Lee Cronin on The Mummy: "I didn’t feel any obligation to serve what had come before... I wanted to focus on telling my own story on my own terms"

The morning after the Oscars, while much of Hollywood is nursing champagne headaches, Lee Cronin is coming off something far less glamorous: a 25-hour stint finishing his latest film on the Warner Bros. lot.

“I arrived at 6am on Sunday and left at 7.30 this morning,” he says. “So while everybody else was out partying, I was finishing my movie on an empty studio lot. It was kind of surreal, actually – you’re aware of everything happening around you culturally, but you’re in this very intense, focused bubble trying to get something over the line.”

It’s a fitting image for a filmmaker whose rise has been anything but idle. In just a few years, Cronin has gone from the quietly unnerving Irish horror of The Hole In The Ground to helming Evil Dead Rise, and now to his most ambitious project yet: a reimagining of The Mummy. And post-Oscars, Irish success in Hollywood is once again in the air.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy

“Every year there’s an Irish presence now, and people are always interested when they find out you’re Irish and working in film or entertainment,” he says. “It’s great to see people like Jesse Buckley recognised – it reinforces the sense there’s something happening with Irish talent internationally, and that it’s not just a one-off.”

Cronin’s own work has been making waves for a few years, known for bringing emotional weight to genre filmmaking. His films don’t begin with monsters so much as fractures – in families, in relationships, in the quiet assumptions people make about each other. The horror arrives later, almost inevitably.

“I think character is vital, and I always start there,” Cronin says. “You need to find the emotional core of something because it’s a long journey to make a film, so you need something you can hold onto and keep coming back to. If you have a group of characters who are already dealing with something difficult in their lives, something unresolved, and then you give them the thing they want most back – but what you put in its place isn’t what they hoped for – that’s where it becomes really interesting. That’s where you get to be a little bit bold with it.”

That idea sits at the heart of his new film. In Cronin’s version, The Mummy is less about tombs and spectacle than about a family reckoning. The young daughter of a journalist (Jack Reynor) disappears into the desert without a trace. Eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them, as what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.

It’s a premise that echoes The Hole In The Ground, where a mother begins to suspect her son is no longer her son. But here, the scale is larger, the mythology deeper, and the emotional stakes arguably more brutal.

“What scares me isn’t necessarily something supernatural in the traditional sense,” he says. “It always comes back to human relationships. The idea that you don’t really know what’s going on inside somebody else’s head, even people that you’re very close to – to me, that’s where the fear comes from. That links into the idea of things literally being buried beneath the surface – whether that’s in the ground, in a tomb, or someone’s psyche.”

Lee Cronin's The Mummy

That fear of the familiar becoming strange is also a through-line in Cronin’s work. A loved one returns, but altered. A child is no longer innocent – or perhaps never was.

“I think everybody has experienced, in some form, a moment where someone they know shifts in front of them,” he says, “like seeing a different side of someone for the first time, or it could be something much bigger. But in this story, it’s taken to an extreme. This is someone who has been gone for a significant period of time, and in theory, their return should heal everything. They should be the answer to all of the pain that’s been experienced. But what if they’re not? What if they’re something that actually makes things worse? That’s a very unsettling place to start from.”

While previous Mummy films have leaned into adventure or spectacle, Cronin’s instinct was to push in the opposite direction.

“I was very aware that mummy films have existed across different eras and tones, from the very early days of cinema right through to the more modern action-adventure versions,” he says. “But I didn’t feel any obligation to serve what had come before. I didn’t go back and rewatch everything. I watched the original Boris Karloff film early on, just to ground myself in the history of it. But after that, I wanted to focus on telling my own story on my own terms. If I had felt like I needed to replicate something, I probably wouldn’t have started.”

Instead, he approached the mythology as something fluid.

“I’ve always been interested in that idea of what lies beneath the surface, whether that’s literal or metaphorical,” he says. “When you start looking into ancient history and mythology, there are gaps, there are unknowns, and as a storyteller, that’s where you can start to ask questions. What if there was a different reason for mummification? What if there was a different kind of entity involved? Once you start thinking in those terms, it opens up the possibility to create something that feels connected to that history, but also distinct from anything that’s been done before.”

Cronin has now been entrusted with several large studio films, and the self-belief and ambition required for that could seem at odds with Irish humility. Cronin isn’t at LA levels of industry talk and self-aggrandisement, but he’s open about his ambition, and taking opportunities seriously.

“Studio filmmaking allows you to take bigger swings, and it allows you to build something on a much larger canvas, whether that’s in terms of scale, number of characters, or the world you’re creating,” he says. “But the core of it is still the same. You have to believe in what you’re making. It’s a long process, and if you don’t have that belief, you won’t get through it.”

That belief has carried him from Skerries to Los Angeles, though he’s quick to point out that Ireland remains his base.

“I dip in and out of Hollywood, but I live in Ireland, and I’m really glad that I do,” he says. “I get to work with my Irish team, and we’ve set up our production company, Wicked Good, which is Irish-based but has an international focus. I don’t think there should be any boundaries on storytelling – you can develop things at home and bring them out into the world.”

As for what comes next, Cronin is deliberately open-ended. Another horror film seems likely – though perhaps something more purely supernatural. There’s also a project set in Ireland in the 1980s, based on a true story, that he’s particularly excited about. But for now, the focus is simpler.

“Next is to catch my breath,” he says. “It’s been a whirlwind few years, and I think there’s value in stepping back a little, looking around, and letting new ideas come in. That’s usually where the next thing starts to take shape.”

And for St.Patrick’s Day?

“Today, I’ll have a couple of drinks with my producer,” he says. “Then I’m going to go to bed for about 24 hours. That’s the plan!”

For now, though, the work is done – at least for a moment – and Cronin can finally step out of the darkness he’s spent the past two-and-a-half years creating.

• Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in cinemas now.