Interviews
How Director Lee Cronin and Producer James Wan Update a Classic Monster in ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ [Interview]
The director behind Evil Dead Rise gives a classic monster a new reimagining with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
In the film releasing in theaters on April 17, a journalist’s young daughter disappears into the desert without a trace. Eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them. But their joyful reunion quickly devolves into a living nightmare.
Writer/Director Lee Cronin gives a whole new spin on a classic monster, the Mummy, with a visceral possession story.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with the director and producer James Wan ahead of the film’s release about the new monster design and mythology behind the complete reinvention.
Redesigning a Classic Monster
A scene from New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster and Blumhouse’s LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY. A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
“I think one of the things myself and James talked about early on was that, first of all, it had to be practical,” Cronin says of his Mummy’s look. “We’re both big fans of that, and that we would create a look and a silhouette and a presentation of something that was different to reflect that the movie is a very different kind of Mummy story. Then I always try to find the answers within the story as well because it’s a monster that we take out of a box, but it’s not all the way there yet. It’s still warming up, it’s still stretching its legs.”
Cronin says of the Mummy’s evolution within the film, “I always describe it as it’s been on a really long economy class flight, and it ain’t going to do cartwheels right away. Within that, part of the design was also how it would look to be concealed from the light. So it’s a lot paler to begin. But then, when it’s brought out of that, maybe it looks like she’s getting color back in her face, but little do we know that that’s actually the beginning of a deeper rot and a bigger change that’s going on. So it was something with layers and something we could take on a journey. That was the key to the design.”
The new design was a huge part of the appeal for Wan. He says, “It was a big aspiration for us to want to do something that was different. There’ve been so many versions of The Mummy story over the years, and trying to find a new approach was very important for us to set us apart from all the others.”
It wasn’t just the design, either, Wan explains: “The aspiration to want to do something unique, but placed it within the sandbox of the Mummy sort of lore and mythology. But within that, how do we find something that we haven’t quite seen before? Myself and my team at Atomic Monster just immediately gravitated to his concept, his approach, and what he wanted to do with it. That was what really kind of, I think, what we needed to make a movie like this today that sets it apart. That was very important.”
An Evil Dead Rise reunion
BILLIE ROY as Maud Cannon in New Line Cinema’s, Atomic Monster’s and Blumhouse’s “LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy reunites the director with Evil Dead Rise cinematographer Dave Garbett, production designer Nick Bassett, editor Bryan Shaw, and composer Stephen McKeon. For eagle-eyed viewers, it also reunites Cronin with his Evil Dead Rise heroine, Lily Sullivan, in an almost unrecognizable, blink-and-you ‘ll-miss-it cameo.
It’s another example of Cronin’s sense of humor, despite his film’s visceral horror.
Cronin says of Sullivan’s cameo, “There was no obvious role for Lily in this movie. She came to me and said, ‘But I have to be in everything.‘ And I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m down with that, but I’m going to do something nasty in terms of just like how I make you look and what we’re going to do. She’s a beautiful woman, and I’m going to break all of that, and I’m going to call you a really, really bad name as well. No, actually, I’m not going to call you a really, really bad name. A nine-year-old kid is going to call you a really, really bad name.‘”
A new “Dark Universe” in the works?
MAY CALAMAWY as detective Dalia Zaki in New Line Cinema’s, Atomic Monster’s and Blumhouse’s “LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy joins Blumhouse’s growing series of Universal Classic Monster reinventions that began with The Invisible Man and continued in last year’s Wolf Man. Considering that horror master James Wan was reported two years ago to be attached to a new Creature from the Black Lagoon update, do Blumhouse and Atomic Monster have much larger plans for their own “Dark Universe“?
Wan remained mum on any Creature updates, but did hint at more to come.
“I mean, we’re all big fans of the classic Universal monsters, right? They’ve definitely penetrated pop culture in such a big way that they’ve gone on to become their own things, right? Away from the Universal initial umbrella,” Wan answers. “So yeah, there are many characters and a lot of them are really sort of public domain characters that we can kind of play in and play in the sandbox with.“
“There are other great characters within that world that we would obviously love to sort of dabble in, but we’ll see.”
(L-r) NATALIE GRACE as Katie and VERONICA FALCON as Carmen in New Line Cinema’s, Atomic Monster’s and Blumhouse’s “LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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