When filmmaker Jeff Lieberman was around eight years old, his older brother told him a curious scientific fact. The two used to go fishing together, and his sibling shared a method for finding worms. “He had read that you could get the worms out of the ground by taking a train transformer, from a toy train set, and sticking the poles in the mud,” Lieberman told The Flashback Files. “It has to be muddy and you have to do this at night. Then when you turn on the electricity the worms will be shocked and they’ll come out of the ground.”
Not only did the brothers apparently perform the experiment successfully in their backyard, but the younger Lieberman also learned that if one turned on lights to see where the worms were, the creatures would hurriedly slide back underground. Some 12 years later, Lieberman recalled the incident and put pen to paper, writing the first two pages of a script that would eventually become his cult classic 1976 movie Squirm.
