TOM
     HOLLAND

Tom Holland was given one of the most challenging tasks as a screenwriter in writing the sequel to one of the greatest horror films of all time, and his successful adaptation launched a career that has influenced many filmmakers today.

After the success of PSYCHO II in 1983, Holland became a screenwriter for hire writing several features and made his directorial debut with the cult classic FRIGHT NIGHT in 1985, a film that at the time resurrected the vampire film, and followed that with helming CHILD'S PLAY, introducing the world to Chucky and launching one of the most profitable horror franchises of the past twenty years.

With these credentials, it's no surprise that Holland became involved in MASTERS OF HORROR and helmed the Season Two episode WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM, one of the more popular in the series, and Holland enters the Crypt to discuss working on this episode, the process of writing PSYCHO II, the enduring legacy of FRIGHT NIGHT, and ponders on the current rating system.

COLONEL’S CRYPT: What was it about the story for WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM that motivated you to make it your episode of MASTERS OF HORROR?

TOM HOLLAND: It’s got something universal which is that everybody’s had an ice cream during the summer when we were kids. We can all see kids playing a nasty trick on the ice cream man that goes bad. So I thought that was something that everybody can understand.

CC: How were you approached for MASTERS OF HORROR?

TH: They called me and I had begun to wonder because so many of my friends were doing them, but they called me and I’m glad they did.

CC: One of the things I liked about WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM was the casting of William Forsythe as Buster the Clown. What was it like casting the film and how was it working with William?

TH: It was great working with William. What we did is he wouldn’t read, so he came to my house and we had lunch. Really what that’s about is getting to know somebody and finding out whether or not it is someone you like and if you’d like to work with him, and we just got along famously, and it continued throughout the shoot. I really liked William and I consider him a friend. We’ve stayed in touch since then. William Forsythe goes back, and I didn’t know this until we were working together and he told me, but he played a character role in a movie I wrote called CLOAK AND DAGGER. He played Morris, the geek who gets killed. This is back around 1984. I didn’t remember at all, and I must’ve fell over because Bill must’ve been in his twenties when he did that and he gained a lot of weight. He was doing the Robert De Niro RAGING BULL thing, he was that kind of actor. He’s brilliant. I thought the whole show was well cast. Lee Tergesen is also very good. Lee comes off from OZ and he has a quality that something’s broken, something’s happened in the past, it’s a less flashy part, but he had the right feeling and personality for it too. I don’t want to denigrate Lee either because people seem to concentrate more on William because he has such a filmography being in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS and going all the way back to fucking Morris in CLOAK AND DAGGER. He’s a character that disappears into his roles.

CC: I thought it was a nice balance between the two in that they both played roles you wouldn’t think they would.

TH: It’s funny because in the horror world everyone knows Bill but not a lot of people knows Lee, but if you ask people in Hollywood, Lee is extremely well known because he got so hot off of OZ he’s working all the time now. What you had there was two terrific actors, and they were both working well. I think I said it in the additional material on the DVD, I always felt that I screwed up William’s costume. I felt that I allowed it to go too Ronald McDonald and didn’t realize it because I had to commit to it during pre-production. Then we started to shoot, and the character is mentally disadvantaged i.e. slow, and then I felt what he should’ve really looked like was Emmett Kelly. I don’t know if you remember but Emmett was a famous clown, he was the one who wore a boulder hat. The character in ICE CREAM, Bill’s character, who is a retarded guy, should’ve gone and picked the clown costume out of his wardrobe or scraps that he found thrown away in garbage cans. If I had something that was patchwork, put together, it probably could’ve been a lot scarier. I didn’t realize that goddamn clown looked so much like Ronald McDonald. It’s funny. I felt that was the big thing I did wrong with the show but I didn’t realize it until about three quarters of the way through.

CC: I did feel the film was in a way a throwback to the 1980s type of horror, that spooky revenge type of horror film.

TH: That’s really nice to hear. It’s got story but it’s entertaining, it’s fun.  I’m saying this about my own work but there’s something fun about it.

CC: In my review, I did say that this was one of the episodes that would’ve worked well as a feature as some things felt unexplained.

TH: If you put another 30 minutes on that with the background on Buster, you’d have a small feature. It would work very nice, I agree with you. Why do you think it reminded you of the 1980s type of horror?

