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It’s a pretty cool scene,” says Terence “Tez” Palmer of the moment a teenage girl possessed by an evil spirit crawls across the ceiling and drops into an open coffin containing her recently deceased grandmother. The dead woman’s relatives try desperately to pull her out, but the struggle sends the casket crashing to the floor. “There’s embalming fluid all over the place and the girl’s drinking it,” chuckles Palmer. “Everyone’s screaming and throwing up.”
To Palmer, a movie special effects supervisor, the scene presented a challenge. He needed a coffin that could “collapse” multiple times at varying speeds without damaging the film set or injuring the actors. His solution – a hydraulic platform that allows the casket to ratchet safely through 90 degrees at the flick of a switch – is in keeping with the preference among horror-film makers for practical special effects over digital trickery.
“It’s just a big toy for us to play around with,” says Palmer, tapping the coffin, an off-the-shelf item reinforced with a steel frame. “I might put it on eBay when all this is over.” He’s joking. I think.
The hydraulic casket is sitting in the dimly lit living room of an old-fashioned house that’s purportedly in New Mexico. In fact, it’s a meticulously built set inside a sound stage about 30km south of Dublin. Acclaimed Irish films, including The Commitments, Angela’s Ashes and Veronica Guerin, were made here. Now, Ardmore Studios is playing host to the Irish director and horror movie aficionado Lee Cronin, who’s shooting interior scenes for his startlingly original version of The Mummy.
In a few days, the entire production will move to Almeria, Spain, the location of all those “spaghetti” westerns. The crew will film the exterior of the “New Mexico″ house and the city of Almeira will double as Cairo. A violent sandstorm, one of the movie’s big set pieces, will be shot in the Tabernas Desert.
To most people, myself included, The Mummy is synonymous with the 1999 blockbuster starring Brendan Fraser. Swashing his buckle in the style of Indiana Jones, Fraser was the perfect frontman for a big-screen adventure that pushed CGI to the limit, took $US418 million at the box office and spawned a couple of sequels that gave Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson his big break.
In 2017, Tom Cruise stepped into Fraser’s safari suit for a reboot. The film embraced horror tropes at the expense of fun and wound up as a kind of Mission Impossible with pyramids. It wasn’t a flop exactly, but Universal is rumoured to have lost as much as $US95 million on the project due to bloated production and marketing budgets. At this point Mummy movies, much like Ozymandias’ vainglorious statue, seemed to vanish beneath the desert sands.
Now, the dusty sarcophagus has cracked open again. A Mummy sequel starring Fraser (whose acting career has been recently excavated and reanimated) is scheduled for release in 2028. Those who can’t wait that long will be able to see what Cronin has brought to the genre this month.
The 44-year-old Irishman, a fast-talker wearing an oversized black baseball cap, hoodie and silver earrings, is quick to point out that his film owes almost nothing to the 1999 blockbuster and has little in common with the 1932 production starring Boris Karloff (see breakout).
“This is not a mummy movie people are going to expect,” he says during a break from filming. “It’s in a domestic setting, which no one has seen before. Mummification is a real thing, it’s part of history and we always tend to deal with it in cinematic terms through a particular lens, as something to do with pharaohs, important people. Well, this is a story about mummification that happens to an unimportant person and the impact that has on their family.”
Michael Clear, the film’s LA-based executive producer, steps in with the elevator pitch. “Our movie starts in Cairo,” he says. “It’s about a family that has two kids, Katie, 8 and Seth, 7. It’s a normal vacation until Katie is abducted. Eight years later, the family get a phone call: Katie has been found alive in a sarcophagus. They go to Egypt and bring her home to her grandmother’s home in New Mexico. Gradually, they realise she has been entombed to conceal something that has been put inside her and the evil begins to spill out into their home.”
The room falls silent. That does sound pretty scary, actually.
Cronin’s reimagining of the ancient bandaged cadaver as a contemporary American teenager shouldn’t come as a complete surprise; his horror is usually centred on families and relationships. His breakthrough movie – 2019’s The Hole in the Ground – was a claustrophobic chiller about a single mum and her creepy young son living in a remote house in the Irish countryside. Evil Dead Rise (2023) – the fifth instalment of the zombie franchise created by Sam Raimi in the early 1980s – starts out as a reunion between estranged sisters, but quickly devolves into a familial bloodbath. Fun fact: Cronin used 6500 litres of fake blood making Evil Dead Rise, a movie that reimagined the cheese grater as a deadly weapon and grossed (pun intended) $US147 million despite costing less than $US20 million to make.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy will offer plenty of visceral scares (if you don’t like scorpions you might want to sit this one out). But it is also part of a new generation of horror films whose ambitions go well beyond the “slice-n-dice” aesthetic.
Sophisticated horror films aren’t new of course. Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie and The Shining won critical plaudits and awards and the record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations handed to the vampire movie Sinners (it won four statues at this year’s Academy Awards, including best actor for Michael B. Jordan) confirmed the genre can now hold its own against all comers. According to The Numbers, a movie data website, the horror genre had a 16.8 per cent market share in June 2025. That’s well ahead of rival genres, such as comedy, drama and action/suspense, and up from just 4.3 per cent in 2015.
The best contemporary horror wants to do more than just scare you. For example, the 2014 Australian supernatural horror, The Babadook, is an exploration of parenting, grief and the fear of madness. Get Out (2017) is about race relations in America and Midsommar (2019) is both a terrifying tale about a Swedish cult and its violent festival and a meditation on codependency, betrayal and bad relationships.
