December 8, 2009

Hot on the heels of last week’s casting news that Danielle Harris would be playing the role of Marybeth in Adam Green’s recently announced Hatchet 2, we now exclusively have two more names for you from the cast!

And for fellow die-hard horror fans, they’re both pretty darned cool.

Both AJ Bowen (The Signal, The House Of The Devil) and Tom Holland (yes, the director of Fright Night) are the latest additions to the cast of the production which begins shooting early next month.

“This whole thing all started from the heart, so as a rule everyone involved with the Hatchet movies is strictly family and friends,” explains Green. “With AJ, obviously I loved him in The Signal and The House Of The Devil, and he really is a phenomenal actor. But when I met him through mutual friends outside of all the movie stuff and discovered what a normal great guy he is, I talked to him about the possibility of joining the Hatchet family and becoming part of the franchise. So I wrote the character of Layton with him in mind. We’re all thrilled to welcome him on board.”

AJ Bowen joins the cast as a hunter named Layton who Green tells us, “is part of a group that Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd) hires to go into the swamp to kill Victor Crowley.”

“I was really surprised and excited when Adam called me in to talk about Hatchet 2,” Bowen tells Shock. “To be offered the opportunity to join the family and the universe of this story is incredibly humbling. I’m a fan of just about every single person that’s working on this film in a big way and I literally can not wait to work with them. Growing up a huge Friday The 13th fan, I’m looking forward to meeting Kane Hodder’s Victor Crowley in the swamp.”

Coming out of acting retirement is Tom Holland, who will play Marybeth’s Uncle Bob, the brother of Robert Englund’s character from the first film and one of the lead roles of Hatchet 2. “Fright Night is a big influence on me,” says Green. “And from conversations I’ve had with Tom about that movie, he clearly gets how to make humor work with horror.”

Prior to writing and directing the horror classics Fright Night and Child’s Play, (as well as the Stephen King adaptations for Thinner and The Langoliers), Holland did quite a bit of acting under the stage name of Tom Fielding (also Tommy Lee Holland) and starred opposite Anthony Quinn in A Walk In The Spring Rain and even made an appearance on The Incredible Hulk TV series.

Hatchet 2, however, marks his first appearance in front of the camera as an actor in almost 25 years. (Not counting his brief cameo in The Stand.)

When asked if he was familiar with Green’s previous films, Holland says, “Well, Adam is a friend. We had met at a Masters of Horror dinner and I looked at his work and was impressed, especially with Spiral.”

“I could tell by listening to him, in the middle of all the gore and mayhem, he was an actor’s director,” continues Holland. “I started out as an actor, a fact I don’t talk about much, but did with Adam, but I never expected him to cast me in anything! I was really surprised, and of course, pleased. I think it will be a lot of fun to work with him.”

A quick scan over Hatchet 2‘s IMDB page reveals a few more names in the cast, one of note is actress Clare Grant who appeared in Green’s Star Wars themed short film Saber. While the IMDB isn’t exactly the most reliable source, Green confirmed that she is in fact in the movie playing the character of “Avery.”

As far as the tone of the Hatchet sequel, Green tells us “this one will not have as much humor as the first Hatchet. We were trying to get you to relate with all the characters in Part One and the quickest way to do that with anything is through comedy. But if you look at the first Hatchet film, it gradually gets darker and darker as it goes along so that by the end of it, it’s not quite as funny anymore. This one will pick up where the last one left off and will continue in that dark direction. Obviously the tone of the Hatchet world is all about good old fashioned slasher fun and the sense of humor that the first Hatchet film had was one of the things that endeared this huge fan base to it, so there will still be some laughs. But overall, things are gonna get a lot more intense across the board.”

“While Hatchet 2 will have less laughs, the gore will continue to push the boundaries and it’ll be even more in your face and over the top then in the first film,” he reiterates. “Making the first Hatchet film was a passion project and a dream come true, and the fact that the genre fans embraced it and championed it into the success that it became is just mind blowing. I mean this was a little indie film made by friends that had no studio support, no high priced marketing campaign, no TV commercials, no billboards… it literally had nothing behind it except for the fans rallying together. It was the fan’s support and word of mouth from our year and a half festival run that got Hatchet into theaters against all odds and then turned it into an epic win. So now five years later from the day we started shooting the first film, we’re so glad to get the band back together and pick up where we left off. The first day of shooting is just 25 days away and when Craig my A.D. yells ‘Pictures up on Hatchet 2‘ that first day, it’s going to be a very emotional moment for all of us who are a part of this.”

Adam Green returns to write and direct Hatchet 2, which stars Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, AJ Bowen, Tom Holland, Clare Grant, R.A. Mihailoff (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), Kathryn Fiore and Kane Hodder as Victor Crowley.