staple.

Additionally, the artist stuck part of another map over the legend, so you need to keep the whole booklet if you do this yourself.

Now that the cat's out of the bag, time is no longer on my side, if there was a market for this at all.

Tremors is great. Holds up really well, too. I saw some behind the scenes photos of the miniature worm filming on Facebook, which was what prompted the re-watch.

Perhaps you'd all like to replicate a "Photos with the Snake Monster" sign? Real cheap and easy :)

You know, Tremors has kind of a Lovecraftian bent to it... Giant, underground, terrible monsters. Reminds me of the white polypous thing from the Louisiana swamps mentioned by Castro, though that monster has eyes. Hooray for icky monsters!


-MJ

Alysson Rowan said...

It's funny, when I first saw Tremors, I always felt that it owed much to the Lovecraftian mythos world.

It has literary links, whether deliberate or not, to The Lair of The White Worm (Bram Stoker) and thus to an English folk legend, that of The Lambton Worm.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambton_Worm ]

For such a simple storyline, the film has everything going for it - including some fun, eye-catching props that round out the story quite nicely.