When you think about it, the Mummy is a weird horror movie monster. Dracula? Wolf Man? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? All those make sense, with their teeth and their claws. But the mummy is a dead guy in bandages, who chases you really, really slowly if you dig him up. How bad is that? The most famous Mummy movies handle that problem by making horror secondary to other genres, a gothic romance in 1932 and Indiana Jones style adventure in 1999.
But if the first trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is any indication, the Irish director of Evil Dead Rise isn’t having any of that. The 65-second long teaser for the new Blumhouse flick is all Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style flash bulks and sharp noises, set to the sound of someone chanting in a foreign language that may not be “Klaatu barada nikto” but it sure is close. There’s even a kid smashing in his face with an intensity that would make the Philippou brothers jealous. The teaser ends with the question “What happened to Katie?” indicating that Cronin’s take will be neither romance nor adventure, but pure terror.
While the director has his name in the title probably to distinguish this picture from the fourth entry in the Brendan Fraser Mummy series, which is currently in pre-production, it also serves to underscore how different Cronin’s take seems to be. The director established himself as an expert in creeping family-based horror with his 2019 debut The Hole in the Ground, and then supercharged in 2023 with Evil Dead Rise.
With The Mummy, Cronin plans to add some new tools to his horror kit. “The movie itself really is a mystery and it’s a puzzle box, which was part of my draw towards it,” he told IGN. “I think for me what’s really interesting and exciting, certainly even from childhood and being drawn towards Egyptian lore and that entire world, is the secrets that exist and the hidden things. So the movie that I wanted to make was reflective of that idea of deep, buried secrets and things we may not know about. This movie is coming from a very different place, and it’s not even a reinvention of mummy lore; it’s looking into darker places and doing something different with what we think we might already know.”
