Richard Stanley

Richard Stanley is a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre.

In the mid-1980s, Stanley began work on two more shorts.

In a Season of Soft Rains was another Futuristic journey, but a majority of the footage has been lost.

Dust Devil was his first work on 16 mm.

Inspired by a series of unsolved murders in Namibia, this short was unfinished but footage can be viewed on the Subversive Cinema DVD release of the feature Dust Devil.

In the late 1980s Stanley traveled to Afghanistan to document the Soviet–Afghan War.

Stanley and his crew witnessed the Soviet Army's withdrawal and the country's slide into the civil war that would bring the Taliban to power.

The resulting documentary, Voice of the Moon, is a 30-minute look at the daily lives of the Afghan people trying to survive.

Stanley was present at the siege of Jalalabad, and the events surrounding his escape from the country, along with his wounded camera man, Immo Horn, later formed the basis of the screenplay Addicted to Danger, by Sebastian Junger.

The documentary is available on the Subversive Cinema DVD release of the feature Dust Devil.

The short eventually won Stanley the IAC International Student Film Trophy film award in 1984.

Stanley followed his first success with the ambitious 45-minute 8 mm short Incidents in an Expanding Universe.

Set in a future dystopia, the film laid the groundwork for Stanley's cyberpunk feature debut Hardware.

It won the IAC Gold Seal Award and was eventually made available on the Severin DVD release of Hardware.

Following the move to London, England, Stanley began working in music videos in 1987.

He directed videos for bands including Fields of the Nephilim, Pop Will Eat Itself, and Renegade Soundwave.

He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics.

Stanley made his feature film directing debut with the post-apocalyptic science fiction film Hardware in 1990.

The film included cameos by musicians Iggy Pop, Carl McCoy and Lemmy.

Shot for approximately £960,000, it was eventually picked up by the Weinstein brothers and released theatrically in the United States through their early Millimeter Films division.

Stanley returned to his South African roots with the supernatural horror film Dust Devil in 1992.

He intended it to be his first film, having written the screenplay for it when he was 16 years old.

In 1994, Stanley directed a 50-minute length video for Marillion's concept album, Brave, which has since been released on DVD.

He would later disown the end result, claiming the material was re-edited to cover the overall running time without his consent.

He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.

Stanley's next project was the third major movie version of the H.G. Wells novel The Island of Doctor Moreau for New Line Cinema in 1996.

An ambitious project attempting to stay true to the source material, the film's production was fraught with problems from the start, with Stanley being undercut by his belligerent lead actors, suspicious studio and a sudden burst of bad weather; he was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer a week after shooting began.

Stanley completed The Secret Glory – an examination of SS officer Otto Rahn's search for the Holy Grail – in 2001 and The White Darkness – a look at the voodoo practices in Haiti – in 2002.

Children of the Kingdom appeared in the short-film collection Europe - 99euro-films 2 in 2003.

The full director's cut was officially released on DVD by Subversive Cinema in September 2006.

Following several festival screenings, both documentaries appeared in the Dust Devil DVD box-set, released by Subversive Cinema in 2006.

Stanley's cinematic efforts include a number of short films.

The science fiction story The Sea of Perdition premiered in October 2006 at the Festival de Cine de Sitges, and has since been made available online and on the 2009 Severin DVD release of Hardware.

The werewolf short Black Tulips premiered online in September 2008.

Stanley was a contributing writer-director to the 2011 omnibus The Theatre Bizarre, with an adaptation of the short story "Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith.

The details of Stanley's involvement in the film, which ultimately veered far from his original vision, are captured in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.

In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.

Stanley's first foray into film making began in high school where he joined the Young Filmmaker's Workshop.

Here he created his first film, Rites of Passage.

Shot on super-8 stock, the 10-minute short film draws comparisons between modern man and primitive man.