Richard Stanley

Richard Stanley is a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. 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. 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. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space. Career Early career (1983–1987) 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. 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.