Lee Cronin’s The Mummy reimagines one of cinema’s most enduring monsters through the lens of a filmmaker known for atmospheric dread, emotional violence, and mythic horror.
Conceived as a bold new chapter in Universal’s ongoing effort to resurrect its classic monster universe, the film draws inspiration from both the 1932 original and the ancient‑curse mythology that has haunted popular culture for nearly a century.
Cronin approaches the material not as a spectacle‑driven adventure but as a psychological descent—an excavation of grief, obsession, and the terrifying persistence of the past. His vision is shaped by the same sensibilities that defined Evil Dead Rise: intimate human stakes, tactile supernatural menace, and a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead erode with unnerving ease.
Written and directed by Lee Cronin, the film marks a significant tonal shift for the franchise
Instead of leaning on the bombast of previous reboots, Cronin crafts a story rooted in character, atmosphere, and the slow, inevitable tightening of dread. His screenplay draws from archaeological history, ancient funerary rites, and the psychological weight of unearthing what should remain buried. The film’s significance lies in its reclamation of The Mummy as a horror property—an opportunity to restore the creature’s mythic terror while exploring the emotional vulnerabilities that make humans susceptible to ancient forces. Cronin’s approach positions the film as both a reinvention and a return to origins, honouring the monster’s legacy while carving out a distinctly modern identity.
The production embraces a grounded, tactile aesthetic: sand‑choked tombs, dimly lit excavation tunnels, and ritual chambers carved with symbols that seem to shift when unobserved. Cronin’s fascination with domestic spaces invaded by supernatural forces translates here into archaeological spaces invaded by human arrogance. The film’s emotional core is built around the idea that the past is not dead—it is waiting, listening, and hungry. By centring the narrative on flawed, haunted characters rather than invincible adventurers, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy becomes a story about the cost of disturbing ancient grief and the monstrous forms it can take.
Its significance within the broader monster canon is clear: it repositions The Mummy as a creature of sorrow as much as rage, a being whose resurrection is not merely a curse but a tragic echo of a life violently interrupted. Cronin’s film stands as a reminder that horror thrives not only in spectacle but in the quiet, suffocating spaces where memory and myth collide.
When a long‑sealed burial chamber is uncovered beneath the shifting sands of Saqqara, archaeologist Dr. Mara Ellison (played by Lupita Nyong’o) and her estranged colleague Daniel Mercer (Oscar Isaac) inadvertently awaken an ancient priestess, Amunet (Sofia Boutella), whose death was the result of a forbidden ritual erased from history. As Amunet’s spirit begins to reclaim her fragmented body, the desert erupts with supernatural phenomena—sandstorms that whisper, shadows that move against the light, and hieroglyphs that bleed.
With the boundaries between worlds collapsing, Mara and Daniel must confront their own buried pasts while racing to stop Amunet from completing the ritual that will restore her fully and unleash a plague of resurrection across the modern world. The film builds toward a harrowing confrontation in the heart of the necropolis, where the living and the dead collide in a battle shaped by grief, desire, and the terrible weight of history.
In Conversation with Lee Cronin
GENESIS
LEE CRONIN: One of the things for me that I enjoy about being a filmmaker is not necessarily knowing what’s around the corner. And I didn’t necessarily think making a movie about a mummy or a movie called THE MUMMY would be next up on my dance card until conversation started around the topic of how maybe there hasn’t been a truly terrifying version made before. That drew my interest in, but as always, I needed to find a story. And once I did that—I found a piece of lore, a set of characters I was interested in, a story that takes place at two different times around the same people—I started to get really engaged and involved with what this thing could become. And it’s always hard to quantify or put your finger on, but a story at that point, if it gets its claws under your skin like it’s got you, I find it hard to let go.
Lee Cronin during the filming of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
LEE CRONIN: With this film, I wanted to tell a story about a buried secret. The Mummy’s in Egyptian lore. They’re always about secrets, things that you discover later on, but I also knew it wasn’t going to be something that was going to take place over 3,000 or 4,000 years, even though there is lore and elements of this story that do have that depth buried in the mystery. There are connections that go back thousands and thousands of years, but the key story is about someone who goes missing and gets returned, not necessarily sooner than expected, but sooner than an entire lifetime having passed. So, it felt like investigating that mystery—being able to get under the skin of that—was going to be a really interesting part and a real point of difference in this movie, and something I’ve always loved and enjoyed.