Cronin, who grew up in a coastal town north of Dublin, fell in love with scary films because his older siblings were horror fans. Spielberg’s Jaws was formative, but he soon graduated to dark psychodramas like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. At 15, he sold his drum kit and used the proceeds to buy a camcorder. Before long, he was teaching himself how to recreate the gory special effects he saw on screen. Film school and a stint making television commercials were followed by his first foray into horror, the 2013 short film Ghost Train.
Now, he’s in the vanguard of the horror boom thanks to the success of Evil Dead Rise, a critical and commercial hit that’s widely credited with reviving the franchise. His take on The Mummy is being produced by Jason Blum and James Wan, two legendary figures whose LA-based companies, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, merged into a horror movie powerhouse in 2024. The film’s other production partner is Warner Bros. It’s the studio’s first foray into mummy territory and the unusual title – Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – is a conscious effort by its lawyers to differentiate the film from the canon established by Universal Pictures.
Michael Clear said he knew he had to make a film with Cronin as soon as he saw a preview of Evil Dead Rise. “That film is such a punch in the face,” he says. “Lee really knows how to embrace the fun side of horror and that’s kind of our ethos too. We want people to be gasping and laughing.”
But why revisit The Mummy? Cronin admits he hadn’t given much thought to the idea until it was suggested to him. “Someone said, ‘when was there a really, really terrifying one’? And that started to tickle me a bit. Something that’s wrapped up points to a secret, a mystery. That was the starting point. And then I found a newspaper story about a missing kid…”
While Cronin clearly loves frightening people and enjoys “leaning into the horror tropes”, he also wants to emulate films such as The Exorcist that have strong, well-developed characters. “I love movies where you care about the people, then you put them through the wringer,” he says. “I think they’re the most effective horror stories. I want people to eat popcorn and enjoy themselves, but I try to ground the characters to make the horror all the more powerful.”
Cronin likes to compare his new film to Poltergeist and the gruesome crime thriller Se7en. “There’s some tough, dark material in it, a hardcore detective streak and a huge supernatural swirl.” But if you ask him what the film’s about he turns serious.
“It’s about family first and foremost,” he answers. “And it’s about guilt as well in terms of the decisions people make and the feeling they could have done more. It’s also about blame and, in a sense, it’s my meditation on grief. I experienced the first really big moment of grief in my life in the run-up to making this movie.”
Fear not, hardcore horror fans: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy may be layered, but it’s not Fanny and Alexander. Terrible teen Katie (played by 19-year-old newcomer Natalie Grace) emerges from the sarcophagus with a face full of boils and a slippery, elongated tongue that slides under doors. “It’s fun to be dead,” she cackles as she vomits, levitates, munches live scorpions and generally makes her family’s life a living hell. Teenagers, eh?
The choice of actors playing the film’s adult roles is also in line with Cronin’s dramatic ambitions. The days of the “scream queen” – horror movie regulars better known for their lung capacity than their acting chops – are mostly gone. For example, Irish actor Jack Raynor, who plays Katie’s dad, has credits ranging from 2013’s Transformers: Age of Extinction to a 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth. Raynor, who is drenched in fake blood for one of the film’s climactic scenes, is full of praise for his director.
“He’s so passionate, it makes you want to get behind him,” he says. “I’ve worked with directors over the years who didn’t give a shit at all. He puts a lot of faith in the people he has working with him, which is refreshing.”
Spanish actor Laia Costa, who plays Katie’s mother, is perhaps best known for her lead role in the acclaimed one-shot German thriller Victoria. And Veronica Falcon, an established Mexican star who has been acting for more than 40 years, was chosen to inject life (an unfortunate choice of words, perhaps) into Carmen, the grandmother. “I’m not a fan of the horror genre to be honest, but I didn’t know horror could be like this,” says Falcon. “This film respects the genre, but goes beyond it.”
Cronin, who seems to be running on caffeine and adrenaline, knows there’s a lot at stake. Right now, he’s red-hot, but in the movie world you’re only as good as your last opening weekend. “The risk I’m taking is breaking the mould in terms of what people expect from a mummy movie,” he admits. “But when you make a movie you have to take risks because it might be your last chance to do it.”
It’s a wrap: 5 memorable mummy movies
The Mummy, 1932
Looking to continue the success of their celluloid versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, but with no source material to anchor the story, Universal Pictures concocted the tale of Imhotep, a mummy brought to life in modern-day Cairo. The British actor and horror icon Boris Karloff played the bad guy with a creepy charisma that hasn’t aged.
The Mummy, 1959
Gothic horror specialists Hammer Film Productions got in on the action with this remake of the 1932 original featuring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Lee plays the reanimated mummy Kharis, while Cushing is his adversary, archeologist John Banning. Reviews were mixed on release, but the film gets plenty of love from contemporary horror fans.
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, 1971
Based on Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars and featuring “Bond girl” Valerie Leon, there’s a lot to like about this Hammer production. Leon plays two roles: a modern woman called Margaret and an ancient Egyptian queen who tries to possess her from the comfort of her sarcophagus.
The Mummy, 1999
Brendan Fraser became an international star as adventurer Rick O’Connell in this remake of the 1932 classic that grossed more than $US418 million. Capturing the swashbuckling spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark and artfully merging CGI and practical effects, the epic film was scary, but not too scary.
Bubba Ho-Tep, 2002
An ancient Egyptian mummy terrorises a retirement home in this American comedy-horror. Facing off against the monster is Sebastian Haff (Bruce Campbell) a resident of the home who claims to be Elvis. If you want to see a mummy pursued by a man on a mobility scooter this is for you.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opens on April 16.
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