LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY Director THE MUMMY Director Explains Why Bringing the Horror Home Makes It Even Scarier
Warner Bros. is taking a fresh crack at The Mummy with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and if you’re expecting sweeping sands and ancient tomb raiding from start to finish, you might want to recalibrate.
Lee Cronin is steering this version in a direction that feels way more personal and, honestly, way more unsettling.
Cronin isn’t ditching the franchise’s roots entirely, but he’s flipping the perspective. Instead of keeping the terror locked away in distant ruins, he’s dragging it right into everyday life, where it can do the most damage.
“What I liked about it was it's a mummy movie set in a domestic setting, which no one's seen before,” Cronin says in the latest issue of SFX.
“What's more frightening? A spider in the forest, or a spider beside your face in your bed? It's the latter. So trying to bring the horror home is something I'm always really interested in doing.”
That idea gives this project a completely different energy. The film follows a journalist played by Jack Reynor and his wife, played by Lai Costa, whose daughter vanishes in the desert. Years later, she returns, but something is clearly wrong.
This isn’t a happy reunion. It’s the kind of setup that leans into that eerie “sometimes dead is better” territory fans will recognize from Pet Sematary, with a dose of Cronin’s own chaotic horror style seen in Evil Dead Rise.
Cronin has built a reputation for digging into fractured families and emotional trauma, and that continues here. He explained how that theme became the backbone of the story:
“I'm always interested in telling stories about the dark side of family and then I started to find a lore and route into it all. Then I found this missing kid story, which seemed like a really interesting pathway.
“I wanted to create a new mythology as well. So it offered me a lot of things where I could get really, really creative. But the whole point being, why should the story about a mummy be limited to tourists in Cairo?”
The Mummy franchise has always leaned on revenge and ancient curses, dating all the way back to its classic roots. But placing that horror inside a family home changes the stakes completely. It’s no longer about surviving an expedition. It’s about surviving your own child.
If you’ve seen Evil Dead Rise or Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground, you know he thrives in that space where family and horror collide. So this direction actually feels like a natural evolution.
And while the film embraces a more intimate setting, Cronin makes it clear this isn’t some small-scale story:
“We're not making it for a crazy amount of money but it is a mini epic, and it takes place in different countries. It's got a huge visual spectrum, both from putting a child to bed in a room, that basic thing we all do, down to being inside a pyramid, or finding something mysterious and dangerous in the desert.
“It covers all that spectrum. Those other mummy moves past are awesome. I can't do anything with that, but I can do something new…”
That balance between grounded horror and large-scale adventure could be exactly what the franchise needs right now. It respects what came before but isn’t afraid to push into new territory.
If this works, it’s going to make for an insanely creepy film! Lee Cronin’s The Mummy hits theaters on April 17, and it sounds like it’s bringing the curse a lot closer to home than we’ve ever seen before.