Featured Essays The Mummy The Many Evolutions of the Cinematic Mummy Mummies have graced films for over a century — but their history is a bit wilder than other movie “monsters.” By Jake Pitre | Published on April 30, 2026 Credit: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Universal Pictures What is the “mummy movie”? If you consider the characteristics of other monster films, their essence easily comes to mind—a vampire movie is about a bloodsucker intent on seducing victims to join the undead; a werewolf movie is about a troubled shapeshifter preying on a rural community; a zombie movie features unnamed hordes ravaging the living. There are fewer mummy movies, which is part of why it’s more difficult to conjure what exactly they are, but they are also, arguably, the least cinematic of the major monsters. They moan, they shuffle, they’re wrapped up in rags. Oooh, I’m so scared?  Through the history of the mummy movie, patterns do emerge, always drawn back to the figure’s Egyptian origins, often exoticized accordingly. With the recent release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which traffics in some of these tropes while ultimately barely registering as a proper mummy movie, and the announcement of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning for The Mummy 4, it seems time to reflect back on the meanings of the mummy across time, and perhaps more interestingly, across regional interpretation. After all, as André Bazin argued in his legendary essay about the ontology of the photographic image, the cinema itself is akin to mummification, as it carries with it the knowledge of death, and the instinct to ward it off: “the preservation of life by a representation of life.”  The earliest examples of mummy movies, arriving early in the twentieth century, are instructive. It’s at this time that a cultural frenzy was occurring over Egyptology in North America and Europe, as major tombs, particularly that of King Tut (finally discovered in 1922), were being sought, found, excavated, and marketed on a global scale. These early shorts, including two both titled The Egyptian Mummy (one a lost film from 1913, the other a Vitagraph Studios short from 1914), told simple comedic tales of corpses run amok, though these were fakes, played by characters trying to get one over on a mad scientist.  Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled (1918) was inspired by these shorts, but further complicated them. Made by an all-Black cast and crew, in this version, the scientist, searching for a mummy to experiment on, tells his daughter’s suitor that he can marry her if his reanimation experiment works (sure, why not). The suitor decides to fake it, acquires a sarcophagus, and hires a shoe shiner to be the mummy. Meanwhile, “Egyptian Emissaries who are searching for the mummy of the Royal Rambunctions stolen years previous by American souvenir hunters” also see the scientist’s ad, and are likewise after the supposed mummy for repatriation. This early inclusion of characters (albeit dressed in era-inappropriate attire) searching for their national heritage, adds a fascinating wrinkle, even if it’s played for humor. The film, it should be noted, was produced by a white-owned company, was largely aimed at white audiences, and other films by the company feature far more racist caricatures than this one. It also may be the first example of a mummy movie with an unravelling gag.  Credit: Universal Studios The next logical point in the mummy film’s trajectory would be, of course, Boris Karloff’s portrayal in Universal’s The Mummy (1932), which would set the tone for the subgenre to come—curses, archeological expeditions, ancient scrolls, elaborate makeup. Indeed, for most of the film, Karloff is heavily made up as an Egyptian man, only briefly appearing in the mummified rags you might imagine (indeed, Lee Cronin’s new mummy film is only the latest in a long tradition of ostensible “mummy movies” that barely seem interested in mummies at all; more on that in a moment).  Of course, evidence remains scarce that Egyptians ever believed at all in mummification having any connection to reanimation, as it was a sacred practice for protecting souls into the afterlife. Nevertheless, Universal Studios’ now-iconic version, kicked off here with Karloff before following up in The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942),The Mummy’s Ghost and Curse (both 1944), and, later, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), would come to define the West’s public imagining of mummies and, to an extent, Egyptian history and culture. While entertaining, these films contributed to an Orientalist and colonialist lens on the region—all of which, again, rest largely on the hoopla around the supposed “curse” on King Tut’s tomb.  