Jeremiah Kipp

Jeremiah Kipp died at about 3 a.m. on Tuesday 13 October 2026. The news was made public by the Long Island International Film Expo in a statement on Facebook, which said it had been told by Lindsay Katt, his life partner of seven years, that he had "left this plane of existence". His age, the place of death and the cause of death were not made public.

The Expo, which had honoured him with a Creative Achievement Award at its virtual ceremony in 2020, described him as a talented filmmaker and "a gentle soul who was always generous with advice and sharing his knowledge of cinema", adding that he left behind many friends and an important legacy of work. Dread Central, Bloody Disgusting, iHorror, Rue Morgue and other genre outlets reported his death on 15 and 16 October, noting that The Mortuary Assistant had reached audiences only months earlier.

Jeremiah Kipp grew up in Rhode Island, spending much of his childhood with his grandparents in a house deep in the woods. He later recalled that his grandparents always made sure there was pen and paper to hand and read stories to him, so he drew, painted and began writing stories of his own. After answering a newspaper advertisement to appear in a play, he had a short spell as a child actor.

When he was 12 his family bought a VHS camcorder to record weddings and family gatherings, and he realised that filmmaking combined everything he loved: the visuals of drawing, the narrative of writing and the performance of acting. He made hundreds of backyard films with his friends, dressing them in old clothes as zombies and turning his grandfather into a monster. He went on to study filmmaking at New York University.

Kipp settled in New York. Starting around 1999 he wrote film reviews and interviewed filmmakers for print magazines and websites including Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Shock Cinema, MovieMaker, Fangoria and Filmcritic.com, an experience he credited with teaching him a great deal about cinema. He refused to separate genre writing from serious criticism, arguing that B movies were often more subversive than A movies.

Behind the camera he worked as a second unit or assistant director on independent genre films including I Sell the Dead, Satan Hates You and Tales of Poe, and he was closely associated with Larry Fessenden and the New York production company Glass Eye Pix. He directed a long series of short films, among them The Pod, starring Fessenden, Siren, Dark Roads, Don't Pick Up, with Keith David and Kathryn Erbe, Draw Up and Stare, with Michael O'Keefe and Melissa Leo, and The Christmas Party. The experimental short The Avant Gardener, made with Lindsay Katt, Heather Matarazzo and Carl Byrd, won the Experimental Grand Prize at Flickers Rhode Island in 2017, and his work on Pickup won the Best Television Award at the HollyShorts Film Festival in 2018. His feature horror debut was The Sadist, starring Tom Savini, and his later credits included the horror and science fiction hybrid Black Wake and The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story.

Slapface started as a 2017 short film inspired by a passage in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the creature circles a farmhouse imagining the lives inside, and by elements of his grandfather's abusive childhood, including the slapping game that gave the film its title. The feature version, which he wrote and directed, starred August Maturo, Mike Manning, Libe Barer, Mirabelle Lee and Dan Hedaya, with Lukas Hassel as the creature. It was shot in the Hudson Valley in late 2019, premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival on 20 March 2021, where it won the Audience Award for thriller, horror or science fiction features, and played Arrow Video FrightFest before Shudder released it on 3 February 2022.

In September 2022 DreadXP and Epic Pictures announced that Kipp would direct a film of Brian Clarke's 2022 video game The Mortuary Assistant. Starring Willa Holland as a newly qualified embalmer and Paul Sparks as her mentor, it opened in theaters on 13 February 2026 and arrived on Shudder in March. To prepare, he interviewed young women with degrees in mortuary science and was moved by how they spoke of caring for the dead. In 2026 he also directed Faceless for the Cambodian company Sastra Film International, from a story by its founder Bun Channimol, and he was preparing The Housewife, starring Devon Sawa.

Kipp lived and worked in New York. At the time of his death his life partner of seven years was the actor and filmmaker Lindsay Katt, with whom he had also collaborated on screen. He was a longtime alumnus of the Long Island International Film Expo and its Scared for Your LIIFE horror programme. Colleagues and festival organisers remembered him as kind, gentle and unusually generous with advice to younger filmmakers. Among the films that frightened him most he named John Carpenter's The Thing, and he called working with its star Keith David a dream come true.

Kipp's career showed how a filmmaker could build a body of work almost entirely outside the studio system, through dozens of shorts, festival runs and close collaboration with New York's independent horror community. Slapface in particular was praised for treating horror as a vehicle for grief, loneliness and abuse, and for giving its monster real tenderness, an idea he returned to throughout his work. The Mortuary Assistant brought him the widest audience of his career in the final year of his life, and Faceless, completed before his death, was expected to follow.