Filmmaker Jeremiah Kipp, who directed the 2024 video game adaptation The Mortuary Assistant, has died. The Long Island International Film Expo announced his passing in a statement, saying Kipp died in the early hours of Tuesday, October 13, and attributing the news to his longtime partner, Lindsay Katt. No cause of death has been shared.
Kipp built his career on a steady run of short films before moving into features, developing a stripped-down, character-driven approach to horror that carried through his filmography. His feature debut, The Sadist, established that sensibility, and he returned to it with Slapface, an expansion of his own short film that premiered on Shudder in 2021 and folded coming-of-age drama into creature-horror dread. The Mortuary Assistant, adapted from the acclaimed horror video game of the same name, became his highest-profile feature; Kipp spoke with Rue Morgue around its release about finding the right approach and cast for translating the game’s dread to the screen. Across his career, Kipp also built a steady presence on the North American independent film festival circuit, where his shorts and features found an audience well before any studio attention.
Beyond directing, Kipp kept up a parallel career writing about film, with credits including Senses of Cinema, a cinephile streak that seemed to feed directly into his own work behind the camera. At the time of his death, he had been in pre-production on The Housewife, a new feature starring Devon Sawa; what becomes of the project isn’t yet known.
The Expo, which gave Kipp its Creative Achievement Award in 2020, added simply that “Jeremiah was a talented filmmaker.” Tributes from collaborators and genre fans continue to surface online as word spreads through the independent horror community he spent decades contributing to.
