Horror Movie A Day: May 2026

APRIL 26, 2026

GENRE: POSSESSION
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

While a lot of folks flipped their lids for Evil Dead Rise, I found it to be disappointing. There was no real progression to the madness, the setting was wasted, and the central “woman who doesn’t want to be a mom but is forced into the role” motif has been done to death over the years. But the thing that really killed it for me was that the characters seemed incapable of reacting normally to their obviously possessed mother/sister - scene after scene had them see her do something creepy and they would react as if it was the first time she had displayed such behavior. Sadly, Lee Cronin does the same damn thing in The Mummy (full title, and stop encouraging him), albeit in a movie that runs much longer, which means it generated even MORE instances of me saying “Does this character have amnesia?”

You can tell it’s gonna be one of those movies that runs too long right from the start, as we are treated to a lengthy epilogue with characters who are not speaking English. Being that this is a major studio horror movie, we know damn well that they will not be important characters, and therefore we should not be spending more than 3-4 minutes tops with them to set up whatever they’re there to set up and be on their way. But it just keeps going and going, and yet still leaves us with questions that won’t be answered until much later. After what seems like 15 minutes we finally meet our actual main characters, and before long the plot kicks in: their daughter disappears and eight years later, as they’ve more or less finally moved on, she is found. But she’s not right…

Now, if she APPEARED to be right and gradually got all creepy and possessed, it’d be one thing. Exorcist works because Regan seems perfectly normal at first, even after displaying a few odd behaviors. Here, she is clearly, you know, the possessed little monster girl from a horror movie. She contorts in strange positions, has weird liquids oozing from around her body, makes clicking noises… it’d be like if the “Let Jesus f— you!” version of Regan was the one that Ellen Burstyn started being a little hesitant around. And yet, the parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) act as if she’s merely a little quiet or something. They take her home and she starts doing horror movie things almost instantly, yet they never call a doctor or bring her to one, and even when Reynor starts to express concern that something might be wrong, it’s treated like a “You’re an uncaring dad!” kind of moment as opposed to, you know, a guy being perfectly rational.

And this sort of thing continues over and over throughout the movie! Both parents just sort of shrug off extreme behavior; even when her antics clearly cause the death of someone, they basically forget about it a scene later. Since Exorcist is just as much of an influence here as any Mummy movie I’ve ever seen (there is SOME Mummy esque stuff here, technically - though it’s basically Exorcist mixed with the same bag of tricks he used in Evil Dead), I started getting the impression that the first version of Friedkin’s masterpiece that Cronin watched was the 2000 recut/expanded one, and the stupid and pointless spider-walk scene unlocked something within him. “Yes!” a young Cronin presumably thought. “Real horror is a technically scary and creepy scene with zero followup whatsoever, never mentioned again!” Crazy things happen in this movie - many of them fun on their own! - but then there is no followup to them, making them feel weightless, not to mention continuing to increase my belief that the parents were brain damaged. Any time Cronin comes up with an idea that would force the plot to change gears, he simply cuts to black and picks up a day later, as if it never happened.

It certainly doesn’t help that the movie runs an unforgivable 135 minutes (longer than the actual Exorcist!), and not because of its complicated plot or wealth of well-developed characters. No, it’s just that every scene goes on much longer than it should, and it’s riddled with pointless subplots like Reynor visiting a professor to have some markings translated. Not only do we get a bit of the guy’s class, suggesting maybe he will be an important character (he isn’t), but there’s a whole other character (a cop who investigated the girl’s disappearance in the first place) whose point in the movie is to find answers, so this information could have been discovered by her. Instead we just have the father leaving his family behind with a clearly dangerous person to go talk to some guy he’s never met, all to get information he then does nothing with.

All of that is a shame, because at 85 minutes or so, this could have at least been a fun little Halloween time “spook a blast” type movie. Cronin uses diopters to an almost comical degree, but on the other hand he has a penchant for gnarly gore and bodily harm that serves him well here (the death via falling out a window has a very cruel/funny button to it), and the makeup for the possessed Katie is quite good. And she starts mind-controlling her siblings, resulting in some fun profanity from a little girl, always an easy way to win me over. But when the movie runs damn near an hour longer than necessary, by the halfway point it’s hard to remain engaged when the parents are so bafflingly inept. Like I understand the idea that they finally got their daughter back and don’t want to give her up again, but when she’s clearly posing a threat to their OTHER children, it just comes off as insane behavior. At least in Cathy’s Curse (a movie I would never defend for its strong character work) they establish that the mom has mental problems before she nonchalantly ignores her daughter teleporting around the house. I legit started cackling when the mom responded to the dad’s (EXTREMELY JUSTIFIABLE) concerns with the same face my own wife gives me when I tell her I don’t feel like taking our kid to his swim class or something.

Oh well. Despite the title, it’s technically an original R rated horror movie and it’s doing fairly well at the box office, so that’s always a good thing. But between this and Rise, I feel that - much like Fede Alvarez, weirdly enough since he made Evil Dead (2013) - despite their popularity with a lot of fans, I just don’t connect with this filmmaker’s particular brand of horror, so I can’t say I’ll be too excited for whatever he makes next. And that’s OK! There are probably people out there who couldn’t ever see what the big deal is with Carpenter or Romero. Just sucks when you can’t have the same fun others are having, though at least here even the people who overall liked it agree it was too long, so that’s not just me being an old grouch.

What say you?