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Is there a classic monster more outdated than the Mummy? Sure, it’s scary to be covered in bandages and buried alive. But as the Orientalism that made the idea of a mummy’s curse so scary to Westerners fades (or at least mutates), it’s harder and harder to sell a beastie that’s essentially a zombie covered in gauze. If you can’t go the adventure route used for the Brendan Fraser movies, how do you make the mummy interesting to modern audiences?
If you’re Lee Cronin, you use that most cutting edge of horror tropes: scary, probably dead, kids. Spooky youngin’s are all over the latest trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which introduces us to two loving parents played by Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, who learn that their missing daughter has been found. It turns out that Katie has been gone for eight years, and she was discovered within an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. Worse, she looks less like a darling little girl and more like, well, like someone who has spent eight years inside an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
Where the classic Universal Mummy was a romantic whose love transcended the bounds of death, and where Fraser’s Rick O’Connell battled a supervillain version of the mummy, Cronin is drawing inspiration from his most recent film, Evil Dead Rise. The trailer is filled with not just the types of audacious split diopter shots that Sam Raimi would love, but also with icky bits like gooey bandages, bloody teeth, and limbs that creak as they twist into unnatural configurations.
Most of all, the trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy features kids being dead and/or scary. Creepy kids and child endangerment aren’t exactly new to cinemas: after all, Frankenstein’s Monster tossed a little girl into a lake in 1931 and eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark terrified her mother in The Bad Seed in 1956.
But lately, moviegoers have taken a renewed interest in seeing kids come to terrible ends on screen, and sometimes return to do new terrible things. The It franchise and its TV spinoff Welcome to Derry, the Terrifier series with its exploding child bits and creepy Art the Clown girl, the tykes with mutilated faces in Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, and the midnight runners of Weapons have ignored all taboos to enjoy critical acclaim and/or big box office returns.
One might feel that Cronin is jumping on a bandwagon for his kid-centric take on the mummy, if the concept didn’t seem like something that fits the premise. As outrageous as the imagery gets, the trailer promises to ground the horror in emotional fears of the parents. That very real anxiety gives Cronin and other filmmakers room to go a little harder with the horror.
And if Evil Dead Rise is any indication, Cronin certainly will go hard with The Mummy, reanimating the tired old monster and making him something all too terrifying.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy arrives in theaters on April 17, 2026.
The post Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Makes Ancient Egypt Spooky Kid Scary appeared first on Den of Geek.
