Lee Cronin's The Mummy Wears Egypt Like a Mask

There's a specific kind of visual lie that movies tell with their titles and posters. The monster on the marquee is essentially a costume worn by a completely different film underneath — and audiences, who have spent decades learning to read those visual signals, feel the deception in their bones even when they can't name it.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy — covered in detail by FilmComicsExplained's Niyat in a recent 23-minute breakdown — appears to be doing exactly this. Based on Niyat's account (the character names, plot details, and mythology described here are sourced entirely from that video, as I haven't been able to independently verify the film's specifics at the time of writing), the movie opens in Aswan with a cold visual grammar that at least gestures toward the right aesthetic register: a black basalt sarcophagus, a subterranean pyramid, the Gothic geometry of ancient containment. Dark stone. Sealed spaces. The visual vocabulary of dread-through-burial that mummy horror has been running on since Boris Karloff shuffled through the 1930s.

Then it abandons that vocabulary almost immediately.

What follows, per Niyat's breakdown, is essentially a possession film. A child named Katie is used as a vessel for an ancient demon called the Nazaranian — described in the film's mythology, according to Niyat, as an entity kept at bay through ritual mummification, with sacred scripture embedded into the host's skin as binding. As the wrappings peel away, the demon strengthens. That's the mechanic. The "mummy" here isn't a reanimated ancient figure stalking archaeologists through torchlit corridors. It's a traumatized American girl with scripture-covered skin, catatonic and deteriorating in a suburban New Mexico home.

Here's what I keep coming back to: the wrapping is the tell.

When you think about the visual tradition of mummy horror, the bandages do specific aesthetic work. They signal preserved time, compressed history, the weight of a civilization making contact with the present. The bandage is a textile archive. That's why the unwrapping sequence in almost any mummy film carries so much charge — it's the reverse of burial, the violation of categorical separation between past and living. The image of a wrapped body communicates: something that should stay sealed is being opened.

In The Exorcist — the film that Niyat correctly identifies as Cronin's primary influence — William Friedkin built a completely different visual language for the same basic premise (malevolent entity inhabiting a child). Where mummy horror works in browns and golds, buried textures and archaeological depth, Friedkin went clinical and institutional: the blue-white sterility of hospital fluorescents, the gray grid of medical equipment, the visual language of modern medicine trying and failing to explain something that sits completely outside its categories. Chris MacNeil's journey through specialists and psychiatric assessments looks rational because the spaces she moves through are coded as rational spaces — all clean lines and diagnostic paperwork. The supernatural horror of The Exorcist lands so hard precisely because it ruptures that visual order from the inside.

Cronin, according to Niyat's account, doesn't build a visual world coherent enough to rupture. Egypt isn't rendered as anything with genuine visual weight — it's a location rather than a language. The Aswan opening with its black pyramid reads like a set that was built and then walked away from. Then the film moves to suburban interiors and stays there. What should be the aesthetic engine of the whole piece — the tension between ancient Egyptian visual culture and contemporary American domestic space — apparently never fires. Egypt becomes what Niyat describes as borrowed branding: a title, some bandages, a scarab in a piece of fruit.

What would Egypt-as-substance look like? Not hieroglyphics on walls as horror wallpaper. Something more like what Bertolucci did with Morocco in The Sheltering Sky, or what Lawrence of Arabia understood about the desert as a kind of conceptual erasure — places that don't function as backdrop but as active visual forces that rewrite the people moving through them. If an ancient Egyptian demon is genuinely ancient and genuinely Egyptian, what would its visual presence carry of that origin? What does three-thousand-year-old evil look like aesthetically, as opposed to Evil Dead evil, which is very specifically a low-budget American franchise aesthetic of practical gore and screaming in domestic interiors?

These are the questions a movie called The Mummy should be answering in images, not just in mythology delivered via videotape.

The videotape detail is actually symptomatic. According to Niyat, the film's central mythology — how the Nazaranian works, what the bindings mean, why children make better vessels — is delivered when a character watches a tape left by the antagonist. That's information design, not visual storytelling. The tape explains what the images were supposed to show.

Niyat draws the Exorcist comparison in terms of character logic and narrative discipline, and that analysis is sharp. But the visual dimension of the comparison is where it gets really brutal. In The Exorcist, the gradual physical transformation of Regan's face and body is presented with such meticulous attention to the uncanny that you feel the wrongness before you've consciously registered what's wrong. Friedkin understood that horror lives in the gap between "something is slightly off" and "this is completely impossible" — and he held the camera in that gap for a long time. The makeup and effects serve a visual grammar, not just a gross-out escalation.

What Niyat describes in The Mummy sounds like the escalation without the grammar. Skin peeling, self-inflicted wounds, teeth-losing, grandmother-devouring wolves (this last detail — set in what Niyat identifies as Albuquerque, though I'd note this is drawn from the video breakdown rather than independent sourcing) — it's a parade of effects that seem to be competing for most extreme rather than building toward any coherent visual idea. Gore as genre signaling rather than gore as language.

That's the thing about the Evil Dead franchise Niyat invokes. What made the original Evil Dead work visually wasn't just the practical effects — it was Raimi's insane camera language, the way the forest itself seemed predatory, the specific texture of cheap horror that became its own aesthetic category. Evil Dead Rise (2023) moved the setting to an apartment building — new for the film but not wholly unprecedented territory for the franchise's occasional domestic settings — and found genuine visual menace in confined vertical space, in the architectural logic of a building you can't escape. The location served an idea.

A Mummy film, if it were doing its visual job, would find the equivalent specificity. The archaeology of grief. What it looks like when something ancient occupies something contemporary. The bandage as boundary between what's sealed and what's been forced back open.

Instead, per Niyat: "The Mummy builds itself out of skipped logic, hysterically bad choices, and people so catastrophically stupid they make the demon look like the most organized presence in the house."

That line is funny and accurate on the character level. But visually, what it describes is a film that made the demon the most visually coherent presence too — because at least the demon has a consistent aesthetic logic (wrappings, scripture, escalating possession signifiers), while the world around it is just genre furniture arranged in whatever order seemed most immediately alarming.

The film apparently ends — again, per Niyat's account — with Charlie's sacrifice having genuine emotional weight, the one moment where a character's actions feel proportionate to what the story has been building. That landing has shape. The tragedy of a father becoming the vessel, tapping out I love you in Morse code from inside a coffin, is an image with real resonance.

Which makes the overall picture stranger: a film that saved its best visual idea for the ending, after spending 90-something minutes burning the audience's goodwill with a monster that has Egypt's name and a completely different face.

A title is a visual promise. When the image that arrives doesn't match the image that was sold, you don't just have a disappointing film. You have a film that doesn't know what it looks like.

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Leo Santana is a design and visual culture writer for Buzzrag.