While Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is the latest instalment in the long-running The Mummy franchise, the gruesome R-rated reboot is also secretly linked to another iconic horror series. Director Lee Cronin has come a long way since 2019’s indie horror The Hole in the Ground first brought him to international attention. The director parlayed the success of that inspired changeling movie into a gig directing 2023’s acclaimed franchise reboot Evil Dead Rise, a brutal siege horror that took the story of the Evil Dead universe out of its remote woodland cabin setting and into an inner-city high-rise.
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Fresh off revitalizing the Evil Dead franchise’s story, Cronin’s next project saw him take on an even older horror franchise. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is an R-rated, horror-centric reboot of Universal’s iconic The Mummy franchise, which began way back in 1932 with Lon Chaney playing the titular cursed Egyptian artefact. While this reboot takes a radically different approach to the franchise from its predecessors, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy notably features a canon connection to the Evil Dead series. In a Collider interview, Cronin said that one archaeological professor mentioned in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy shares a surname with key Evil Dead Rise characters.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Secretly Takes Place In The Evil Dead Franchise Universe
Since Evil Dead Rise didn’t reboot the Evil Dead franchise’s canon, this means that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes place in the same universe not only as his own earlier hit, but all of the Evil Dead movies. In a way, this makes a lot of sense, since the brutally gory story of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is closer to an Evil Dead movie than a classic take on The Mummy franchise in terms of style, tone, and content. Opening with the kidnapping of a little girl by mysterious, shady villains, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy skips ahead a few years to the discovery of this girl, alive, inexplicably inside a sarcophagus.
How the child ended up in a sarcophagus in the first place isn’t explained until much later, after she has returned home to her parents and displayed all manner off disturbing behaviours. As this synopsis implies, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is more of a possession movie than a traditional take on The Mummy, and numerous reviewers noted that the story has more in common with a sequel to The Exorcist or 2025’s Bring Her Back than, for example, 1999’s Brendan Fraser vehicle The Mummy. Thus, the revelation that the movie takes place in the Evil Dead universe serves to explain its blackly comic, gory approach.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Easter Egg Continues A Decades-Long Horror Tradition
Furthermore, Cronin’s decision to situate Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in the same universe as his earlier Hollywood reboot keeps a sweet decades-long tradition alive. When director Sam Raimi made 1980’s original The Evil Dead, he included a poster for Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes in the background. Craven then included a poster for The Evil Dead in the background of 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, prompting Raimi to include Freddy Krueger’s razor glove in Ash’s log cabin woodshed in 1987’s Evil Dead II. By confirming Lee Cronin’s The Mummy shares its universe with the Evil Dead movies, Cronin keeps this canon-linking tradition alive and well in 2026.
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