This article contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.Anyone coming to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy for a slow-burn horror in the vein of the classic Universal movies is in for a shock. The latest take on the mythical monster spends minimal time in haunted pyramids or tracking a love that spans centuries. But it does have a little girl who yanks out her own teeth and replaces them with her dead grandmother’s dentures.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});You might find that disgusting or you might find it delightful. Cronin is fine either way. “I see horror movies as an opportunity to create an experience, and not all experiences necessarily need to be comfortable,” the Irish filmmaker tells Den of Geek. “It depends on the story that you’re telling, and the reaction you’re trying to elicit.”With The Mummy, Cronin tells a story unlike anything you’ve seen in Boris Karloff or Brendan Fraser films. Jack Reynor and Laia Costa star as Charlie and Larissa Cannon, whose daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) goes missing when the family is living in Egypt, where Charlie was on assignment as a TV reporter. Eight years later, Charlie and Larissa learn that their daughter was discovered alive, kept in a sarcophagus, malformed but relatively healthy. When the parents bring Katie home to live with her siblings Seb (Shylo Molina) and Maudie (Billie Roy) and her grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón), the Cannons slowly realize that something evil has invaded their family.For Cronin, the family aspect drives his story, much more than its spectacular imagery. “I think it’s very important in a horror movie that you identify with the circumstances and the characters. I remember when the trailer dropped, you’d see a lot of comments with people saying ‘Hell no, I’m not bringing her home.’ And I think that’s absolutely right, watching a 90-second trailer. But you go watch the movie and get to know these people, and it changes.“As a filmmaker, you’re always trying to trap your characters or your audience inside the mechanics of a horror movie. In this film, I didn’t need a burned-down bridge or a cutoff mobile phone signal or whatever. Charlie and Larissa are trapped by their own guilt, trapped by their own remorse, and trapped by the circumstances of having lost their daughter. Therefore, they would do anything for her.”Anyone who has seen Cronin’s previous films The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise knows that he understands the bonds of family. Like The Mummy, those movies feature people who cannot escape their horrible situations because the monster is within their sons and daughters, mothers and sisters.“Family is a wonderful shortcut to communicating with people,” explains Cronin. “For good or bad, everybody has a family as a frame of reference. There’s no perfect family, and sometimes the families that appear to be perfect are kind of the freakiest. And even if it’s just a tight friendship group with the people closest to you, everybody understands some type of family.“Family also gets at what really frightens me. I’m not really scared by the notion of a monster bursting through my door because it would probably be so unreal that I’d just look and wave and carry on. “But, to me, the destruction of the structures that underpin your life, the loving relationships that offer you support—that’s terrifying. That scares the hell out of me. And it’s something that we all have to face in our lives, through troubles and traumas and losing people to death. It frightens me greatly.“So there’s no more fertile, terrifying place to play than with the construct of family and their demise.”That ground helped Cronin find his take on The Mummy, a monster that comes with certain iconic images and lore. Instead of replicating those beats, Cronin began by thinking about family dynamics. “In this case, I started to imagine how a loved one might get mummified and then back in my home. That led me to the house and the lore, with the kidnapping and all those aspects. And I realized that I wanted to tell a detective story, to have someone on the hunt.“I tend to try and get the character sketches and circumstances in the world right before I start to slide in stuff from my bag of tricks with all the horror moments. Because if you start purely with the horror, you might struggle to get the characters as real I like them to be. When my movies work, it’s from a mashup of grounded behavior and really out there horror moments.”“Out there” might seem like an understatement to describe scenes in which Larissa tries trimming Katie’s toenails and rips hunks of skin off her leg, or a particularly gnarly sequence involving a cheese grater in Evil Dead Rise. Cronin knows that these instances could overwhelm the character parts he finds so important, and so he’s careful to balance the more extreme scenes with pathos and true terror.“It’s funny, I always know a scene is right where I want it to be when I’m on set and I start to laugh,” he confesses. “If something that’s so out there starts to work, it’s probably a relief of nervous tension.” Cronin’s also quick to point out that even though gross things happen in his movie, “it could be way worse.” Using the infamous cheese grater scene from Evil Dead Rise as an example, he points out that “in terms of what you see, it’s only on screen for two and a half seconds. I think if you go back and look at some of the gnarlier moments in my films, they don’t linger.“And if they do linger, it’s like the unbinding sequence in The Mummy. We spend a lot of time looking at that, because that’s the contract I’ve made with the audience. You want to know what happened to Katie, and I’m going to show you.“To me, that’s the most terrifying sequence in the movie, when Charlie and Larissa have to watch the VHS tape of their daughter put through this ritual. It was intentional in terms of the emotional roller coaster, because it comes right after the wake scene, which was this wild body horror moment. It has some gallows humor, and people are laughing and screaming and hiding.“But then I know they won’t make a noise when the next bit comes along. And it’s what the audience asked for, because they want to know what happened to Katie. That’s why they’re here, so let’s look at it together.”From the grueling terror of a parent’s worst nightmare to the complexities of family to the gooey fun of a gross-out gag, Cronin is willing to do it all on screen. “I think the greatest sin of all is not to elicit a reaction. So long as people are watching a horror movie and reacting to it in some way, shape, or form, that’s far more appealing to me than being boring,” he admits. No one who has seen Lee Cronin’s The Mummy would disagree.Lee Cronin’s The Mummy releases on digital on July 14, 2026.The post Lee Cronin Isn’t Just Trying to Gross You Out appeared first on Den of Geek.