Lee Cronin's The Mummy review, Blumhouse's R-rated possession horror reviewed, with full spoilers, ending explained, and a spoiler breakdown of what actually happens to Katie Cannon.

Arthur and Meaghan sit down to review Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026), the Blumhouse and Atomic Monster reimagining from the director of Evil Dead Rise. Starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy and Verónica Falcón, this is not a Brendan Fraser sequel; it's something much gnarlier.

We cover first impressions, where the tone breaks down, the wheelchair scene everyone's talking about, the viral May Calamawy wound-prosthetic premiere moment, Natalie Grace's incredible physical performance, and a full spoiler breakdown of the demon, the Magician, the possession, and the ending. Plus Meaghan's Frédéric Bourdin impostor-case spiral, why this feels more like Evil Dead with a mummy filter, and a look ahead at Evil Dead Burn (July 2026), Brendan Fraser's Mummy 4, and Mārama.

⚠ Full spoilers begin around the 22:00 mark.

What we're reviewing

• Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026) — directed and written by Lee Cronin, released April 17 by Warner Bros. Pictures
• Produced by Jason Blum (Blumhouse) and James Wan (Atomic Monster) with Cronin's Wicked/Good (formerly Doppelgängers)
• Rated R, a standalone reimagining (explicitly not connected to the Brendan Fraser films or Universal's 2017 Dark Universe attempt)

What worked

• The mummy design itself — wrappings as skin, a containment spell written on the underside, genuinely unsettling every time she's on camera
• Natalie Grace's physical performance (a 22-year-old actress playing a mummified, demon-possessed child)
• Practical effects across the board — prosthetics designed by Arjen Tuiten, gore work that went viral when May Calamawy wore a wound prosthetic to the April 9 LA premiere and the clip pulled 20 million views
• Sound design — teeth-tapping, shifts in chairs, small details that amplify every serious moment
• The house itself — secluded, colonial, almost a character in its own right
• The kid actors, consistently (Cronin proved this in Evil Dead Rise too)

What didn't

• The wheelchair-up-the-stairs scene (goes on for almost two minutes, never explains why no one just carries the chair)
• Unwanted camp — the little girl pulling out her teeth and inserting Abuela's dentures is supposed to be unsettling, lands as funny
• Silly musical cues dropped on top of brutal deaths
• The split-diopter shot is used so often it stops being an effect and starts being a distraction
• The Egypt setting feels shoehorned in once the film relocates to New Mexico — the mummy stuff never fully integrates with the possession story
• 40 minutes of denial from the parents that Katie is obviously not okay

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Exit 8 is a 2025 Japanese psychological horror film directed by Genki Kawamura — the producer behind Your Name and A Silent Voice — and it's based on the 2023 indie video game The Exit 8 by Kotake Create. After earning an eight-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and grossing over ¥5.2 billion in Japan, it's finally arrived in North American theatres via NEON, and Arthur and Megan are here for it.

This is Part 2 of Grave Tone's Double Feature Weekend, and they come prepared. Unable to get the game running on Arthur's Xbox (a whole saga), they did the next best thing: watched Markiplier's full playthrough, catalogued the anomalies, and then headed to the theatre. The result is one of the most informed discussions you'll hear about this one — game vs. film, anomaly mechanics, what the adaptation does differently, and whether the emotional depth they've layered onto a basically plotless video game actually works.

Spoiler-free section covers the game's premise, the film's setup in a looping Tokyo subway tunnel, the rules the lost man must follow to reach Exit 8, and first impressions from both hosts. Then it's full spoilers: the multiple POV structure (including the Walking Man's storyline), the themes of societal passivity and fatherhood anxiety, the sound design that makes silence terrifying, the tsunami siren sequence, the ambiguous ending, and what they think it all means.

Arthur lands at a 7/10, Meaghan at an 8/10 — and both agree it's a film that earns its Cannes reception. Liminal horror is having a real cultural moment right now, with A24's Backrooms arriving in May 2026, and Exit 8 is exactly the kind of film that shows you why the genre works when it's done right.

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Faces of Death (2026) review: Arthur and Meaghan break down Daniel Goldhaber's TikTok-era cult horror reimagining, starring Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery. In theatres April 10 via IFC Films / Shudder.

Is the 2026 Faces of Death worth seeing? We went opening night and came back with some thoughts. Here's the honest take, no nostalgia for the original, no safety net, just the movie on its own terms.

⬇️ WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

→ The 1978 original: John Alan Schwartz's mondo horror cult film, its fake-and-real deaths, PSA Flight 182 footage, $450K budget / $35M box office, and why it lives exclusively on old VHS

→ The 2026 reimagining: content moderator Margot (Barbie Ferreira) at short-clip app Kino flags videos appearing to recreate murders from the original film, and the killer, Arthur Spivak (Dacre Montgomery), is filming them for viral fame

→ Dacre Montgomery's performance: Dexter-level methodical, physically built for the role, genuinely disgusted by blood, completely unhinged in the best way

→ Barbie Ferreira's arc: a woman trying to disappear from the internet after her sister's death went viral, slowly forced back into the spotlight

→ The social commentary: content moderation, the algorithm, and the very human fascination with violent video online

→ The kills: more restrained than the marketing implies, visceral because they're realistic, not because they're gratuitous

→ What doesn't work: a third act that over-explains its thesis when the quieter moments were landing just fine

📊 RATINGS Arthur: 6.5 / 10 Megan: 6 – 6.5 / 10

🎬 FILM DETAILS

Title: Faces of Death (2026)

Director: Daniel Goldhaber

Writers: Daniel Goldhaber, Isa Mazzei

Cast: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX

Distributor: IFC Films / Shudder

Runtime: 98 minutes | Rated R

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Unrewatchable horror movies, we all have a list. This week Arthur and Meaghan dig into the horror films they love but will never, ever put on again: Hereditary, Hounds of Love, The Mist, Gerald's Game, Hostel, Annihilation, Mandy, The Ring, Silent Hill, and more.

