Set: Masters of Horror#2

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

CLICK
HERE FOR PART 1 OF
THIS SET VISIT

As
I step up into Tom Holland’s trailer, I immediately spot him; a
shock of white hair on his head, a cigarette clamped in his teeth.
To my surprise, seated next to Tom Holland is the writer of the
episode, David J. Schow (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
III). David smiles at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke;
equal parts rock & roll novelist, screenwriter, journalist and
serial killer. I offer my hand to each man and introduce myself.

Tom
Holland (TH): Hiya, kid!

David
J. Schow (DJS): Arrow in the Head! I go there all the time…great
site!

Thank
you! Wow, I’ve got both of you guys here.

DJS
– Yeah, we’ll make sure to interrupt each other.

Awesome…I
can’t wait to transcribe this later and see if I can make heads or
tales of it.

DJS
– (laughs) Good luck! It’ll be like: “Did he say…suck my
what?”

The
first thing I know pretty much every one of our readers is going to
want to know is where has Tom Holland been for the last ten years? I
think I speak for the majority of horror fans when I say that
you’ve been missed.

TH
– Thank you…that’s incredibly kind. I’ll try to make it
really simple. I’ve got Belles Palsy…and half my face slid-off,
and…they can talk about how it’s a fuckin’ virus and it’s
not a bad thing…it was God-awful! And if you look at me in any
pictures now you’ll find one eye, the left eye, is always smaller
than the right, and when I get tired, the eye-lid droops…(Tom runs a finger around his eye-socket) and I’m frozen around the
eye here and I’m frozen here…I have no feeling and no control
over the muscles. When that happened…I just didn’t feel like
leaving the house. It took me about eighteen months for it to start
to come back to where there was some…solidity, and psychologically
it really had a bad effect on me. It kicked the hell out of me. And
then I turn around I was offered a whole bunch of low budget horror
films, and I wasn’t gonna do that…so you know, one thing led to
another.

Did
you turn down anything good?

TH
– When I was hot I turned down a lot of things that ended up being
good…but anyway… now here we are!

So
what’s ‘We All Scream For Ice Cream’ all about?

TH
– It’s a childhood dream. Some kids play a prank when they’re
like nine or ten…on Buster (William Forsythe), the ice cream man,
who’s a sweet, wonderful retard…or “mentally deficient” as
they say in PC-land. They let the brake go on his truck, thinking
it’s gonna roll away and he’s gonna chase after it, instead it
runs over him and kills him. The kids carry this guilt with them
into adulthood until one day; the ice cream man comes back from the
dead to exact revenge.

DJS
– It’s kind of a sins-of-our-fathers story turned on its
ear…ah, where in a conventional horror story you’re supposed to
sympathize with these grown-up kids but once you reach the mid-point
in the story your going “Hey wait a minute…that was kind of
mean”, but an aspect of that is that the innate sadism of children
is not always malign…you know what I mean? It’s like kids
do…they don’t know any better…usually kids find out the first
time they mistreat a pet, “If you do that you’ll hurt the puppy,
so don’t do that”…unless of course you’re a sick psychopath
and you grow-up to stack bodies like cords of wood in your basement,
then…

TH
– David’s in love with serial killers…

DJS
– I’m in love with a
serial killer…but let’s not go into that. So Layne, our main
character…our protagonist…he’s very sympathetic. He made a
mistake and he’s kind of been in denial of that mistake for years
and years and years and now he’s moved back to town and Buster’s
come back to bite him on the ass. If this movie would have been made
in 1983, it would have been the start of a franchise.

Hey
you never know. Maybe we can get a spin-off feature

TH
– Buster will return with Buster’s army of the living dead!

DJS
– There you go!

David,
was this something that you brought
to Mick Garris as a possible ‘Masters’ story?

DJS
– Yeah, I was literally on another trip and I got off the plane
and went right into the ‘Masters’ production office and the
producers were sitting around the office and they were like, “What
do you have?” and I knew this story by John Farris and in very
much the same way as Halloween started with someone looking at John
Carpenter and saying two words: babysitter murders…right? It was
sort of the same thing, I said “Evil clown” and Andrew Deane the
Executive Producer lit up and was like “Buy it!” and here we
are!

So
Tom, how did you get involved with Masters of Horror?

TH
– They sent me the…well for one, a lot of my friends and fans
started asking me why I wasn’t doing one, and just about the time
I started to get resentful that nobody had asked…they asked!…and
they sent me this, and I fell in love with it. It’s that chant,
it’s that jingle; “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice
cream” because we all did it. It seems to go through
generations…so I though, well…this is gonna have a wide appeal,
because everybody’s gone out as a kid in the summer and chased the
ice-cream man. It’s gonna be recognized by a lot of people of all
ages. But, at the same time, it was the characters…it had a real
character arcs…it had an emotional voice so it wasn’t just
graphic-horror…not that there’s anything wrong with
graphic-horror and terror but it’s nicer when it’s matched with
emotional complexity.

So
there’s a little bit more substance to it rather than just hack
and slash.

TH
– Absolutely!

DJS
– Of course we’re talking about our own project here so we could
be totally bullshitting you.

TH
– It could be fuckin’ awful.

DJS
– You might look at it and go “Lame!”

You
two seem like a great team. Is it common on ‘Masters’ to have
the Writer and the Director together on set?

DJS
– Tom invited me in to like, a really extreme degree…in fact the
producers said no writers have had this much access to the
production floor on any episode ever…except for me on my last
show, “Pick Me Up” with Larry Cohen…but Tom was the guy who
invited me to casting and make-up meetings and sought my opinion on
other things so in a lot of ways…in a minor key…in a small way,
I’ve also been Tom’s second set of eyes on things.

One
more thing I wanted to ask…with being away from the work for so
many years and now coming back, especially to horror, what’s it
like being back behind the camera?

TH
– I feel sharper than ever.

Do
you have anything in the works after your ‘Masters’ episode
wraps? Anything we can look forward to?

TH
– Yeah…I’ve got a project I’m pretty jazzed about called
“Simian” and it’s (Tom
looks across the table to
David Schow, they share a devilish smile. Tom pulls back and playfully
dangles a carrot)…you know I think horror fans are gonna love
it…but that’s all I’ll say right now.

No
tidbits? No morsels to whet our appetites?

TH
– Fans are gonna love it.

And
with those final words my visit to the Vancouver set of Masters of
Horror drew to a close. Tom and David got called back to set for
rehearsals and sadly, it was my time to leave as well. I had the
chance to ask Tom when we might expect his episode to go-to-air as I
walked with him towards video-village and he simply threw-up his
shoulders; “Ask Garris” he replied as he quickly doused his
cigarette.

We shook hands and I thanked him for his time just as
Buster the Clown himself, William Forsythe, stepped-up between us
and politely stole Tom away with a question regarding his blocking
for the scene. I took one long, last look around the fantastic
snow-covered set before I sank back into the thick stand of pines
and snuck through the wardrobe and back to reality once more.

While
I didn’t have the opportunity to take Tom Holland’s advice and
ask Mick Garris about the air-date of “We All Scream For Ice
Cream” before I left (there
is no hard and fast rule as to the order that these
suckers run, basically it’s which ever finishes first) I was
told by Unit Publicist Bill Vigars that the second season will
bow sometime in October on Showtime in the US, right around the same
time shooting wraps on the still-shrouded-in-secrecy and
all-too-coveted thirteenth and final episode of the season, rumored
once again to be internationally flavored ala last seasons much
ballyhooed Takashi Miikie entry ‘Imprint’.