Horror Beat: Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY teaser points to a very different take on the classic monster

Classic monsters have been getting quite the makeover in recent years, both in terms of design and story. Leigh Whannell alone, for instance, took on the Wolf Man and The Invisible Man in the span of five years. With Wolf Man (2025), post-pandemic fears and parental abuse took center stage for a version of the lycanthrope that looked more like a monstrous infection than a fully-furred canine-like transformation. In The Invisible Man (2020), jealousy and tech combined to tell the story of a vindictive ex-boyfriend that turned science into an instrument of terror to stalk the woman that rejected his obsessive and violent ways.

Now it’s Lee Cronin’s turn to see how far a classic monster’s identity can stretch without turning into something else entirely with The Mummy, scheduled to premiere on April 17^th, 2026.

The director of Evil Dead Rise and The Hole in the Ground is faced with one of the hardest monsters to modernize here. The Mummy is, by its very nature, tied to an idea of ancient evil that considers curses and everlasting life through rituals and sacrifices. Some concepts are just synonymous with it, maybe even necessary to safeguard the creature’s narrative integrity in reinterpretations of it.

The teaser trailer for the movie, though, is quick to dispense with the idea that the new Mummy will be anything like the Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz-led action horror films that brought the monster back from the dead in 1999. Cronin’s vision hints at something darker that might share more with Bring Her Back than Boris Karloff.

The teaser keeps things ambiguous through a series of images presented in a style not unlike that of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s opening sequence. What little one can find online regarding a plot summary points to the disappearance of a girl in the desert. She’s the daughter of a journalist that appears to have been part of an expedition that unearths a mummy. The girl reappears eight years later, but the family reunion is anything but a sigh of relief. Something’s come back with her.

We’re treated to snapshots of mummified remains being unwrapped, sandstorms, and some kind of macabre resurrection (along with quick cuts to curled corpse hands and a scorpion coming out of someone’s mouth). It all speaks to a kind of unholy marriage between the past and the present, of a mummy movie that’s recognizable enough but eager to try new things. It’s not indicative of the norm, which stuck to period pieces more akin to the Universal and Hammer flicks of old.

This puts the movie’s tagline in an interesting light: “What happened to Katie?” It sounds more intimate, like a small-town mystery. These aren’t things that are commonly associated with The Mummy. Fresh horrors are at the forefront here, potentially tied to a slower and more methodically paced experience.

Cronin has already proven more than capable of producing unsettling imagery of paranormal horror. The Deadites in his Evil Dead Rise film are haunting in their cruel manner, and they’re given the chance to shine in confrontational ways. Cronin knows when to let the camera linger on something horrible so we have no choice but to contemplate it. The Mummy’s teaser trailer suggests audiences will get something just as unshakably terrifying.