Holland was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of Lee and Tom Holland. Holland attended Ossining Public High School before transferring to Worcester Academy where he graduated in 1962. He is the father of American actor Josh Holland.Holland attended the UCLA School of Law, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He also received his Juris Doctorate from the UCLA School of Law.
In explaining why he chose not to pursue a promising legal career:”I had just taken the Bar Exam and I was waiting for my results, which at the time took three months to post. At the same time I received word that a treatment I had written had been optioned. As a struggling actor I had become used to being poor, so I decided to pursue my passion to create rather than litigate. And I’ve never really looked back.”
Holland did pass the Bar Exam on his first attempt and has been a member of the California Bar Association since 1973.
During the early days of his career in New York and Hollywood, Holland worked on over 200 commercials as means of learning the craft of film making and supporting his family.
“In the beginning I did everything, worked as a Grip, Loader, PA, what have you. In my mind I was always working toward directing feature films and so I decided early on that any job I could take on a working set would give me the tools to make my own films.”
Holland trained as an actor at the world famous Actor’s Studio under the tutelage of the legendary Lee Strasberg. Throughout the 60’s and early 70’s Holland appeared under the moniker of Tom Fielding in several supporting and guest star roles for both TV and Film, including A Walk in the Spring Rain alongside Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman.
In December 2009 Holland was cast for Adam Green’s Hatchet 2, who star alongside Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, and R.A. Mihailoff. He narrated the film Hatchet II alongside Adam Green on San Diego Comic-Con International 2010. In an interview published in January 2011 with mondo-video.com, Holland shared some stories about his acting days, which included working with legendary actress Ingrid Bergman, and martial arts expert, Bruce Lee.
He founded alongside his compatriot David Chackler the horror film company Dead Rabbit Films.
On directing, he would be famous for writing and directing twisted tales ordinary people facing the unknown and evil beings from beyond. He began by writing the scripts of the films The Beast Within and Psycho II, followed later by directing Fright Night, Child’s Play, and the TV films The Stranger Within and The Langoliers. The only non horror film he made was the crime comedy-drama Fatal Beauty.
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 Frights, 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.