And the thing is, being unrewatchable isn't always a knock. Some of these are genuinely excellent films. The reasons vary: some are too dark, some hit physically wrong, some only work when you don't know the ending, and some are just so stylistically unhinged you need a very specific headspace to return to them. They go through all of it.

ALSO IN THIS EPISODE:

— The Mortuary Assistant movie vs. the game: why it doesn't translate

— Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man remake, Horror Sector (his new production company), and how Snoop Dogg ended up attached

— Mike Flanagan's mirror Easter egg (it's on our TikTok, go look)

— The case for Australian horror cinema beyond Wolf Creek

— Why Japanese horror originals almost always beat their American remakes

— Nicolas Cage in Mandy and why "cage rage headspace" is a real thing

— Carla Gugino appreciation that is long overdue

— Ari Aster's next A24 project: what we know

Films discussed: Hereditary, Gerald's Game, Hostel, Hounds of Love, The Mist, Mandy, Annihilation, Cabin Fever, The Mortuary Assistant, Silent Hill, The Ring, Terrifier, Martyrs, A Serbian Film, Wolf Creek...

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Mike P. Nelson has made a habit of walking into beloved horror franchises and doing something completely unexpected with them. He did it with Wrong Turn in 2021, he did it twice in VHS 85, and now he's done it again with his reboot of Silent Night Deadly Night, a film that somehow turned Pixar, the Bill Paxton thriller Frailty, and an Indiana Jones homage into a killer Santa movie that went genuinely viral before it even hit theaters.

In this special bonus interview episode, Arthur and Meaghan sit down with Nelson for a wide-ranging horror nerd conversation covering the full arc of his career. They get into how Universal Monsters, Monster Squad, and his dad's shoulder-rig camera sent him down the filmmaking path. They talk about Wrong Turn's tri-fecta of politics and its unexpected resonance. They dig into the two connected segments Nelson contributed to VHS 85, including the one that turns a sniper-based horror premise into something genuinely devastating, and how he convinced the producers to let him link them across the film.

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🎄 WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE 🐍

From Universal Monsters and Monster Squad to a killer Santa who takes his orders from a Pixar-meets-Frailty dark passenger, Mike P. Nelson's path through horror is exactly as weird and specific as his movies.

In this interview, Arthur and Meaghan talk with Nelson about:

→ Growing up on recorded-off-TV VHS tapes and making backyard movies with his dad's shoulder-rig camera

→ How The Domestics led to Wrong Turn, and why the franchise's political subtext made it worth taking on

→ His two connected segments in VHS 85, including the active-shooter-as-horror-film concept behind "No Wake", and how he convinced producers to let him link them

→ The creative process behind Silent Night Deadly Night (2025): the Dexter-coded dark passenger, the Rohan Campbell and Ruby Modine casting, and why Mark Acheson was the only choice for the voice of Charlie

→ The now-viral Nazi massacre sequence, how it was inspired by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, shot in a day and a half with real squibs, and what got cut for time

→ A genuinely pitched sequel: both leads are in, the producers are in, it's just waiting on a distribution green light

→ Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon: shot on the actual Amazon River in Colombia, produced by the Event Horizon and Resident Evil producer, distributed by Lionsgate, described as "a little bit more grim" than Anaconda

→ Horror bracket: Midsommar, Cabin in the Woods, The Shining, Wrong Turn, one winner

→ Childhood trauma pick: Toy Soldiers, and why it still makes him uncomfortable in ways pure horror films don't

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Horror doesn't wait around, and neither do we.

Grave Tone is a horror podcast covering the genre across film, TV, books, and games, with new release reviews on the day they drop, deep dives into the movies that traumatized us as kids, and interviews with the directors and actors actually making the horror.

We go in with opinions. We come out with takes. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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THEY WILL KILL YOU (2026) Review | Satanic Cult Horror, Zazie Beetz, Kill Bill Vibes & Full Spoilers — Grave Tone Podcast

Arthur and Megan just got back from the theater and they're reviewing They Will Kill You — the new horror-action-comedy from director Kirill Sokolov, starring Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette, Myha'la, Heather Graham, and Tom Felton.

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⚠️ SPOILERS: Full spoiler breakdown starts partway through — listen for the warning.

🔪 WHAT WE COVER:

- Full plot breakdown: Asia infiltrates the Virgil, a satanic cult's immortal NYC high-rise

- The Kill Bill and Edgar Wright comparisons (and why they're accurate)

- Fight choreography breakdown — the stunt team genuinely went above and beyond

- The Dante's Inferno symbolism baked into the building's design

- Arthur's rating: 7/10 digs | Meaghan's rating: 5.5/10 digs — and why they split

- Patricia Arquette's Irish accent (it's a whole thing)

- Why Heather Graham's disembodied eyeball might be the film's best character

- The Rosemary's Baby origin story behind the whole film

- Tom Felton playing ukulele songs about joining a cult on set

- Zazie Beetz being called a "cyborg" by the crew for her relentlessness

🎬 Director: Kirill Sokolov (Why Don't You Just Die!)

🎬 Produced by: Andy & Barbara Muschietti (IT, Welcome to Derry)

🎬 Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures

🎬 In theaters: March 27, 2026

📅 COMING UP:

Interview with director Mike P. Nelson drops Monday — do not miss it.

Collab episode with Horror Roulette on Anti/Violent Nature — coming to their feed.

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