All Lee Cronin Movies, Ranked By Scariness
Maybe it’s because of a recent Tom Cruise disaster or an upcoming Brendan Fraser project, but when a horror director gets their name in the title of a Blumhouse movie (as Lee Cronin has just done with The Mummy), you know they’re doing something right — and in the world of Blumhouse, doing things right means making them as terrifying as possible.
The Irish filmmaker’s upward trajectory in the horror movie world has been remarkably steady since breaking out with his A24 creeper The Hole in the Ground in 2019. He followed that up with a successful move to franchise horror with the critically acclaimed Evil Dead Rise a few years later. The Mummy, which is only his third feature, further cements his reputation as a director with the rare ability to scare the wits out of audiences while still allowing them to have a pretty good time in the process.
In the list below, which we’ll keep updated whenever necessary, I’ve ranked every Lee Cronin movie so far in ascending order of scariness. Read on to learn a bit more about the director's filmography and where you can see his work, whether in theatres or on streaming platforms like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Before making his first feature in 2019, Cronin honed his craft in the world of horror shorts. The most prominent of these, 2013’s Ghost Train, appeared in a straight-to-VOD anthology movie called Minutes Past Midnight and focused on a fairground employee working on a rickety old ghost train at night.
The short is only 16-minutes long, but it works wonders at showing the director’s natural ability to build dread and suspense in confined spaces, and without the need for much budget or effects. If you’re starting to get into Cronin’s work, it’s well worth going back to.
A few years after becoming the home of a new kind of indie horror — thanks to movies like Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Ari Aster’s Hereditary — A24 turned to Lee Cronin for his debut feature, The Hole in the Ground. It’s a movie that manages to get under your skin, even though the central idea — parental anxieties about a child being evil — is not the most original concept under the sun.
What Hole in the Ground did do, in a way that has clearly borne out in the last few years, was show Cronin’s knack for taking well-worn material and making it feel freshly chilling. Better things would follow, but for an Irish filmmaker in 2019, it was a remarkable feature genre debut.
Nine years after the disastrous attempt to revive The Mummy as a Tom Cruise-led action caper, we’ve finally got another movie worthy of the character’s lore. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has once again offered a showcase of the director’s talent for approaching legendary IP from freshly horrifying angles.
The story — in which a girl who disappeared returns, along with a potentially supernatural and malevolent force — takes place not in Egypt but in the much more worrying confines of a suburban family home. In much the same way that he managed with his Evil Dead movie (more on that in a second, it’s a classic example of, when it comes to terrifying audiences, less is usually more.
The finest example to date of Cronin’s terrifyingly claustrophobic style is still his 2023 mainstream breakout, Evil Dead Rise — a movie that moved the classic story from a cabin in the woods to an L.A. apartment block while managing to rekindle the sense of gross-out fun of Sam Raimi’s original, and without losing the terror that Fede Álvarez had conjured in his slightly-too-serious 2013 reboot.
This is a great one to watch for horror fans who like their gore two parts gnarly and one part fun — just wait for the cheese grater scene. Another standalone spinoff film, Evil Dead Burn, will apparently be with us this July, with Cronin acting as executive producer and Infested’s Sébastien Vaniček on board to direct, which is basically the most gruesome combo you could reasonably ask for. Sign us up.