CC: I would say for me it was the revenge story. I know a lot of horror films had that theme of revenge where the killer was someone vengeful who attacked adults over something those adults did as children. I also felt the special effects had that practical feel that I haven’t seen in a while.

TH: That’s interesting because I like mechanical effects because you can control them, you are there doing them personally. You’re shooting them practically. With CGI you say “Here are the elements, have a good time, let me know how it turns out,” because you give it over to the CGI firm and it’s just so much better to be able to sit there with Howard Berger and say “A little more goo, a little less goo.” I can sit there and actually do the melting in the hot tub and control it. But there’s a good lesson that I’ll remember, because maybe I should do more digital effects or I’ll be considered an old fashioned type of guy (laughs).

CC: Well for me it’s all about the story first, which brings me to screenwriting. You had one of the most daunting tasks ever put in cinematic history when you were asked to write the screenplay to PSYCHO II. How daunting was that process?

TH: Scary as hell. That was I believe 1982. Hitchcock was lionized but the horror world was not then what it is now. It was just beginning. Fangoria began in 1979. HALLOWEEN was 1978. You’re talking four years beyond the beginnings of modern film horror. It hadn’t yet become a medium that was critically respected. Somehow the fan base was seemed smaller. I think it was less threatening to do it then than it would be now. I went through holy hell trying to make sure that everything that I used the given circumstances of the original movie PSYCHO and that everything had to fit in and make sense within PSYCHO, so I was playing fair that way. Then it somehow it turned into its own thing. That started out as a cable movie, it wasn’t even a feature film. Universal had no idea what they had in the property. What happened was the script was good enough it got Anthony Perkins. They still didn’t realize how important that was, then all of a sudden you had all this press interest in Anthony Perkins making another PSYCHO. At that point, the studio started to realize that they might have a hot property. Literally they backed into it and didn’t know what they had.

CC: Were you able to be on set during filming?

TH: Oh yeah.

CC: How was that experience in seeing what you wrote coming alive?

TH: It was absolutely terrific. It was wonderful in every way. There were bumps along the way. We were sort of blessed in retrospect. You had small things. Anthony didn’t get along with Meg Tilly at some points. Him wanting to have her fired I remember was being one of the biggest bumble on the road and that was the result of a scene that she wasn’t doing the way he wanted to. I don’t remember all the details. I had long talks with Anthony. Anthony was some kind of genius, one of the brightest guys I ever met. His intellect was really impressive. He loved to play the movie game. He would quote stars, cinematographers, and directors in movies. He would come up with one line bits of dialogue in movies and quote them. You play that game in exchange until you couldn’t keep up with him and you lost. We played that game between shots, so I got a fairly good sense of him.

CC: With PSYCHO II, Norman was the protagonist in this film as opposed to being mainly the antagonist in the first film. Was that your idea?

TH: I always thought that was the potential of what made the first film so terrifying. I always thought that was there in the Norman character in the first one. Somewhere you felt sorry for him, you knew that his mother had driven him crazy. Even in the terror of the first one, the potential was there and I played it in PSYCHO II. That’s what gives it such resonance because you find yourself sympathizing with a serial murderer who was insane and you find yourself feeling sorry for him because these people are trying to drive him insane. Of course the horror of it is at the end is he gets away with it but they’ve succeeded. He’s as mad as a hatter and he goes back to get satisfaction by killing the mother who drove him insane. It’s very convoluted, it’s very sick.

CC: That final scene of Norman at the motel with the mother there. It’s like “Oh shit, he’s back.”

TH: It’s starting all over again.

CC: I really do applaud you on the screenplay and I think the film is very underrated.

TH: Thank you. There’s a guy named Robert Galluzzo who has this nicely run website called ICONS OF FRIGHT. He’s put up a PSYCHO website with a lot of nice interviews about the movies and he’s making a documentary for the fans. PSYCHO’s gaining a reputation as the years pass. It’s sort of like FRIGHT NIGHT has, and at the same time it’s not happening it seems to me with CHILD’S PLAY and I think that’s because they keep bringing out current sequels so that stays current whereas PSYCHO and FRIGHT NIGHT seem like milestones of the past.

