Mummy stuff

Thanks to a combination of RL Stine’s The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, the 1999 action-adventure film The Mummy, and a formative trip to the Field Museum’s Egyptian display when I was eleven, I am forever cursed to watch every iteration of a Mummy movie that will ever or can ever be made. I just need the data. I need all the mummy data, real or fictional. I must keep tabs.

Some people worry about sinkholes, others, volcanoes. I worry about ancient Egyptian curses that activate when you open the Book of Amun-Ra. I mean, I also worry about Mount Vesuvius, because we’re living within its geological alarm period, but in general, I probably think about mummies 2-3 times per week. They’re out there! They exist! They probably won’t come to life but why even take the chance?

There is a new mummy movie, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. I’m into this for three reasons. One, mummy stuff. I will consume it. Two, filmmaker Lee Cronin has made some good horror movies. He’s an Irish lad, and the Irish f-ck with horror in a way that I cannot get enough of. Irish cinema in general is excellent, but Irish horror is next level (Irish horror movie rec: Oddity, deeply unnerving). It’s not jump scares and gore, it’s creepy, unsettling, upsetting, often rooted in folklore, and is made by the kind of people who say things like, “I don’t believe in faeries, but I also didn’t cut down this ancient hawthorn tree by my gate because it might be a portal to the Otherworld and why risk it?”

Lee Cronin directed an excellent horror film called The Hole in the Ground—classic creepy Irish stuff—and in 2023 he made the latest installment in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise, which was a huge hit and a sequel is coming later this year. But first, he has The Mummy. Which brings me to point the third, the trailer for The Mummy is creepy as f-ck.

The hook for Cronin’s tale, which he wrote as well as directed, is that a journalist’s daughter is lost in the desert, only to show up years later. The trailer includes the line, What happened to Katie? You left her in a spooky desert, that’s what! That’s where mummies live! This is why you study mummies, so you know where they live and don’t go there. Don’t open golden books, don’t open that sarcophagus, put that jar down, don’t translate those hieroglyphics out loud, definitely don’t lose your kid in a spooky desert. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is due in April. Can’t wait.

Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube (we can't embed due to age restrictions.)