At this point, though, things get more interesting, not only through new interpretations in Hollywood and in Europe, but particularly as other global cultures made use of the mummy figure and, oftentimes, how it fit into their regional myths and histories. Mexican cinema is a primary example: Many luchador films, including those featuring folk hero El Santo, would feature mummies, often alongside other monster characters. Mummies here tend to have some connection to demonic power, and are generally foils for the wrestling star to easily dispatch (Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters, from 1970, is one to seek out). Other films, perhaps most notably the Aztec Mummy trilogy (1957-8), more directly tie mummy tropes to Aztec aesthetics and history, in part, reportedly, to avoid copyright infringement considering how heavily screenwriter Alfredo Salazar pulled from Universal’s version. These mummies, though, more closely resembled the Mummies of Guanajuato, naturally mummified bodies that were a popular tourist attraction.  The best of the trilogy is the third entry, The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, which, as it happens, is less interested in either robots or mummies than it is in telling a Frankenstein’s monster-like story of “reanimating” a human-robot. In any case, the mummy does show up, looking uncomfortably like Leatherface. The Aztec-Egyptian assemblage does result in inaccurate portrayals of hieroglyphics (Aztecs used pictographs), and Incas actually practiced mummification, not the Aztecs. Even so, the madcap nonsense is ideal viewing while under certain medicinal influences.  Credit: Cinematografica Calderon Brazil also distributed a number of unique mummy films, including O Segredo da Múmia (The Secret of the Mummy, 1982). The story is similar to the original mummy shorts, as a scientist seeking the elixir of life uncovers an ancient tomb in Egypt, awakening a mummy who happens to be a love-spurned killer. It is, well, rather campy, a practically-softcore, erotically-charged take of anarchic comedy—in Brazil, a subgenre called pornochanchada—that barely holds together. Here, there is less attention paid to localisation, and more to the absurd pastiche of genres, styles, and iconography.  The UK reimagined the mummy through Hammer Films’ less “romantic” interpretation, first in The Mummy (1959), as Christopher Lee played the bandaged monster as a more action-oriented rampager, ultimately offering a more exciting and imposing version, even if it somehow has a more uncomfortable colonial sheen to it than the 1932 version. The next two Hammer mummy films are barely worth mentioning, but their final effort, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), is a somewhat intriguing take, even as the mummy as such is sidelined in favor of dark occult happenings and outrageous vulgarisms.  Egypt itself, one of the most successful film industries in the Arab world, has almost entirely ignored the mummy in its cinema. A slight exception would be The Night of Counting the Years (1969), also released as The Mummy, a neo-realist masterpiece which explicitly deals with the moment right before British colonial rule in the country. Taking place in 1881, and based on a true story about the sacking of ancient tombs and the selling of mummies and other relics on the black market, it confronts the value of heritage and tradition, and the threat of the past from outside and from within. As it becomes increasingly mythical, the stolen mummies come to reflect a much broader and thornier meaning of history itself being robbed of its reality.  In recent decades, then, the mummy film has taken on a decidedly populist and, in some cases, postmodern status. There is the franchise with Brendan Fraser (1999, 2001, 2008), massively popular films, simultaneously irresistible as popcorn entertainment and troubling in their obvious and ill-considered Orientalism. That the franchise is making a comeback now, perhaps spurred  by the ongoing Fraser renaissance, suggests that its continued relevance goes beyond nostalgia, that there’s something about its swashbuckling, adventurous formula that audiences are again demanding. Then, there was Tom Cruise’s attempt to reboot The Mummy (2017) and kickstart the Universal “Dark Universe,” which was canceled following the film’s failure. If anything, it’s probably best remembered by many today because of the trailer released for the film with the wrong audio track, a video which routinely gets re-shared on social media.  Credit: Vitagraph Films The best (post)modern take may just be Bubba Ho-tep, Don Coscarelli’s (of Phantasm fame) ridiculous story of a still-alive Elvis Presley teaming up with a dyed-black JFK to battle an ancient, cowboy boot-wearing mummy terrorizing their nursing home by feeding on the souls of its residents through their anuses. It’s both puerile and juvenile, but very funny, and it somehow manages to appropriate the mummy for a moving treatment of aging and what it means to be facing death and confronting your “legacy,” or what you might leave behind. As Elvis asks at one point, “In the end… does anything really matter?”  Perhaps here is the core of the mummy film, whether in 1918 or today: Death is always coming for you, and there’s nothing you can do about it—but maybe being preserved on film is one way to overcome it. That feeling will never go out of style.[end-mark] The post The Many Evolutions of the Cinematic Mummy appeared first on Reactor.

