Filmmaker Lee Cronin helped bring the Evil Dead franchise back to life (again) when his film Evil Dead Rise proved to be a hit in 2023, bringing the series back to the big screen after a 10-year hiatus. Now Cronin has his take on a different horror icon — The Mummy — coming out this week, even while not one but two Evil Dead films are in the works from different directors (Evil Dead Burn from Sébastien Vaniček and Evil Dead Wrath from Francis Galluppi).
We recently spoke to the filmmaker about his eponymous Mummy movie (look for that chat later this week), but we of course also had to ask him about his feelings on the state of Evil Dead these days. Along the way, he let slip that the lead actress of Evil Dead Rise, Lily Sullivan, has a cameo in his new film.
It all started when we asked him if he ever gets grossed out on set when putting together the extremely gory sequences in his films.
"I'll tell you a moment that definitely grossed me out on this set, and it's a small detail. Did you notice who plays Maud’s teacher [in The Mummy]?" Cronin said. "This is letting the cat out of the bag. So there's a very definitive Evil Dead Rise connection there. It's Lily Sullivan, who plays Beth in Evil Dead Rise. There was no obvious role for her in the movie. And I love Lily, and I'll work with her again, but she's like, ‘I have to be in this film!’ So I wrote this role of this very inelegant teacher, and her revenge was to save up that snot that pops out of her nose, which I didn't know was coming. And I did have a little bit of sick in my mouth when that happened."
Changing the subject before we all get a little bit of sick in our mouths, Cronin did reflect on the success of Evil Dead Rise and how it's a point of pride that, thanks to that success, there are now two more Evil Dead movies on the way.
"Yeah, two more! It is great," he said, while also clarifying the film's origins a bit. "It was quite a journey with Evil Dead Rise, because it's funny. It was never envisioned for streaming. It was Covid that put it there. There's always that piece of the story that's missing, which was it was a theatrical venture, and then Covid put it into the streaming box, and then it crawled its way back out when audiences saw it [in test screenings] and, thankfully, theaters reopened and everybody started to come back. And of course, I feel a certain bit of pride that I kind of reawakened [the series] and maybe went about it in a different way, and opened up a pathway of new characters in different worlds. So I'm very excited to see what audiences think of the new Evil Dead movies that are coming up in the coming years."
Cronin will have executive producer credits on the two upcoming films, but he's not talking when asked if the sequels will continue his idea of having the three books from Army of Darkness being the three established Necronomicons.
"I think audiences will have to wait and see!" he laughs.
Evil Dead Burn will be released on July 24, 2026, while Evil Dead Wrath doesn't have a release date yet. Lee Cronin's The Mummy, snot and all, will be out this weekend.
