Courtney Howard // Film Critic
Filmmaker Lee Cronin’s films have haunted audiences in very specific ways. He captures families caught in the throes of chaos, making their ordinary lives extraordinarily plagued by the specters of trauma. His latest creeptastic feature, LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY, tells of the close knit Cannon family – Dad Charlie (Jack Reynor), Mom Larissa (Laia Costa) and brother Seb (Dean Allen Williams) – whose lives are upended when their youngest member Katie (Emily Mitchell) is kidnapped and returns 8 years later (Natalie Grace) having significantly changed into a cursed demonic hellion.
At the film’s recent press day for its digital and home video release, I spoke with the affable writer-director about everything from crafting the family dynamics in his films and getting the best collaboration out of his teams, to turning everyday objects into veritable nightmare weaponry.
I really love that your films are focused on family – specifically how entities or insidious infections can fester and rot the familial unit. You break down what that look like physically and psychologically. Is that a through-line that you see too? Is that something you easily gravitate to in your work?
“It’s definitely something I gravitate towards like the 3 movies I’ve made to date all play around with different familial constructs and they’re all families under threat. My first feature film THE HOLE IN THE GROUND is about a mother and a son escape to the countryside. It’s not overt, but you can tell there was domestic violence in the past and it’s about the scars and carriage of that into their world and if what mom is experiencing is real or otherwise.
With EVIL DEAD RISE, it’s a very direct threat with mom, in a moment, being turned into something that’s gonna completely destroy this family, eating it from the inside out. That idea that the rug can pulled out from the family at any moment – something can suddenly happen that can change your life, the history of that family and where your headed.
With THE MUMMY, it was more thoughtful in a sense that it’s about a family that have already suffered probably their worst nightmare and then the remedy to that turns out to be worse. That’s an interesting thing to explore in life in relation to when families in the real world, or when families are threatened or bad things happen, sometimes what heals you can make you worse. People react in different ways. Even within the core of this family, you have the grandmother, who it’s business as usual, but she’s also not so naive to pretend that everything is normal. Mom, equally. It’s not that she’s put blinkers on. She’s aware. And then Dad is having guilt about his part and his responsibility – or who’s responsibility – for what happened. These are fertile places to explore.
There are cases that if you removed the horror elements, or removed the supernatural from the story that your telling, especially with THE MUMMY… something I was really intrigued by was ‘What if there was a missing person and you brought them home? What if there was no monster?’ At some point, how do you start to find a way back to normality in that situation. For the type of movie I wanted to make, for this one, I wanted to bring the supernatural element into it and explore that experience further. You can look at CASTAWAY with Tom Hanks and that’s him and Wilson and he has to form a new family on an island. I think it’s always at the core of great storytelling.”
You make great use of practical effects. I would imagine this was a true collaboration between the special effects teams and your cinematographer (Dave Garbett), working so close-up to these effects to make them look so real. Tell me about bringing those teams together.
“It’s a really interesting aspect. One of the things you pointed out was we were really going to interrogate everything. We used a lot of these probe lenses where we got extremely close to detail. That puts a lot of pressure on our prosthetics team – Arjen Tuitan, who created The Mummy. It is about that early collaboration. It even goes back to the production designer [Nick Bassett] and how the sets look. You can only look as good as what you can shoot. That collaboration has come through really, really strongly in preparation where everybody is discussing these moments.
With horror movies, you have your stories, you’ve got your set and you’ve got your cast. But you always have these key 10-12 things that you’re always discussing in meetings and slowly trying to figure out the methodologies. And everybody plays a part, from special effects through to digital effects. Even down to the nuts and bolts, working with your first assistant director [Daire Glynn], figuring out what’s the order we need to do these things in or reminder of you’ll get 2 shots of this or you’re gonna blow the day. There’s a lot of different techniques that allow you to capture those seconds of something really impactful.”
I loved how lunatic the grandmother’s wake got. What was the most challenging sequence to negotiate in terms of tone and everything going on there or was it something completely different like two people talking?
“Sometimes you’re really surprised. Sometimes you’d think would be simple turn out to be quite difficult to capture in the way you want. And sometimes there’s things you’re really nervous about and they actually go incredibly well. The wake was one I was really nervous about. I was very aware it was gonna be difficult. It was really difficult. There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s not just we’re cutting forward and back. We’re upstairs with Dad. We’re upstairs with Seb and Mom’s in the kitchen and she joins the wake and we’ve got the aside with the parents. And all the mourners who are there as well, and all the stunts that go with that and the arrival of Katie. It was a challenging formula to put together. It was one of those ones where we had a really good stab and had to find a way to return and get a couple of other good details, maybe a week later, we’re back on that stage to do a little bit more this and that, add texture… It kind of had everything.
What you’re ultimately trying to boil it all down to is some kind of cohesive tone. But I knew the tone and I wanted it to be hot, as in I wanted it to be wild. I wanted it to be unhinged. The goal was to take a wake and exaggerate it to the point of madness – to be reflective of where the family were in the story in that point in time and be reflective of my own experiences at wakes and grief and loss. For me, making that scene there was a cathartic value to it as well. Wakes are tough and I wanted to put on on-screen but I’d have to push it to the nth degree and push it out there.