LEVELS
LEE CRONIN: I wanted to tell something that had more than just an A narrative, but also had other things going on within the background. So, there is a big detective angle to this, which is maybe a little different to a conventional horror movie that you might watch, whilst also having a lot of the traditional haunted house elements at play. The movie in my mind as I approached it was some sort of combination between POLTERGEIST and SE7EN—SE7EN encapsulating the more hard-boiled detective side of things, and some of the darker body horror, too, and then POLTERGEIST in terms of the exceptional circumstances that are faced. And then with the family in this movie, POLTERGEIST was also a touchpoint for capturing the domestic relationships and also the heart that was in place between the family. I definitely wanted to mash up some really dark themes with some warmth. And I always think family is a great way into a story, especially a horror story, because it’s something that we can all identify with.
A MONSTER IN DAYLIGHT
LEE CRONIN: This movie is a monster movie and the creation of the monster in your movie is always of really great importance. One of the things I knew is that I wanted to put this monster in full daylight and for the audience to experience and for the family to experience something unknown, something that’s there, something that seems off, but hasn’t fully revealed itself yet. And again, the concept within the movie, it lent itself to this slow unbinding, versus a sudden explosion of horror right on your face. The design of the monster was inspired by this idea of a secret that’s buried. The layers have settled and—initially to the eye and the focus of the people who love Katie when she’s returned—it’s about making her better, healing her skin, healing her flesh, making her more comfortable. Finding a way to communicate with her, but not recognizing that some of the things that are apparently wrong with her are actually connected to what happened to her in the first place.
LEE CRONIN: The look of the monster was also very much inspired by the mystery in the story, and I love when things like that happen, rather than just saying, “Hey, let’s make it scary. Let’s make it creepy.” There’s a purpose behind all the choices that we made. There’s a purpose behind the color her skin is when we first meet her and how it develops. It might seem like she’s getting healthier, where in reality she’s actually starting to decay in a different way. So, all of that—the various stages throughout the movie that we wanted to explore with the monstrous look—was pretty meticulously planned out from the start.
HORROR
LEE CRONIN: This is a movie that plays a number of different horror chords and I’ve got history and renown for being someone that creates some pretty gory set pieces and some quite shocking imagery. And this movie is no different in many ways, but it also plays with psychology, dread and chills as well. I think when it comes to gore and to imagery that is really arresting and sticks in your mind, it has to be earned. It has to be based on context. I think for me, the simple equation is to find characters that people fall in love with, and then maybe you can start to turn the screw and do horrible things to them. Without that connectivity to the characters, I think gore fails. When I watch movies that don’t have any character, weight, depth, or dimensionality, I become disinterested very, very quickly.
LEE CRONIN: But I do think the power of gore and horror set pieces that sear into your mind is it’s all part of the experience. I try and think of the movies that I make and the stories that I tell as some sort of dark ride or roller coaster. And sometimes it’s silence, and sometimes it’s just clicking towards the corner… but sometimes you also just need to be hit very dramatically in the face and in your mind with something that completely raises your heart rate and changes how you’re feeling about the experience at the time. And, yeah, the power of a frightful image is something really special and unique that I always love to play with and use to bring the audience on a ride and to entertain as well.
LEE CRONIN: I think when you are trying to make great effect of horror scenes, there has to be something familiar about it, or at least for me, that’s what I’m always drawn to. So, if I look back at my last movie, EVIL DEAD RISE, there’s the infamous cheese grater scene, for example. I knew I wanted something domestic to be involved in the scene and to shock people, and I walked into my kitchen and hey, there’s the cheese grater. And it’s like, yeah, everybody has one in the kitchen. Everyone has a frame of context. This movie has some equally gnarly and unusual actions that take place, but again, always around slightly domestic things.
MASTERS OF HORROR
LEE CRONIN: It was really exciting to team up with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, and with New Line, also who I had a working relationship with and have a continuing working relationship with in the horror space. It was a new departure for me working with Atomic Monster and Blumhouse—James Wan and Jason Blum—but I knew them by their reputation and their taste. They were brilliant partners and throughout the making of this movie, all I really felt was supported. They’re the sort of producers who hire a filmmaker because they believe in them and trust them and want to work with them, as opposed to second-guessing or questioning what you’re trying to create. And so, it was a really, really great experience.
