From the 26th – 30th August the much loved genre film festival Arrow Video FrightFest will return to its home at Cineworld Leicester Square. The twenty-second edition of the event will mark the first physical version of the festival since Glasgow 2019. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, last year’s summer and Halloween events had to move online and play out in the virtual arena. As hard as everyone tried to generate the same experience, with the FrightFest crowd all being remotely separated from one another, it just didn’t have the same atmosphere. This will soon all change as friends of fear-inducing films can once more sit together in the dark and scare themselves silly. With over sixty films on the line-up there is bound to be something for everyone, and in the days leading up to the festival we’ve been speaking with the cast and crew of several of this year’s offerings.
The Last Rite will debut at FrightFest on Saturday 28th on the Discovery Screens, playing as part of the First Blood selection. The strand of programming celebrates the best and most innovative of fresh new genre creators and The Last Rite exemplifies this perfectly. It’s a story about demonic possession, but not quite how you might expect. The man behind the project is Leroy Kincaide, a filmmaker with a history in undertaking. Now to me, someone who has worked as an undertaker sounds like the perfect person to conjure up a film to scare the FrightFest masses. The writer and director also spent ten years of his professional life working in the WWE before branching out into feature making, so his working career certainly isn’t lacking in variety. Furthermore, Kincaide is one of five nominees for this year’s Genre Rising Star, which makes The Last Rite a film not to be missed.
Ahead of the world premiere at Arrow Video FrightFest I sat down and spoke to Leroy to learn more about the film’s journey, his own journey from undertaker to wrestler to director, and to find out exactly how he feels to be nominated for the Rising Star award.
The Last Rite will receive its world premiere at Arrow Video FrightFest on Saturday 28th August 2021. Tickets for the festival can be purchased on the FrightFest website.
