7 Years Later, Blumhouse’s R-Rated Mummy Remake Is A Secret Sequel To This Underrated Indie Horror

While Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a fun reboot in its own regard, its gruesome story also acts as a perfect spiritual successor to the director’s underrated indie horror from 2019. The Mummy franchise has been through many incarnations over the years and, like its titular antagonist, the series has reliably returned from the dead once every few decades to scare viewers anew. Beginning in 1932 with The Mummy, the series was first rebooted by Hammer in 1959, then turned into a playful, tongue-in-cheek action horror franchise in the late ‘90s.

Although 2017’s more explosive The Mummy reboot was a major critical and commercial failure, 2026’s horror-centric Blumhouse reboot, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, has already fared better. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy turns the franchise’s familiar story into more of a possession horror, following a family whose missing daughter is found alive, but certainly not well, in a sarcophagus after a mysterious plane crash. Although this grisly, brutal horror has shades of Cronin’s earlier 2023 horror hit Evil Dead Rise, the movie’s plot mirrors the story of his breakout hit, 2019’s The Hole in the Ground, even more.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Revisits 2019’s The Hole In The Ground

Released in 2019, The Hole in the Ground follows the beleaguered single mother Sarah and her shy, quiet young son Chris. After Chris ventures into a strange sinkhole behind the pair’s remote country home, he returns different, and Sarah is disturbed to discover that her son may not be who he seems. Although it takes Sarah a long time to come to this conclusion, viewers will likely know early on that Chris has been replaced by a changeling, a malicious sort of faery from Celtic mythology that specialises in stealing and replacing children.

Read Next

The Mummy 4 Confirms One Of the Best Characters Is Returning (But Some Are Still Missing)

Thus, the arrival of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy marks the second Cronin horror movie where a main child character goes missing, comes back changed, and plunges their confused, horrified parent into a terrifying ordeal to get them back. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy adds some Egyptian folklore into the mix, but a lot of reviews have noted that the horror feels more like a conventional killer kid plot than a traditional mummy story, and its similarities to The Hole in the Ground only make this more evident.

The Hole In The Ground Is Perfect For Fans of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Fortunately, this approach isn’t necessarily a problem for the movie. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is longer than it needs to be, and the reboot could’ve benefited from jettisoning its redundant police procedural subplot. However, its inventively gruesome, genuinely unnerving possession story remains fun once viewers accept that it’s hardly a typical Mummy movie. That said, viewers who do like Lee Cronin’s The Mummy should definitely seek out The Hole in the Ground.

With a tighter runtime than the director’s Mummy reboot, The Hole in the Ground also shares its dark sense of humor, its poignant plot about family, and its genuinely gross gore and creepy scares with Cronin’s later Hollywood effort. 2015’s The Hallow offered a similarly unsettling take on the changeling myth, as did a standout segment from the underrated festive horror anthology A Christmas Horror Story. However, for viewers who want another spin on the story of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, The Hole in the Ground is the best place to start.