Kevin Bacon Thought His Career Would Never Recover After One Horror Movie

Kevin Bacon has cropped up just about everywhere over the past five decades, from raucous teen comedies (his debut, "Animal House") to Hollywood blockbusters ("Apollo 13") and challenging indie projects ("The Woodsman," perhaps his bravest performance). Indeed, his roles have been so varied across so many genres that a whole game emerged called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (you can try to beat it at The Oracle of Bacon). Yet there was a period in the 1980s when it wasn't going so well for the hard-working actor, to the extent that he thought one of his best-loved movies might totally tank his career.

That movie was Ron Underwood's "Tremors," a light-hearted yet suspenseful throwback to the classic creature features of the 1950s. Set in the tiny Nevada desert town of Perfection (Population: 14), Bacon starred as Val McKee, one half of a hapless handyman duo with his best friend, Earl Bassett (Fred Ward). Their attempt to move onto better things is thwarted when the sleepy burg comes under sudden and deadly attack from huge burrowing worm-like monsters nicknamed "Graboids," throwing them into a fight for survival with the other townsfolk.

"Tremors" neatly balances comedy with gentle scares and it benefits from a group of characters we grow to love, played by a charming B-list cast including Finn Carter, Michael Gross, Victor Wong, and country singer Reba McEntire in her first screen role. Working from a smart screenplay by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, debut director Underwood mines the outlandish premise for all its potential and keeps things moving at a breezy pace. It's one of those great comfort movies I throw on at some point every year or so, but it was not a big success when it first hit theaters in the dump months of 1990. "Tremors" might have vanished into obscurity altogether if it hadn't found a second life in video rental stores, and the same thing could be said for Bacon if the killer worm movie hadn't marked a change in his fortunes.

Kevin Bacon had a fast start to his career, debuting in John Landis' surprise hit "National Lampoon's Animal House" and scoring another low-budget smash as one of the ill-fated teens in "Friday the 13th." A dependable turn as part of the ensemble in Barry Levinson's "Diner" led to the lead role in "Footloose," another box office success.

But Bacon's transition to lead actor didn't go as well as he hoped, and he suffered a string of flops in the mid-to-late '80s. His luck was perhaps summed up by his involvement with John Hughes at the time. Bacon's bad run was broken by a fleeting cameo in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" and Hughes then cast him as the lead in his next picture, "She's Having a Baby." It became the first bomb of Hughes' directorial career, and Bacon's two subsequent movies ("Criminal Law" and "The Big Picture") did little to change the trajectory. Then came "Tremors." In a 2020 interview about the film, Bacon admitted:

"To be brutally honest, I was running out of money and I was feeling at a real kind of low point, career-wise [...] After 'Footloose' came out, I had a series of leading roles that just all bombed [...] and I felt that my career was really close to ending."

In his early thirties with a baby on the way and other challenges in his personal life, the last thing the actor needed was another failure on his résumé. The prospect of starring in a horror-comedy about underground creatures didn't sound all that promising at first. Although his hopes for "Tremors" perked up on his first day on set, his initial misgivings about the movie being "bottom of the barrel" appeared justified when he attended the premiere in Los Angeles: "'Yup, here we go, I'm in another bomb.' And that's exactly what it was."

"Tremors" wasn't a total failure at the box office, but it still fell way short of the earnings projected by the suits at Universal. The producers blamed the marketing campaign for the film's poor performance, in particular the original trailer described by co-writer/producer Brent Maddock as "cringeworthy." Kevin Bacon also supports this notion, calling the initial release "a disaster" and suggesting it was a difficult movie to market due to its tricky position as a comedy-horror film.

Kevin Bacon doesn't credit "Tremors" with salvaging his career, but 1990 marked a turning point as he appeared in a big summer hit as part of the ensemble in "Flatliners." Crucially, "Tremors" didn't end his career as he feared, and he thanks Blockbuster and the home rental boom of the early '90s for saving the film from oblivion:

"Blockbuster was the biggest thing going [...] Somehow, it kinda caught on in that world. You'd go to the video store and they'd have ordered ten copies of it [...] It didn't really do much for me in terms of my career, because it's not like I was trying to have a video rental business [...] But I think there was a cumulative effect of the popularity of that movie, to the point where, at this point, most people don't realize that it wasn't a successful movie."

It's easy to see why "Tremors" found a natural home on video. It's a crowd-pleaser that strikes the right scare-to-laugh ratio, making it equally appealing for families with older children and adults who want an entertaining hang-out movie to go with their beer and a pizza on a Friday night. Bacon has praised the film's relatability for its enduring appeal, especially in the modern era of superhero blockbusters where characters have the ability to do pretty much anything. It's just a small-scale movie about regular people in a very irregular situation; we can see ourselves in the characters and think, "Yeah, that's probably how I'd handle it, too." Bacon went on to say:

"I was very, very reluctant to be in the movie and very disappointed with the outcome of the way that it performed at the box office, but over time, it's something that I love and that I'm proud of [...] Ultimately, time has proven it was a good decision to play that part."

Bacon's career went from strength to strength over the next decade, largely playing eye-catching supporting roles in a string of hits including "A Few Good Men," "Apollo 13," "Sleepers," and "Wild Things," while also mixing things up with assured lead performances in films like "Stir of Echoes." He's still rarely off our screens today, but it might just be the killer worm movie he didn't really want to do that remains the quintessential Kevin Bacon movie.