CC: I have to talk about FRIGHT NIGHT. I heard you had complete control on casting except for one suggestion that someone gave you that led to the casting of Roddy McDowall as Peter Vincent?

TH: That was Guy McElwaine and it was a brilliant suggestion obviously.

CC: What inspired you to make FRIGHT NIGHT?

TH: It was me looking back at my youth and remembering how I had come to love horror films. Back in those days on Friday nights, they would have some hokey horror host like Stagger Lee or Vampira or Elvira that would introduce some terrible horror film from the 1930s and 40s and they’d do it on television, usually on your local channel with these horror hosts all over the country. It was a common experience in the 50s and 60s. If you wanted to see a horror film, you looked on your local TV channel and there was some hokey horror host introducing them. There was something so hilarious about it, so delightful and funny about the basic premise of FRIGHT NIGHT that a: you have a vampire moving in next door and b: that you’d be so deluded as a fan that you would actually think you could go to vampire killer from a movie to get help with a real vampire. That’s just very funny, and of course a down on his heels actor desperate for money decides to go along with it and then discovers that “Oh my god, it’s a real vampire.” That’s just delightful. I think some of that sense of delight is also WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM I guess. There’s something silly about the haunted ice cream man melting in the ice cream. It goes full circle but in a lot of what I do there’s something about it that tickles my funny bone and I’m able to communicate that or at least give an echo or feel to that.

CC: One thing I was curious about in FRIGHT NIGHT was the opening scene where the character of Peter Vincent was shown on screen. It looked like it was from a Hammer film.

TH: We shot that scene ourselves as best we could to make it look like. I did things like that to hoke it up. I had Roddy holding the stake the wrong way. One of the great lines is “Back, Spawn Of Satan.” I was on the floor rolling when I wrote that.

CC: There was a lot of humor in the film but I wouldn’t call it a comedy.

TH: No because the humor came out of the situation and it always maintained the reality of the situation.

CC: How much of that humor was improvised or was it in the script?

TH: It was in the script. It really was. I don’t know if anybody realized except me because usually what the studios do is try to take out the humor. They come back and try to recut with no sense of humor, take it out. They cut out a lot of humor in THE LANGOLIERS and they made me take it out. I’m amazed in retrospect that FRIGHT NIGHT got through without anybody fucking with it?

CC: Is that why you embraced MASTERS OF HORROR so much because you had that creative control?

TH: Oh sure because with MASTERS nobody fucks with you, that’s terrific. I have a question for you. If FRIGHT NIGHT was released today would that be an R?

CC: With the practical effects used in it, yes. If it was made today and had some digital effects, it probably would get a PG-13 rating. I don’t know. To me, R or no R, I’d love it anyway.

TH: In retrospect it seems to me it’s very mild. There’s very little language, I don’t even think there’s one fuck in it. I don’t think so. I’m looking at it and I’m thinking “Why would it be an R?” I don’t know.

CC: The wolf transformation scene with Ed would probably give it an R.

TH: I wonder about that because if you look at WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM, would that get an R because you have the scene where the guy dissolves in the hot tub.

CC: I don’t know. Probably.

TH: I don’t know because I try to figure out what the rules are currently but it is interesting that you think if it’s practical it’s more likely to draw an R than the digital, CGI feel to it.

CC: The scene in the hot tub was one of the more gorier not just in the execution practically but in the pain of the character that was shown as he was dissolving.

TH: Usually you think I have to get into gore and blood and things like dissolving into ice cream doesn’t qualify for me but what the hell do I know?

CC: What is next for Tom Holland?

TH: I don’t know. Trying to put things together but we shall see.

CC: Are you going to be involved with FEAR ITSELF?

TH: What’s FEAR ITSELF?

CC: The new title for MASTERS OF HORROR on NBC.

TH: They’ve retitled it FEAR ITSELF, why would they do that?

CC: I don’t know but I’ll still watch it.

TH: You’d think after the built in audience for MASTERS OF HORROR that they’d stay with the title, but then again what the hell do I know?

CC: Thank you so much for your time Mr. Holland.

TH: Thank you Scott and god bless.

NEWS &
UPDATES

ON THE SET
REPORTS

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

BLOGS
Colonel's Blog

VIDEOS

MEET THE
COLONEL

LINKS

CONTACT