William Malone Bio: Feardotcom Director

Fascinated by sci-fi and fantasy films since he was a child, William Malone used an 8mm camera to create his first movies when he was only 14 years old. Malone started right away taking a hand in every aspect of production for these early films; he even designed the costumes.

At the age of 19, he moved to Los Angeles to attend cinema lectures at UCLA. His creativity stood him well as he obtained his first job in features—drawing and modeling monster masks for Don Post’s FX studio, including the Michael Myers mask in the original Halloween. His ambitions were greater than just creating props for other people’s films, however, and led him to sell his car and mortgage his house to raise $80,000 to finance his first feature, Scared to Death (1982). He not only produced, directed and wrote the screenplay, but appeared in the film in a minor role. Although it wasn’t a huge hit, it reached Number 16 on the Box Office charts, which was enough to encourage him to go on to produce, write and direct a second feature, the suspense film The Creature (1985).

Hollywood began to take notice of Malone’s ability to create suspense and terror, and over the next few years he landed assignments directing episodes of television series such as Freddy’s Nightmares; Tales from the Crypt; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show; Perversions of Science; The Others and the TV movie W.E.I.R.D. World. In 1988, he made his only other acting appearance in the television series, The Incredible Hulk Returns. Not one to let his multi-talents go to waste, he worked on the creature design for the feature Sygenor in 1990 and was one of the writers on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1999 feature Universal Solder: The Return.

Also in 1999, Malone returned to directing for the big screen with the blockbuster House on Haunted Hill. In 2000, he co-wrote the story for the feature Supernova. He once again returned to the director’s chair in 2002 with the thriller FearDotCom.

Malone is an avid movie memorabilia collector, with props from Alien (1979) and MGM’s classic Forbidden Planet (1956) amongst his most treasured possessions.

Filmography:

FearDotCom(2002)
House on Haunted Hill(1999)
Creature(1985)
Scared to Death (1982)