For decades, Hollywood's great monster franchises have been quietly defanged. The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein figures once designed to terrify were repackaged into four-quadrant spectacles, the horror hollowed out in favour of spectacle and accessibility. Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions has made a career of restoring dread to popular cinema, has had enough. "Monster movies started out as scary movies and over time they grew big to four quadrant family movies."
Speaking to us ahead of the film's release, Blum was characteristically direct about the state of monster movies, for him, something essential had been lost in that transition, and The Invisible Man was where Blumhouse first began course-correcting. "We produced THE INVISIBLE MAN and that was one of the first to bring the heart. And what these movies originally set out to do the Invisible Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon all of those stories were originally horror and over time, they grew into something else."
The choice of director was no accident. When Blum and James Wan met Lee Cronin the filmmaker who delivered the terrifyingly effective Evil Dead Rise the creative alignment was immediate. "We've been a big fan of Lee's for a while, since his previous movies, and we just felt that we wanted to do something different," Blum recalled. "We wanted it to be a scary film, visceral in a powerful way, and for it to stand apart from the previous iterations of the Mummy franchises. And when we met with Lee, he felt the same way."
Part of the film's emotional texture comes from a deeply personal place for Blum. A visit to Egypt with his wife left a mark on him that found its way into the film's DNA. "One of the things that stuck out to me the most is the tombs where the pharaohs were buried, and how much of what's inside has survived thousands of years. All these stories that are told, some of which we understand, some of which we don't." That unresolved mystery, he says, is exactly what makes Cronin's film so unsettling. "So much of it is undiscovered and still mysterious to us."
But what Blum is most excited about is simpler and more visceral. "I think one thing that's unique about this movie is that it's taking this old legend and bringing it back to its roots, which was what the Mummy was, which is scary as hell." Further talking about why the film is exiting for the audience he adds, "I'm most excited about audiences experiencing fear, horror, and excitement," he says. "You're very tied up in the fate of this family you care about them. Then suddenly, a child goes missing and there's terror that comes with that. And setting it in the context of this mummy mythology makes it that much scarier." The Mummy releases worldwide on April 17, 2026.
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