News Resident Evil Resident Evil Teaser Trailer “Kind Of” Takes Place in Resident Evil 2‘s World, Says Zach Cregger Trash Panda City is no place to be alone at night. Or ever By Molly Templeton | Published on April 30, 2026 Image: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Sony Pictures There are definitely better places to be a courier having some mysterious sort of trouble. The first teaser for the new Resident Evil movie—which comes to us courtesy of Weapons director Zach Cregger—isn’t very long, and it doesn’t say very much, but it doesn’t need to. A young fellow named Bryan (Austin Abrams) breaks into an empty house in search of help. Something has happened to him on the road, and things don’t exactly look good. We hear him leaving a message, but it becomes a bit difficult to pay attention to what he’s saying once the zombies—or, you know, just their limbs—start showing up. Speaking to the PlayStation Blog, Cregger’s enthusiasm for the Resident Evil game series is clear. As is his approach to this world and the way a person is forced to move through it. Cregger said that what he loved about the games is “this new mechanic of resource conservation. You had to be completely aware of how many bullets you had, and how many healing items you had. You’d make these tough decisions about – what am I going to carry with me? What am I going to leave behind? It was such a unique mechanic. And it felt for me, with all the Resident Evil games, or with most of them, some of them get a little too arcade-y for my taste, but I really like the survival horror mechanics of moving slow and with deliberation. That was something that was really important to me to bring into the movie.” The trailer puts this mechanic front and center as Bryan digs through the empty house, looking for anything that’ll help him. Enter: a conveniently placed shotgun! Probably with very few shells. Cregger also said that the movie “kind of” takes place in the world of Resident Evil 2, though he notes he made “a couple of little shifts for dramatic license.” He describes the character of Bryan—notably the only human we see in this teaser—as “just a good-natured, hapless dude who gets sucked into a nightmare.” He is not Leon, the well-trained game character who knows how to handle himself. He’s clear about why this movie isn’t retelling the story of a specific Resident Evil game: “To me, I would feel like there’s kind of no winning there if I were to tell Leon’s story, because the games do such a great job. It would just be kind of redundant, and ultimately, I think, disappointing. So I would rather just kind of celebrate everything I love about the games by telling the story that could exist on the sidelines of one of the games.” Cregger’s Resident Evil—which the director co-wrote with Shay Hatten—is in theaters September 18.[end-mark] The post <i>Resident Evil</i> Teaser Trailer “Kind Of” Takes Place in <i>Resident Evil 2</i>‘s World, Says Zach Cregger appeared first on Reactor.

Column Mark as Read In Space, No One Can Hear How Lonely You Are From Project Hail Mary to Pluribus, our recent media shares a common theme of loneliness… By Molly Templeton | Published on April 30, 2026 Credit: Amazon MGM Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Amazon MGM Studios At some point, fairly early into Project Hail Mary—maybe it was while Ryan Gosling drank contraband vodka from a pouch—I thought to myself, Oh, fuck. We’re all just really crushingly lonely, aren’t we? This is, in a way, a large leap. Gosling’s character has been unwillingly sent to space and is, at that point in time, unwillingly the only person alive for who knows how many miles. He could not possibly be more alone, on a technical level. And yet I spent a lot of the rest of the movie just thinking about loneliness, and modern life, and these stories that—whenever they may have been written—have cropped up in the last few years, full of people who are or have become alone, who may or may not be reckoning with their loneliness.  Everyone in Severance is lonely, so far as I can tell; Helena may have money and power, but does she have friends? Mark Scott has candles that belonged to his dead wife, and Irving has his dog. When they go to work and stop being themselves, becoming their innies, they have each other. But not themselves. In Pluribus, Carol is the only individual in thousands of miles who has not become part of a larger hivemind. I thought about Carol a lot while watching Ryland Grace try to save the world. I thought about Carol and her whiteboard, and Ryland Grace and his whiteboard. You work with what you’ve got.  There are so many more books than movies in any given year that I generally find it harder to follow these thematic threads, but still: Maw in Claire North’s Slow Gods is largely isolated, if not exactly lonely, but most everyone he interacts with wants something from him. The characters in Pip Adam’s Audition are sometimes alone—a very specific kind of alone that’s imposed on them—sometimes with each other, but always cut off, sustained by too-small, too-rare moments of connection. The demon in Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass spends ages rebuilding her city, mostly alone, rebuffing the angel who wants to help. Is she lonely? She would never admit it. Morgan in E.K. Johnston’s Sky on Fire chooses her solitude, up to a point, when she realizes there are other options. The young man at the heart of Rachel Hartman’s Among Ghosts has, for much of the book, ghosts and a murderer for company, but that book feels lonely. There’s barely a drop of loneliness in Martin MacInnes’s glorious In Ascension, but the narrator is almost always on her own. You can choose that, of course. I don’t want to say you can’t choose solitude. But so many stories I’ve read in the last few years have loneliness as a color in their palette. A note in their bouquet. It hovers. Sometimes it comes straight to the fore.  