BEHIND THE CAMERA
LEE CRONIN: [Production designer] Nick Bassett and I worked together originally on EVIL DEAD RISE, and really, really hit it off as collaborators. We’ve very similar tastes. We love things to feel lived in, real and worn, and for there to be layers of history, so there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to work with Nick again on this movie. We knew because of the elaborate nature of the project and the set pieces that we’d have to build quite a lot of sets to achieve what we wanted to achieve, and that would be very difficult to do on location. One of the great things about Nick is before you start building sets, you still go on location to look at things similar to your own ideas to gain insight, to learn, to look at details in the real world. So early on in the process, we took ourselves to different places and looked—we wandered around museums in Ireland and traveled to Spain and out to deserts for inspiration. Nick is so focused on the detail, and I think the world that he and his team created is really amazing. You can visualize a shot all you want, you can light it beautifully, but if what’s in front of the camera isn’t the way you want it to be, it will only ever be so good. Nick and his team are just brilliant at bringing just the right things in front of the lens.
LEE CRONIN: [Director of photography] Dave Garbett also became a collaborator on EVIL DEAD RISE and I had an incredible experience working with him. And I knew that I wanted Dave to come back and shoot this movie and hope he will continue to shoot movies alongside me moving forward. I could say the same about so many of the crew. Dave is a really fun-loving and entertaining person to work with, but also super focused, but never stressed. Always brings a real A game to the table, has an incredible eye, and is really good at taking my ideas and pushing them that little bit further. And there’s lots of things we wanted to experiment with on this movie. I love using split field diopters—something we did on EVIL DEAD RISE—and Dave loves it, too. I also knew I wanted to get really close and involved with some of the body horror moments and things that maybe were a little grosser on screen. And Dave brought these probe lenses to the table, which we ended up using in quite a number of different ways within the story. He’s always someone that’s got a new thought or idea around the corner. We did a lot of testing together as well, to kind of find the right look for the movie. As collaborators, we’re not people that just stop and go, “That will be okay.” We’re always trying to push the envelope. But look, all great filmmaking and DP teams tend to work that way, and Dave’s like a supreme talent, but also just a lovely person to be around for months on end.
LEE CRONIN: I loved working with [costume designer] Joanna Eatwell on this movie, because she’s so thoughtful in how she approaches things. And again, I’m a fan of texture and detail and so is she. She has a real wealth of experience. And one of the things across the board between me and Dave and Nick and Joanna was always looking at the overall color palette for this movie. Nothing’s random, nothing’s by accident. There are colors that track through with characters and backgrounds for a specific purpose, and how the costume is brought into that world is really important. And Joanna was always there to collaborate and look at the overall visuality we were trying to create, and where her department and her leadership could play a part. But she’s such a lovely person to work with day-to-day, and even when she was stressed, she’d make sure that I didn’t know it.
A ROOM IN THE DARK
LEE CRONIN: I’d like to think that the movies that I make are must-sees in theaters, because we go to so much effort to create a really big screen experience—the horror and the emotion, the set pieces, the vistas that are in the film. And I always think horror movies are best shared with the collective. You get that sense of movement and motion within a room when you get people screaming together, jumping together, popcorn flying at the same time. The cast, crew and I worked extremely hard to create something very much a big screen spectacle, an event, something that you need to see on the biggest screen and hear with the loudest speakers and to be watched with a collective. It’s all about just going to the movies and having a great time.
Growing up in the seaside town of Skerries, just outside Dublin, LEE CRONIN (Writer / Director / Executive Producer) had aspirations of being a fisherman, a clown, and a Ghostbuster. An early education in classic genre films led him to realize that moviemaking ticked all three boxes.
Having cut his teeth with numerous award-winning short films, Cronin’s debut feature The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2019 to critical acclaim. It was released by A24 and landed him a Saturn Award nomination for Breakthrough Director.
His sophomore feature Evil Dead Rise premiered at SXSW in 2023. It achieved critical and commercial success, grossing $150 million for Warner Bros. at the global box office and earned Cronin the Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Director.
Cronin lives in Ireland where he operates his freshly birthed production company Wicked/Good. This new entity produced his third feature film, the highly anticipated Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,set to be released this Spring by New Line Cinema/Warner Bros.
