We are very happy to announce the arrival of director and screenwriter Richard Stanley to this year’s Grossmann Festival where he will head the feature film jury.

Richard Stanley is one of the last true mavericks of horror cinema. He tested his craft in several shorts and in music videos for Fields of the Nephilim and Public Image Limited before he brought a fresh and uniquely apocalyptic vision in his feature debut, Hardware (1990). Its success led to Dust Devil (1992), a true masterpiece of the supernatural disguised behind horror's most despised subgenre, slasher. But slasher is here a mask, just like SF was in Hardware. Behind it lies a metaphysical questioning of the roots of material and spiritual existence, dressed in imagery borrowed and shapeshifted from Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and Tarkovsky's surreal ruminations.

Stanley's restless spirit took him all over the world in search for the meaning behind the veils of appearances. In vivo, and through his documentaries, he has investigated various esoteric traditions: Afghanistan mountain folklore in Voice of the Moon (1990), Nazi occultism and its links with the legends of the Holy Grail and the Cathars in The Secret Glory (2001), Haitian voodoo practices in The White Darkness (2002) and, ultimately, a further investigation of the Cathar beliefs in The Otherworld (2014).

Two segments in recent horror anthologies, "The Mother of Toads" in The Theatre Bizarre (2011) and "Coltan" in the still unreleased The Profane Exhibit (2015?), signal his return to filmmaking which should come in fool bloom with his announced feature length adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space.

We will pay tribute to this unique filmmaker with a special retrospective of his films and a screening of David Gregory's documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. There will also be a special master class, moderated by Serbian writer and critic Dejan Ognjanović who has also contributed an in-depth article on Stanley for our website and program booklet and was partly used in this article.

More information on Grossmann 2015 here:
http://www.grossmann.si