Fright Night Director/Writer Tom Holland To Make Stephen King Movie

The Ten O'clock People

I loved the original Fright Night movie. It had thrills, it had chills and it had things you had to believe in if you didn't want to get eaten alive. I'm reading over what I just typed. It's amazing (to me) the layers of meaning there, layers I didn't detect when I first watched the movie all those many years ago.

Horror Buff and writer/director of Fright Night (1985), Tom Holland has enthusiastically agreed to make Stephen King's Ten O'Clock People into a feature film.

Here is more from the press release:

Tom Holland has signed on to adapt and direct The Ten O’clock People, a feature adaptation of a short story by Stephen King. Holland and King previously collaborated on The Langoliers and Thinner. Holland took an extended hiatus, then returned to directing in 2007 in the Masters Of Horror series for Showtime. He’s writing and directing Twisted Tales, a series of shorts for FearNet, and plans for The Ten O’clock People to be his first theatrical  since Thinner, which King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

The Ten O’clock People comes from a short story published in King’s 1993 Nightmares And Dreamscapes collection. Set in Boston, the story follows Brandon Pearson, who in trying to kick his smoking habit uncovers a frightening aspect of reality that he plans to extinguish through extreme measures.


Holland said the tale was inspired by King’s own struggles with a smoking habit. “This was Stephen trying to deal with his cigarette jones and the fairly new no-smoking laws back in the ’90s,” Holland said. “This film will be a modernization of the original short story, a paranoid suspense piece.”

The film goes into production this summer, produced by Making Ten O’clock Productions and Holland’s Dead Rabbit Films with Nathaniel Kramer and E.J. Meyers producing.
- Stephen King’s ‘The Ten O’Clock’ People Gets Feature Treatment From Tom Holland

The last adaptation of King's work that I watched was Bag of Bones with Pierce Brosnan. I had big hopes for that mini series but--although I love King's stories and Pierce Brosnan's acting--was a bit disappointed. I think sometimes I underestimate the challenges involved in bringing one of King's stories to the screen.

From what I've read of this movie, though, my hopes for a great spine-chilling take of horror and redemption are very high.

Cheers.

Related Links:
- The Ten O'clock People is included in  Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
- Stephen King: 15 tips on how to become a better writer
- Quotes From The Master of Horror, Stephen King
- Stephen King's Doctor Sleep: Release delayed