Tremors might not be the most renowned of horror franchises, but it has been steadily continued since its debut in 1990, and now some images have been released from the upcoming seventh and latest installment, Tremors: Shrieker Island, previously known as Island Fury.
The Tremors series revolves around battles against the Graboids, a bizarre species of giant carnivorous sandworms who survived from prehistoric times, so-called due to each possessing a trio of prehensile oral tentacles that grab the creature’s prey and pull it into their gaping maw. This time around, several Graboids have been captured and illegally brought to a private island by a wealthy playboy who wants to genetically modify them to create the ultimate in trophy hunting prey. Of course, the creatures escape, everything goes to hell, and only gun-nut survivalist and expert Graboid hunter Burt Gummer can fix the problem.
The Shriekers of the title are one of the stages of the Graboids’ life-cycle, a bipedal form resembling featherless and flightless birds that see via heat vision and quickly reproduce by vomiting out cocoons that grow into full sized duplicates in mere hours, potentially overrunning all before them unless kept in check, which may be how things in the movie will go wrong. Another possibility comes from the bioengineering premise of the story, which perhaps involves aspects from each of the Graboids’ various life stages being cherry-picked and combined to form an apex predator, which of course the foolish humans prove unable to control.
Tremors as a series has never been content to rest on its laurels, instead always finding new and interesting ways to develop its surreal monsters and the various collections of idiots who have to survive them, and Tremors: Shrieker Island looks set to continue this tradition in as fun and gory a way as possible.