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Blackmore showcased her writer-director debut ‘Tales From The Lodge’.

Abigail Blackmore, writer-director of the comedy horror film Tales From The Lodge, has won the Screen FrightFest Genre Rising Star award for 2019.

Blackmore received the award at the Cineworld Leicester Square on Monday August 26, as part of the closing day of FrightFest.

Her debut feature Tales From The Lodge is set in an isolated English woodland dwelling, where five old university friends meet to scatter their drowned companion’s ashes.

Screen’s contributing editor Nikki Baughan, who judged the five-strong shortlisted, praised Blackmore as a filmmaker who “not only showcases vision and flair behind the camera,...

In this hide-and-seek suspense story, a usually capable woman is put on the back foot when she’s taunted by a ghostly adversary that turns out to be anything but supernatural.

“I’ll be eight minutes, tops,” says frazzled single mother and former Royal Marine Commando Sam, as she makes the foolhardy, fateful decision to leave her feverish five-month-old at home while she nips out for some medicine. When Sam is abducted and wakes up in a seemingly deserted industrial estate, the pressure is on to find an exit and get back to her baby.

Sam isn’t alone here. The industrial estate? That’ll be a military-hardware factory that produces all manner of bleeding-edge equipment, including autonomous gun-toting drones and, as Sam soon discovers, quantum stealth suits, which manipulate light waves to render their wearer invisible to the naked eye. Along with a long list of bad intentions, Sam...

Stars: Rebecca Rogers, Nathalie Buscombe, Laurence Saunders, Ian Sharp, Stephen Uppal, Vanessa Donovan, Imogen Irving, Amber Edgar, Billy Cooke | Written and Directed by Justin Edgar

Written and Directed by Justin Edgar, Stalked follows our main character, Sam, who is a single mom and a former marine who, on the way to get her baby some medicine from the pharmacy, is abducted only to find herself waking up in a deserted factory. When she tries to leave, however, she realises that all the ways out have been sealed up, and she’s stuck there, with her baby alone at home. She isn’t alone either. Something invisible is stalking her and she must use her military experience and utilise her skills in order to survive.

This plot alone immediately grabbed my interest. A survival-thriller is something I tend to enjoy. There are unnerving horror-style moments to be found here in the early stages,...

Nominees include Rebecca Rogers for her role in ‘Stalked’.

Four directors and one actor are on the five-person shortlist for the 2019 FrightFest Screen Genre Rising Star Award.

This year’s event is the 20th edition, and runs from August 22 to 26 at cinemas in Leicester Square, London.

Nominees for the Genre Rising Star award include Rebecca Rogers, who takes the lead role in Justin Edgar’s Stalked. Rogers plays Sam, a former Royal Marine Commando and single mother who wakes up disoriented in a deserted factory and must evade an invisible foe.

Writer-director-producer Fredi ‘Kruga’ Nwaka is nominated for his debut feature Are We Dead Yet?...