Simon Rumley, the horror director who turned grief into cinema and now bets on AI

Simon Rumley

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 22, 1968 London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	The ABCs of Death, Red White & Blue, The Living and the Dead
Awards	2 Fantastic Fest · Sitges Film Festival · Fantasia International Film Festival

Simon Rumley makes films that are hard to sit through, and he has never pretended otherwise. His characters include a schizophrenic son left alone with his dying mother and a priest searching the back streets of Bangkok for his kidnapped daughter. Screen International once called him one of the great British cinematic outsiders, a label he earned at genre festivals and in small releases rather than in multiplexes. So his newest project reads strangely on paper: Rumley is writing and directing an adaptation of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild that will be generated largely by artificial intelligence.

His best work came out of private damage and real places, filmed close and without much protection for the viewer. Whether that instinct survives when the snow and the dog are made by software is the open bet behind the project.

Rumley was born in London on 22 May 1968 and came into the industry at the bottom, as a runner, writing scripts on the side. A place on the Carlton Television Writing Course followed, along with a handful of short films, one of which, Laughter, was nominated for an award at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. His first three features, Strong Language, The Truth Game and Club Le Monde, were low-budget London dramas; the first two were released through the BFI at the National Film Theatre, where they were noted for their intensity and their search for emotional honesty.

Then his life broke his style open. His parents died within a short time of each other, his father of a heart attack and his mother of cancer in 2002. Rumley has said that watching her die was the starting point for The Living and the Dead, which he shot in 2005 on the Savernake Estate with Roger Lloyd-Pack, Leo Bill and Kate Fahy. The film, about an aristocrat facing ruin, his terminally ill wife and their schizophrenic son, turns a family tragedy into something close to horror. It premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, won Best Film and Best Director at Fantastic Fest in Austin, and Variety described it as near brilliant. In the same period his short The Handyman, starring Greta Scacchi, won Best Short Film at Sitges.

Austin became a second home for his work. Red White & Blue, shot there with Noah Taylor, Amanda Fuller and Marc Senter, starts as a portrait of a lonely woman picking up strangers in bars and turns into a revenge story about HIV, guilt and cruelty. Rumley has linked it to his own fear of what one-night stands could cost. It premiered in Rotterdam in 2010, played SXSW and won the Séquences Award at Montreal’s Fantasia festival. He followed it with the closing segment of the British anthology Little Deaths and with P Is for Pressure, his chapter of The ABCs of Death, which he filmed in Suriname and which reached the Midnight Madness section in Toronto in 2012.

The next phase brought American money and true stories. Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word, produced by Frank Mancuso Jr. and starring Sean Patrick Flanery, built a curse thriller around a Texas man executed for the murder of a nun; it opened at SXSW in 2016. Fashionista reunited him with Amanda Fuller as a vintage clothing seller in Austin whose marriage and sense of self come apart, a deliberately fractured film in which Rumley has acknowledged the influence of Nicolas Roeg. Crowhurst told the story of Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who entered the 1968 round-the-world race and never came home, with Justin Salinger in the lead and Roeg himself as executive producer, decades after Roeg had tried to film the story. Once Upon a Time in London, in 2019, moved to the postwar gangland of Jack Comer and Billy Hill.

The outsider label flatters Rumley, but it also describes a career that has often been fought on unequal terms. Crowhurst arrived in the same season as The Mercy, James Marsh’s far larger film about the same voyage, starring Colin Firth, and the smaller film struggled for attention; The Hollywood Reporter called it an intriguing curio and a minor addition to what it described as his mind-bending canon. The same paper had dismissed Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word as a schlocky fright flick, even as Variety credited it with juggling eerie restraint and grotesque frenzy with confidence. Rumley himself has been blunter about the business than any critic. In a 2023 interview with Southwark News he said he had had too many bad experiences making feature films, with projects recut badly, buried or mismanaged, and that after his 2019 release he took a sabbatical from directing.

He spent it writing a novel. The Wobble Club, crowdfunded and published in 2023, follows a morbidly obese couple off the Walworth Road in south-east London, a few minutes from the flat in Borough where Rumley has lived since 2002, and it starts as comedy before sliding towards the dark places his films know well.

The break did not last. Crushed, which he wrote, directed and produced, expands his short for The ABCs of Death into a feature about a British priest in Bangkok, played by Steve Oram, whose daughter disappears after a local teenager shows her a viral video of animal cruelty. It had its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August 2025 and then played FrightFest in London. Reviews split along familiar lines: Nerdly praised his eye for the city and his talent behind the camera but argued that a lack of sincerity left the film short of its ambitions, while other critics found it disturbing for its own sake.

In September 2026, Deadline reported the project that changes the conversation. David Barron, a producer on six Harry Potter films, is producing The Call of the Wild with Mark Sandell and Nick Price, with Rumley writing and directing. The film is to be generated at the studio nmatic, with conventional visual effects for the most complex scenes, and is billed as the first faithful adaptation of London’s novel because it will be built from the subjective experience of Buck, the dog at its centre. No cast, release date or distributor has been announced.

For a director who spent more than two decades proving that cheap films could still wound, the test is specific. Rumley has always made audiences feel what his characters feel at close range. In The Call of the Wild that character is an animal, and the images will come from a machine; if the film works, it will be because he found a way to make an image generator see the world the way his films always have.