Do wraps make a mummy?

This movie was hard to watch, and not because it was scary, but because children are at the center of this unflinchingly gory film.

First, I have to nitpick at the title of this movie. It’s not about mummies, but the culture in which they existed. The evil is actually a demon kept in check through a living human host, who is then wrapped in dressing covered in ancient language. The individual is NOT mummified, but they are kept in a certain type of sarcophagus. At its core, this is a possession movie.

A possession movie that starts off with a child kidnapping. The kid is lured with an apple that contains a scarab beetle that goes down her throat. She goes missing for 8 years and is found when a plane carrying her sarcophagus crashes.

It’s crazy to me that Katie’s doctors recommend taking her home. She isn’t stable when she’s not sedated.

Her condition is finally revealed when she arrives home. Her skin looks like crepe. One eye is lazy, her nails are thick and long, and her limbs are in a “locked” position. When she’s not sedated, she’s headbutting abuela or chattering her teeth.

The worst comes when Larissa is clipping her kid’s grotesque toenail: a looooooong strip of skin is removed from toe to shin (and yes, you see it). We find out later that the hosts are wrapped in some kind of dressing with an ancient language that keeps the demon at bay. Once one strip of it was removed, Katie was able to rip off the other pieces (another grotesque scene) and gain more power.

The demon both possesses and spreads. It spreads through whispers. Demon Katie infects her baby sister first, who laughs while her abuela is disemboweled and eventually spreads the demon to her dead body (so it possesses the living and the dead). The creepiest part is when Maud puts in her gramma’s dentures. Yikes.

The older brother, Sebastian, ends up possessed but is also under the control of Demon Katie, who makes him bash his head on his bedpost. Possessed Abuela manages to produce a gigantic scorpion and get it into Detective Zaki’s throat, where it then bursts out of Zaki’s throat. She somehow manages to stay awake and alert long enough to help Charlie transfer the devil from his child to himself. In order to speak the incantation, Zaki has to dig around in her open neck to plug the hole so she can speak aloud.

A lot of these scenes were hard to stomach for the gore alone, but watching children go through it makes it all the worse. It doesn’t help that the characters feel somewhat empty, particularly the main characters. They exist, and we know a few things about them, but not much. I can’t articulate why that makes the movie seem more artificial, but it does.

While the combination of horror elements is somewhat original – an ancient Egyptian demon that possesses humans en masse, but can be held at bay using the wraps typically associated with mummies – that’s where the originality ends. It’s giving complicated Evil Dead. Mummies + generational keepers + evil mother + possession + body horror + contagious demon (curse?) + bugs down the throat + Catholicism + ancient rituals. There’s a lot going on, and I can’t say it’s good.

On one level, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy does its job: it’s creepy. Children as evil gives me the fucking creeps, and this one is particularly brutal. Natalie Grace is one hell of an actress to sell that. But there’s nothing behind the horror. And if I have to watch that kind of gore, I’d like some kind of value out of it.