Richard Wolstencroft: Hellfire Club, MUFF, and the Name Richard Masters

Richard Wolstencroft, born 23 April 1969, is an Australian filmmaker who does not sit in one box. He founded and directed the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), and in the 1990s he built Hellfire Club, Melbourne’s main BDSM venue. Grindhouse cinema and a dungeon club put him where erotic extremity and underground film met. The public record braids exploitation cinema, festival politics, illegal screenings, and later culture-war statements. For local kink history, the Hellfire chapter is the piece that lasted.

In 1992 he opened his film career with the vampire feature Bloodlust, co-directed with Jon Hewitt. The same year, under the name Richard Masters, he opened Hellfire Club. For most of the 1990s it was Melbourne’s only dedicated BDSM and kink venue. The play inside was between adults who had agreed to it. Starting a grindhouse film and a dungeon club in the same year put him at the front of Melbourne’s underground culture.

The film turn came in 1999 with Pearls Before Swine, starring industrial musician Boyd Rice, a man often discussed in connection with neo-Nazi associations. The Melbourne International Film Festival rejected the picture, and in 2000 Wolstencroft founded MUFF as an outlet for alternative, exploitation, genre, and political cinema. He later directed The Beautiful and Damned (2008), The Second Coming (2015), and The Second Coming: Volume 2 (2016). As of 2022 he was still MUFF’s director.

Legal fights and programming fights stacked up on the festival. In 2001 MUFF planned to screen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and had to cancel when it could not get Australian Classification Board permission. In 2003 Wolstencroft scheduled a lecture recording by Holocaust denier David Irving. Australian Jewish groups failed to win a court injunction. Wolstencroft himself pulled the item hours before showtime. In 2010 he organized an illegal screening of L.A. Zombie. After trial, Melbourne Magistrates’ Court ordered him to pay 750 Australian dollars to the Royal Children’s Hospital, far under the theoretical maximum of a 20,000-dollar fine and up to two years in prison. Police searched his home after the screening. That is the public record of what happened. It is not a method for screening a banned film.

In 2017, reacting to Australia’s marriage-equality vote, he posted on Facebook that homosexuality is “created often by child abuse,” and that the public had been “fooled, bullied and cajoled” by government and media elites. That causal claim is what he wrote. It is not an established fact. He apologized in public, implied he would resign as MUFF director, and was back in the job the next year. The episode made him a polarizing festival figure well beyond the history of a BDSM venue.

Early reviews split. Karl Quinn, in Cinema Papers, called Bloodlust appalling and plotless. Mark David Ryan later called Wolstencroft a key figure in 2000s horror production. Adrian Martin dismissed Pearls Before Swine as grandly pretentious and a bad film. SBS critic Simon Foster gave the documentary The Last Days of Joe Blow three and a half stars, and called it both jittery and impulsive and a revealing account.

In the 2010 Victorian state election he backed the Sex Party and spoke at a launch. He has described his politics as a mix of left and right, voiced support for the alt-right and for Donald Trump, and labeled himself a “transcendental fascist” and an “Australian Milo Yiannopoulos.” A 2010 blog post claimed the Nazis “only wanted a united Europe like the EU” and that Hitler would have protected the British Empire “if he had been allowed to.” Many readers take those lines as Nazi sympathy. They sit in permanent tension with his earlier ownership of a large kink-club brand next to queer nightlife.

Readers tracking Australian dungeon history still need Hellfire Club under the name Richard Masters. For most of the 1990s it was Melbourne’s kink room of record. MUFF’s extreme-cinema brand, the fights over Salò and L.A. Zombie, and the later political scandals belong to the same biography. For local leather memory they come second to the club. Both facts can stand: he built a real BDSM venue, and he was a festival director whose politics and programming kept courting maximum conflict.