We are not all unwilling astronauts. We are not all one of the lone individuals on the planet after the arrival of a hive mind. But Pluribus, especially, feels … accurate, in a way that is hard to describe. Carol is alone but not alone. There are people present, sort of, sometimes. Somewhere, far off, there are other people that might, potentially, be more like her. Or they might not. It kind of feels like being online. So many people! And yet so little to grab on to. The internet, as you might gather from this comparison, or if it has happened to you too, has started making me more lonely. People have been complaining about the state of the internet for a while now; I am far from the first. But it keeps coming up: the thing I used to do, the place I used to go when I was lonely and bored and angsty and uncertain—well, now it’s the place that makes me lonely and bored and angsty and uncertain. Once upon a time, I went to the internet to read about people’s lives, to read journals and blogs and talk to whoever was awake and on AOL Instant Messenger. (The thrill of the little green light!) Once upon a time, I read thousands of words that were just written because people had too many feelings and had found an unlikely place to put them. Once upon a time, we were strangers writing to each other, not brands, not self-marketers, not influencers. No one had yet figured out how to monetize people’s attention spans. I went online because I was bored at work, or depressed at work, or sad at home, or missed people, or wanted to be a different version of myself for a minute. Now I go online because I have to, and yet I’m still looking for that old internet, expecting it to appear between the cracks, slipping through the paid posts and the fake videos and the engagement bait Instagram drops into your feed just to try to get you to go yell at someone on Threads. It is a very weird thing when what was once the salve for loneliness is now the cause of it. Maybe you don’t feel that way. I don’t always feel that way. I love the moments of surprise, the stories, the threads of unexpected and magical encounters, the photos of birds and rabbits and cats and dogs. I love the way you can gain a new appreciation for a person by seeing what catches their eye. What they notice. At its best, the internet is full of glorious noticing—sometimes a pithy one-liner, sometimes an essay. At its worst, well, I probably don’t need to tell you. It’s a luxury to be able to look away when the feed that perpetually alternates between art and horror switches over to horror. And yet I’m not sure how many minds are built to engage with the erasure of that divide.  No one in these stories full of loneliness spends any time online. The answer isn’t in there. A lot of good things are: essays, stories, art, cat videos, fundraisers that I wish weren’t necessary, information that we need to know. Job offers, freelance work, news about books I want to read. But I keep thinking about the moment in Pluribus where Carol, abandoned by the hive-mind people who cannot deal with her messy emotions, paints a huge sign asking them to come back. I want to tell her no. I want to tell her she doesn’t need them. They want to change her; they want to make her one of them. But she is all alone in a big house with only the prowling coyotes for company, sending missives out into the world that may or may not ever arrive. What else is she going to do?[end-mark] The post In Space, No One Can Hear How Lonely You Are appeared first on Reactor.

News Mother Knows Best Upcoming New Zealand Horror Thriller Mother Knows Best Has a Stand-Out Cast Some of us will follow Bobbie Draper anywhere By Molly Templeton | Published on April 30, 2026 Screenshot: Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Prime Video Sometimes, you hardly need to know what a movie is about to get interested in it. That’s definitely the case with Mother Knows Best, which just finished shooting in New Zealand: It stars Frankie Adams (The Expanse’s Bobbie Draper, pictured above), Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider, Game of Thrones), and Rhona Mitra (Underworld: Rise of the Lycans). The supporting cast includes Predator: Badlands star Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and Vinnie Bennett (who played young Dom Toretto in Fast 9). Personally, I’m sold. But the synopsis also sounds intriguing. As Variety explains: Mother Knows Best follows Talia (Adams), who, after surviving a near-fatal encounter in the Pacific, gives birth to a premature daughter whose existence appears tied to an ancient prophecy. Talia travels to the remote New Zealand estate of her partner’s powerful and secretive family, but what begins as an uneasy Christmas reunion quickly reveals itself to be something far more disturbing. As she digs deeper, she uncovers a terrifying connection between her daughter, forgotten Pacific mythology and a sinister order that will stop at nothing to reclaim what they believe belongs to them. She must fight to protect her child before the family closes in and the truth behind the prophecy is finally revealed. The film is directed by Kiel McNaughton (Good Grief) from a screenplay by John Argall; the two previously collaborated on The Legend of Baron To’a. “Mother Knows Best aims to push the boundaries of New Zealand genre filmmaking,” McNaughton said in a statement. “It sits at the intersection of psychological horror and cultural myth, and it’s being brought to life by an extraordinary cast. Frankie Adams anchors the film with a powerful performance, and an incredible group of Māori and Pacific actors makes this project very special.” The film doesn’t have a U.S. release date just yet.