On the other end, the foot chase on the streets of Cairo, we shot that in Almería in Southern Spain. In this rather large part of the city to shut down streets. That was anxiety inducing for everyone because anything could go wrong. But it was a dream. That was one where we finished Day One. We were bang on-time, more than we hopes, everything was great and everyone was happy. Sometimes there are things that you’re apprehensive about, but they go incredibly smoothly. It’s all about preparation. We prepared for so many components and details.”
That was a great foot pursuit. Jack Reynor’s character is driving that action, which can be difficult to keep at the forward of an action sequence.
“Yes, it is a challenge. You find a lot of that in the edit. You just keep thinking, ‘How can I refine it more?’ You try to get it down to its barest essence. That usually makes for the best version of that type of sequence.”
Sound design is also important increasing the suspense. I’m curious about extending the scares through the soundscape, collaborating with sound designer Peter Albrechtsen, who you’ve worked with before.
“It’s always the same when you go back with someone you know each other’s language. But this one was different, because we were on a slightly tighter release schedule. Early days, on the sound design, I didn’t get to engage with Peter as much. Luckily, he was working with a director who he knew his tastes. He was able to start sketching things out more than on EVIL DEAD RISE, we needed his sketches to inform the edit. He was engaged from the script stage and we’d talk about stuff.
Peter loves my screenplays because they give a really strong impression of what I’m really trying to do with sound. They don’t describe, “And the sound effect will be,” but it’s woven into the experience, the tempo and timing and how many clicks of the door – those types of moments. So it was detailed. It was striking a balance between that and the music of my composer Stephen McKeon. Finding a balance, because it’s very easy for music and sound design to heavily compete with each other. I quite like to let the music do the job of sound design and sound design to do the job of music which creates even more layers of complexity and create surprise. But we just put our heads down and worked on it.
The last thing you really do on a movie is finalize the mix and your color timing is quite close behind that. My last shift on this movie was I was on the Warner Brothers lot and I got there at 6:30 on a Sunday morning, Oscar Sunday. So there was nobody else on the lot – everyone’s getting ready to party. I linked into Copenhagen, where the mix stage was and I worked straight for 25 hours until 7 the next morning. You get an Uber and that’s it. The movie’s done. This monumental shift to get every last detail as correct as you can.”
What kind of measures did you take preparing the younger actors for the scarier elements? Young Katie’s (Emily Mitchell) sacrifice sequence is intense, as is young Maud’s (Billie Roy) ripping out of her teeth and, while he’s not as young, Sebastian’s (Shylo Molina) hitting his head against the bedpost.
“You always start with honesty. Younger performers, you have prepare in a slightly different way. Maybe like a simpler way. But I still approach them like any performer. We just try to be clear about what we’re trying to achieve. And then maybe sometimes, with a more seasoned actor or grown up, they might not know how you’re gonna make the cake of that moment. They might just wanna experience it. With younger performers, it’s good to make them aware of the techniques you’re using and how it’s going to work. Make sure they’re trained and planned and communicating with their parents and chaperones. What I’ve found across all my movies is, when you do that, they actually have a blast doing it. If anything, that thing you’re trying to measure is that they don’t have too much fun or their performance slips. I think it’s really clear communication.”
Like the cheese grater in EVIL DEAD RISE and toe nail clippers in this, your films have an everyday object that makes us frightened of using it. How do you come up with this stuff – and what should I fear next?
“I don’t know. There might not be one in the next. I might park that for a little while. You never know. The cheese grater one came from this kitchen sequence fight that I had in EVIL DEAD RISE and it was just missing something – something specific. As I was thinking about it, I walked into my kitchen and there was a cheese grater right on the counter and I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s definitely the one.’
With the toenail sequence, it came from a few different angles. My sister is a chiropodist – kind of a gnarly job and I’ve heard some stories over the years. So it’s always lingered in my mind. Like ‘Ooh. If there’s something that could be done.’ I remember working on the script and I talked to her about the amount of leverage it would take to maybe rip [the skin]. But that was kinda driven by the story as well in terms of the attempts to bathe and soothe and reform Katie in some way. The shock of this, links into the plot. The cheese grater is all about the visceral, but the pedicure sequence opens up the mystery – and her skin – a little bit further.
There is something about taking an everyday object. For me, looking back on childhood and horror, people that talk about horror movies, you’re reflecting on… ‘it’s like my house’ or ‘there’s a creepy road down there,’ something that you connect with. And there’s also that version of people will watch this movie and the next time they go to clip their fingernails or – I don’t even wanna say toenails because it’s so gross – go get a pedicure, it’s gonna cross their mind. I think that’s one of the fun things with horror: you can actually hand the baggage to people.”
LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is now available on Digital. It will be available on 4K UHD on July 14.
