An Interview w/ Tom Holland: Director of Child’s Play

Recently, I was able to speak with Tom Holland, best known as the director of Fright Night and Child’s Play. I asked Tom a little about his involvement in the recently-released-to-DVD Hatchet II as well as some general questions about his love for the genre.

As a kid Child’s Play, scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t sleep for days. So my parent’s thank you for that.

You know, there was a writing campaign from classrooms in England, in reaction to the film. They sent me thousands of letters protesting that I had destroyed their faith in their childhood toys. That I had made so many kids afraid of their dolls, and it was all my fault for writing and directing the movie.

I still have a couple of boxes out in the back that came from PR. It was incredible. It was really interesting. There was a VERY STRONG reaction against that film.

In Hatchet II you flex your acting muscles. What do you like more? Do you like acting or directing in the genre?

It had been not just years but decades since I had acted, so it was really a lot of fun to do. I really enjoyed doing it. I enjoy all of it. I enjoy writing, I enjoy directing, and I enjoy acting. I had forgotten how much I’d enjoyed acting and how much fun it could be until I did Hatchet II.

Horror and humor coincide with a lot of the work that you do. How do you feel about those two things mixing together—do you feel that it is an essential part of the horror genre?

You know that’s a really interesting question. It feels to me that there is almost a growing sub-genre of a comedy horror mix. You see it in Adam’s work, and you see it in Joe Lynch’s. It seems to be creating it’s own movies now. And a lot of them are retro where they echo the 80s. Which is interesting too.

Just one last question, it’s very simple. What makes you love horror so much?

I fell in love with it because when I was a kid they had the hammer films from England, and they had the AIT Vincent Price horror films. That was when I was a kid growing up. You only had three channels of television then. You had the Friday Night Firghts, which was at 11 at night– and it was really late. It was the Fright Night stuff, and I fell in love with it then.

It all changed with Psycho. I was young when that happened, so I experienced going from old-fashioned horror into psychological horror. I think I fell in love with it then, because I saw the complexity of it. I saw that new vistas of horror opened up when I was young. I saw it happen with Hitchcock and Psycho. It was very exciting.