[end-mark] The post Upcoming New Zealand Horror Thriller <i>Mother Knows Best</i> Has a Stand-Out Cast appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Hokum Hokum’s Damian McCarthy Explains the Rabbits of It All Reactor interviewed writer-director McCarthy and actor Adam Scott about the horror film By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 30, 2026 Credit: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Neon Hokum, latest horror movie from writer-director Damian McCarthy, features Adam Scott playing a prickly novelist named Ohm Bauman who heads to an Irish inn to spread his parents’ ashes. Without getting into spoilers, Ohm ultimately becomes trapped inside the inn, which is rumored to be haunted by an ancient evil witch, and faces many horrors, with more than a few of them bunny-shaped in nature. “Those rabbits keep seeming to find their way into the movie,” McCarthy told me in an interview with Scott in the lead up to the film’s release. He shared specific inspirations for the bunny imagery of it all as well as the desire to show a shanachie on screen, while Scott talked about what Ohm sees (and doesn’t see) in the film. Read on for the full discussion. Credit: Neon This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.   Ohm faces internal and external trauma and horror, and sometimes the viewer sees his internal horrors manifested on screen. I wondered for you as an actor, how you approached playing those scenes where things from his past were taking physical form for the viewer? Adam Scott: I think that one of the reasons I was so excited to do the movie—other than Damian’s previous movie Oddity, such a big fan of that— was the character, who’s starting as this prickly, for lack of a better word, a-hole, and then taking this journey where, unbeknownst to him, he’s figuring out how to forgive himself and forgive his father, to let himself off the hook. I think that whether or not everything that happens over the course of the movie is actually happening or not, it is a direct reflection of how he feels about himself and how he sees the world, and that starts to change as he investigates and is finally at a place where he’s able to face up to how he got here. Damian, one of the things that was so striking about the movie was the imagery. We see some of it in the trailer, and I wanted to talk to you about how you came up with that imagery, specifically the rabbit imagery. Damian McCarthy: It was going to be a long time spent with just this one character [Scott’s Ohm] in the one location. He arrives at the hotel, he interacts with the other characters, but by the time he lands in the situation he’s in and trying to escape this night, there’s nobody else there. Your production design—every ornament and painting—everything in the room becomes vital then, and those are the things that are that are watching him. And if you ever want to cut away from the actor to something else in the room… I feel like that that cut away has to be justified, and the way to do that is just with this scary imagery of ornaments and haunting clocks and those carvings of the babies, the cherubs over the fireplace; all of this just continues to tighten those screws and make the film a lot more unsettling. Courtesy of Neon And is there anything special about the rabbit theme? Damian: It seems to keep coming back, those rabbits keep seeming to find their way into the movie. And I know all that comes from, as a child, watching Watership Down, which is very frightening, and then as a film student, things like Danny Darko and Gummo, the kid who has the bunny ears, or Sexy Beast, that demonic hare that’s following Ray Winstone around the desert. Adam: Fatal Attraction. Damian: [laughs] Yeah, it’s all there. So I think all of that—it’s just an image that’s quite strange. And then you get into Alice in Wonderland, that’s what leads her into this other strange world, which I always loved as a child. I think all of that now, just as an adult and making films, seems to keep finding its way back in there. And last question: The actor who played the owner of the hotel—his voice, his delivery, is just fantastic. And I would love to hear how you found him, or if you had him in mind when you wrote that part. Damian: Brendan Conroy, an excellent Irish actor. I wanted somebody that would have that kind of gravitas… we call them in Ireland a shanachie, which would be an old Irish storyteller. And I thought, this part has got to be a shanachie. This has gotta be a guy who’s sitting down and telling everybody in the pubs some old, interesting story. I thought Brendan would be brilliant for that. And he was just lovely to work with. Hokum premieres in theaters on May 1, 2026.[end-mark] The post <i>Hokum</i>’s Damian McCarthy Explains the Rabbits of It All appeared first on Reactor.