‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Imposes Christian Ideas On Ancient Egyptian Mythology
(REVIEW) “The Mummy” is a classic Hollywood franchise that loves to leap genres. The classic 1932 Boris Karloff film was old-fashioned Hollywood monster horror. The Brendan Fraser 1999 reboot switched it up to classic “Indiana Jones” action-adventure. The Tom Cruise 2017 reboot tried to start a gritty “dark universe” of monster movies to compete with Marvel.
All of these films have a loose relationship with real Egyptian mythology, but still try to incorporate it into the films.
The latest franchise entry, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy”, has nothing remotely to do with Egyptian mythology. But that doesn’t mean it has nothing to say about our modern relationship with faith.
READ: Historical Drama ‘A Great Awakening’ A Film That Might Put You To Sleep
The film is an excellent example of how Hollywood uses Christian metaphysical assumptions when dealing with non-Christian faiths — all while denying Christianity and promoting these same pre-Christian religions.
Katie (played by Natalie Grace), the young daughter of a journalist, Charlie Canon (Jack Raynor) disappears into the desert without a trace. Eight years later, the broken family, including mother Larisa Cannon (Laia Costa) and grandmother Carmen Santiago (Veronica Falcón), is shocked when she's returned to them, having been mummified and locked in a sarcophagus all this time. However, what should be a joyful reunion soon turns into a living nightmare as she starts to transform into something truly horrifying.
The movie is a fascinating time capsule of the modern horror landscape. Ever since prestige horror films like “Hereditary” and “Get Out” defined modern horror as “artistically made yet entertaining metaphors for trauma and/or social commentary”, these same tropes have trickled down to “B-tier” horror films as well. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is shot and acted with the quality of an arthouse film and leans into the “monster as a metaphor for grief” angle as hard as any movie you’ve seen. But the characters are as dumb as any parodied by the “Scream” franchise.
The movie’s mummy also has nothing to do with actual Egyptian mummies or mythology. Egyptians buried people with objects they thought they might need in the afterlife, and taught that going there is a “pass/fail” meritocracy exam. You went into the presence of the god Osiris, had your heart weighed to see if it’s lighter than a feather, which is a picturesque way of weighing your good deeds and bad deeds.
If your heart is as light or lighter than a feather, you get to go into the afterlife. If not, then Ammit the devourer eats your soul. There is little evidence of a concept of Hell. Instead, this is far closer to the Christian idea of “annihilationism” or “conditional mortality”. Everyone dies unless God deems they get resurrected and/or enter Heaven. The main difference is that, in Christian theology, resurrection is based on accepting Jesus rather than weighing your good and bad deeds.
But Cronin’s movie doesn’t talk about this at all. Instead, it's mummy is strictly a way of burying an ancient Egyptian demon called “The Nazaranian”. In the movie, this demon would destroy families by possessing family members and then influencing them one by one until the families destroyed themselves from the inside. At which point the demon would move on to the next family. The Egyptians eventually beat this demon by using a ritual to trap its soul in the body of a human that they then trapped in a sarcophagus.
It can hardly be overemphasized: this has literally nothing to do with Egyptian views of “demons.” There is no such demon as a “Nazaranian” in Egyptian mythology. And the idea of “demons” as we understand them today has nothing to do with Egyptian cosmology of how humans interacted with spirits. For Egyptians, spirits were powerful entities that were morally neutral. They might do harm to you if you crossed them, but that was at least partly your fault for crossing them.
For example, if you neglected to perform the right rituals for dead family members (like Disney’s “Coco”), they might cause harm to you and your family. This could easily be resolved by just doing your afterlife family duty. Essentially, it is the cosmic equivalent of your parents giving you grief for not calling them often enough.
The idea that “demons” are exclusively malevolent spirits is largely a Western Christian idea. It’s built on the notion that there are spirits who are in the service of God (angels) and those that are not (demons), and anyone not serving God in the spiritual realm is at war with God. Former pagans who became Christians reinterpreted formerly morally neutral demons and their ritual appeasement as evil, and Jesus' power to banish them became a method of liberation from them and their demands.
What’s interesting about “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is that it imports Christian views of demons while denying Christian solutions to demons. The film goes out of its way to have various representatives of Christianity face the Nazaranian, only for the Nazaranian to completely trounce them.
Carmen, for instance, is a deeply religious Catholic who constantly prays over Katie to be delivered from her affliction and against the demon when she attacks her. These prayers are ineffective and typically result in grisly violence against Carmen. One scene, so on the nose it could be in a faith-based film, has the Nazaranian strangle her with her own cross necklace. Likewise, a possessed girl completely annihilates a priest.
What actually stops The Mummy? The ancient ritual that the Egyptians used to seal it away thousands of years ago. This is not just a literal or surface-level symbolic rejection of Christianity in favor of ancient paganism, but a deeply existential one.
The only thing that has the power to stop the Nazaranian demon is a magic ritual to bind the demon to a human host and then seal that human host away. This process has to be repeated over and over for all time when the original host body wears out. This kind of pagan sacrifice is at the heart of the film.
That’s also how the heroes beat the demon themselves. The dad volunteers to be the new host and submits to the ritual that binds him to the demon. This combines pagan supremacy with Christian sensibilities.
In “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy”, Christian rituals are powerless against the demon, but the pagan binding rituals work. Yet, the emotional payoff is built on the father’s voluntary self-sacrifice. So it has a Christian emotional resonance.
Not so fast. At the end, Larisa decides she can’t let her children grow up without their father. So she plots with an Egyptian cop to kidnap to bind the demon to another character. So the film comes full circle in justifying the very system that got Katie possessed in the first place.
The film isn’t interested in thinking through the implications of these ideas. It’s interested in making a gory, scary movie. But it does affirm underlying assumptions that pagan ideas are powerful against demons, but modern scientific and Christian ideas are not. It’s very popular in Hollywood right now to portray paganism as real, powerful and good.
But careful students of “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” and history have good reason to be skeptical of that thesis.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.