“It has body horror, it has possession, it has the domestic setup. Underneath all of that, and maybe most importantly, it’s a mystery.”

How Lee Cronin’s The Mummy rethinks a classic movie monster: ‘Mummification for a different purpose’ (exclusive)

"It has body horror, it has possession, it has the domestic setup. Underneath all of that, and maybe most importantly, it's a mystery."

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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April 1, 2026 12:00 p.m. ET

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Natalie Grace as Katie in 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy'. Credit:

Warner Bros. Pictures

- Director Lee Cronin and producers James Wan and Jason Blum discuss a new vision of *The Mummy*.

- "The key difference is that it's a really scary mummy movie," the filmmaker says.

- Instead of pharaohs or long-buried high priests, *Lee Cronin's The Mummy* brings body horror and possession to a family setting.

When Millennials think about *The Mummy*, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz's swashbuckling adventure film series often comes to mind, more so than what Hollywood legend Boris Karloff did in the role of Imhotep in the 1930s. For better or worse, there's also now a more recent Tom Cruise-led monster-destroys-the-world incarnation as a reference, even if that concept didn't make it past movie No. 1 in 2017.

With *Lee Cronin's The Mummy*, opening in theaters April 17, "The key difference is that it's a really scary mummy movie," the filmmaker tells **, in conversation with Atomic Monster producer James Wan and Blumhouse head Jason Blum. "It's also a mummy movie partly set in a domestic context. So rather than it being, necessarily, about grand secrets linked to politics and hierarchy, it's actually a small family secret."

Jack Reynor (*Midsommar*) and Laia Costa (*The Wheel of Time*) star as Charlie and Larissa Cannon, two journalists who are parents to Katie (Natalie Grace), Sebastián (Shylo Molina), and Maud (Billie Roy). Eight years ago, Katie vanished while in the Egyptian desert, leaving no clues to her whereabouts. In the present, the family, still recovering from this loss, receives a shocking call: Katie has been found.

She's one of 58 individuals (not all alive) residing in ancient sarcophagi. How did this happen? Who put her there? How is she still alive? Without many answers, the Cannons bring their daughter back home to Albuquerque, N.M., but she's clearly changed. And a joyous family reunion soon turns into a ghastly nightmare.

Natalie Grace as Katie, Veronica Falcon as Carmen in 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy'.

Warner Bros. Pictures

The film, Lee Cronin says, is about "mummification for a different purpose," as Wan teases how the director plays "into the horror of mummification."

"When you think traditionally about mummies, you think about pharaohs, kings, queens, the rich," Cronin explains. "One of the things we talked about early on was: What if it was about regular people?"

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Blum references 2020's critically acclaimed *The Invisible Man*, which explored a classic movie monster through an underlying story about domestic abuse and gaslighting. Blumhouse Productions also released *The Wolf Man*, a 2025 film that, boiled down, was about a family dealing with a loved one's degenerative disease.

With *Lee Cronin's The Mummy*, the director knows he sounds an awful lot like Dominic Toretto when he describes the upcoming horror feature. "It's about family," he says, even if that *Fast & Furious* reference isn't reflective of the general tone.

Director Lee Cronin, Hayat Kamille as the Magician in 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy'.

Warner Bros. Pictures

"The original monsters, when they were first seen in the movies, were scary," Blum notes. "Over time, not just *The Mummy* but other ones too, they morphed into more four-quadrant movies. You could even say that's true of Guillermo [Del Toro] 's *Frankenstein*. What's unique about Lee's *Mummy* is that we're returning to the roots of what these original monsters were, which was really, really scary and mysterious. There's a great mystery in this movie, and I think my colleagues here would agree with me, a mystery makes a movie scarier."

Cronin agrees: "It has body horror, it has possession, it has the domestic setup. Underneath all of that, and maybe most importantly, it's a mystery."

The film began more than two years ago when Wan reached out to Cronin, having seen the director's work on *Evil Dead Rise* (2023). Cronin describes that movie, a reawakening for that particular franchise, as a "burning desire" project and was looking for a different challenge.

Wan, a proven horror maven from *The Conjuring*, *Saw*, and *Insidious*, threw out a simple idea. "What about a scary mummy movie?" Cronin remembers of that Zoom meeting. "It was a question that took seed very quickly."

Hayat Kamille as the Magician, director Lee Cronin on set of 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy'.

Warner Bros. Pictures

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Wan, admittedly, has seen just about every mummy movie out there, from the days of Hammer Films and the 1959 *Mummy* to the straight-to-video fare. What struck him most about Cronin's take on the material was that it became "a possession movie that potentially afflicts this family," he says.

"As a horror filmmaker myself, I love movies that we can relate to," Wan continues, "and there's nothing more relatable than a family dynamic."

*Fast & Furious* comes to mind again. "It is all about the family," Cronin says, this time non-ironically. "For me, it's a great way to pull the rug quickly on an audience, as well, which is what I want to do. I want you to come into the theater, and I want you to trust me, and then I want you to instantly regret trusting me because now you're on the ride and I've got you by the hand and you're not able to go anywhere."

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Source: “EW Horror”