Over the past several years, the frightmeisters at Blumhouse have been reinventing iconic monsters, first with The Invisible Man in 2020, followed by Wolf Man in 2025. This year, they turned to Lee Cronin, whose Evil Dead Rise successfully rebooted that franchise in 2023, for a decidedly different take on The Mummy.
“One of the things for me that I enjoy about being a filmmaker is not necessarily knowing what’s around the corner,” the filmmaker says. “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.”
In Cronin’s conception, the central creature is a lumbering linen-swathed creeper, it’s a young girl possessed by an Egyptian demon. “I wanted to tell a story about a buried secret,” he explains. The mummies in Egyptian lore, they’re always about secrets, things that you discover later on.”
He also wanted to use as much practical effects as possible. As Cronin explains in an exclusive featurette from the digital release (watch above), “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 from early on 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,” he continues. “Something that’s there, something that seems off, but hasn’t fully revealed itself yet. There’s a journey that the monster goes on in terms of revealing itself.”
Watch the clip below to learn how Cronin and crew made their monster as terrifying as possible, from the choice of skin coloration to the body part that required a special mechanism to make the requisite “horrible twanginess.”
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now available on digital. It will be released July 14 on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD.
