Mike Fleming

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.