Richard Stanley

Richard Stanley is a South African director who works mostly in horror and got his start as a teenager, making shorts in a high school filmmakers' workshop; his first, Rites of Passage, won a student film award in 1984. He later moved to London, where he directed music videos for bands such as Fields of the Nephilim, and he traveled to Afghanistan to shoot the documentary Voice of the Moon. His first feature was the science fiction film Hardware (1990), followed by the supernatural horror Dust Devil (1992). He was originally hired to direct The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) but was dismissed shortly after filming began, an episode told in the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau (2014). Documentaries, short films and screenwriting filled the years before Color Out of Space (2020), his return to features, drew praise.