If EVIL DEAD RISE Was a “Rocket Ship Fuelled by Blood,” LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY Is “More of a Maze” With a Detective Edge
After watching the trailer for Lee Cronin's The Mummy, I was kind of expecting a repeat of Evil Dead Rise's relentless, arterial carnage. It just has that vibe, but the director wants you to know that isn't what's coming.
Cronin, the Irish filmmaker who turned a low-budget Evil Dead sequel into a $147 million worldwide hit, has opened up to SFX Magazine about just how different his take on the classic Universal monster really is.
He expained: "Evil Dead Rise was a very clear roller coaster ride. It reaches a point and... it's kind of like a rocket ship fuelled by blood, and it just goes and goes.
“This movie is a different type of fairground attraction. It's more of a maze, and you don't know whether you're going to go left or right next, but you're not in control. Ideally, if I'm doing a good job, I've got my hand on your back, and I'm telling you which way to go."
That's a significant creative pivot, and it tells you everything about what Cronin is attempting here. Evil Dead Rise was precision-engineered escalation. The Mummy sounds like something far more unsettling. It will be a film that keeps you off-balance rather than just overwhelmed.
The story backs that up. A journalist's young daughter vanishes in the desert without explanation. Eight years pass. Then she comes back. And something, clearly, isn't right.
The trailer makes no secret of the fact that the monster isn't some ancient Egyptian relic wrapped in linen. It's an eight-year-old girl, and her first victims are the people who missed her most.
Dark, sure. But Cronin isn't just going for bleak. He continued: "There's some tough, dark material in it, and there's a hard-boiled detective streak. But then there's also a huge domestic, supernatural swirl that's going on."
That combination of genre textures, gritty procedural instinct layered over a supernatural family nightmare, sounds unlike anything the Mummy franchise has attempted before. Then again, Cronin put his own name in the title. He wasn't going for familiar.
The emotional engine, though, is grief. "It's about family first and foremost," he says. "It's about guilt as well, in terms of decisions that people make or wishing they could have done a little bit more. It's about blame also, and it's my meditation on grief."
Cronin has said he drew from his own personal experience with loss to shape the film, wanting to explore "the hope of connecting with someone that's gone." Which, when you think about it, is the cruelest possible premise for a horror movie.
Worth noting too, Cronin turned down an Evil Dead Rise sequel to make this happen. He called making another sequel "really easy" and chose the harder path instead. Whether that gamble pays off, we'll find out soon enough.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy hits cinemas on April 17.