True horror lives in the details the eye wants to look away from, but can’t. For Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, the brief was simple yet daunting: make the impossible feel invasive. With intricately created insects, a sinister dust storm and lots of horrifying gore, Cinesite’s Mummy team helped transform the screen into a claustrophobic gauntlet of visceral trauma.

Directed by Lee Cronin, with Jack Reynor as Charlie Cannon and Natalie Grace as daughter, Katie Cannon, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy follows the story of Katie and an ancient curse.  The young daughter of a journalist, Katie disappears into the desert as a young child. Eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is found in the desert, but what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.

Cinesite’s visual effects team, led by VFX supervisor Nathalie Girard and VFX producer Natasha Pereiro, delivered over 200 visual effects to The Mummy, ranging from environments to FX, gore and  horror.  

Katie is Taken

While interiors were shot in Ireland, the production filmed much of the exterior action of The Mummy in Spain, doubling for Cairo. An early establishing shot required extensive 2.5D digital matte painting to make the location look like Cairo. This involved adding the Nile behind the mountains, installing elements like mosque minarets into the village and other adjustments.

An early sequence in the film sets up the mystery of Katie’s disappearance as we see her playing tea parties in a garden. Given a nectarine by a mysterious lady, she is shocked when a beetle creeps suddenly out of its flesh, crawling up her arm and into her mouth.

Production VFX supervisor Russell Bowen chose a specific scarab beetle look and his design markings needed to be recreated, which represent specific markings from a pyramid chamber. The team used real beetle footage to reference how the creature would walk, run, jump and fly, in its various appearances throughout the film. The speed and creepiness of its movement were adjusted according to story and shot requirements.

Charlie Canon, having discovered his daughter missing from the garden, runs after her, chasing after the mysterious sorcerer figure who appears to have carried her off into the Cairo streets. A dust storm blows in, gradually growing in intensity to illustrate the rising power of the Mummy, obscuring his path and hiding the sorcerer as she runs away with Katie.

This chase sequence was also filmed in Spain for Cairo, with large wind machines on set, although the densely populated location meant that use of the machines needed to be limited. Sand was added as FX simulations which could be carefully choreographed to increase in thickness and intensity as Charlie gets closer to his daughter. The FX team created numerous reusable sand elements for the compositors to apply; this was an efficient workflow which worked well with the production’s budget. 2D elements could be mixed with the simulations to build the storm’s intensity shot by shot. This approach meant that shots could be turned around quickly and the sand asset dropped in. Sky replacements with 2.5D digital matte painting environment extensions were also added, with minarets and buildings which were architecturally correct for Cairo.

Katie Comes Home

Several years later, Katie has been mysteriously re-discovered and returns home to her family. Some of Cinesite’s goriest work follows, as her possession reveals itself and her fury is unleashed upon her family.

The team watched references of people eating large bugs and timed the creature’s movements and dissection with the actress’s biting, crunching, acting performance. They also studied how skin reacts to scorpion stings, to form realistic sting marks across the actress’s face. 

Katie is then forced by her family to vomit the scorpion out. This effect was initially attempted using practical effects with a hose, but was ultimately enhanced with CG using FX fluids for the liquid and adding small pieces of identifiable, chewed-up scorpion in the puddle.

Car Sequence

In another horrifying sequence, Katie throws her grandmother, Carmen, out of her bedroom window onto the windshield of the family jeep, while Charlie and the kids are driving up to the house. One aspect of the challenge facing the VFX team was that most of the windshield was missing from the jeep, or had not shattered; CG glass was added for the windscreen breaking, making sure the impact points synchronized with Carmen’s head hitting the glass and careful blending was needed to disguise the use of a stunt double. Additional 2D blood was placed onto the CG FX broken windshield, to enhance the dramatic impact of Carmen falling.

After the grandmother’s body has slid from the car hood to the ground, a pack of coyotes begin attacking and tearing her apart.  This terrifying sequence was achieved by integrating parts of a life-sized dummy filmed on set with animal organs and intestines – these were added into a digital version of Carmen’s torso.  Blood splatter on the jeep and the coyotes’ mouths and paws were also added, for dreadful realism.

The Unbinding

As Katie removes her bandages and releases the demon spirit of the Mummy inside the Cannon house, the rooms begin to decay in her presence. Cinesite handled the addition of mould, rot and damage to the walls using a combination of crafted 2D rotten textures reprojected onto each wall. The team was able to use a lidar scan from the set location to recreate the entire room digitally. This technical approach simplified the process of delivering multiple shots, making it more efficient for the compositing team.

The sandstorm penetrates Katie’s room, and follows her as she moves around the house. An  FX sand library was created so that compositors could reuse elements efficiently.  The FX team created a hero cache for dust blowing in through the windows, which could quickly be rendered out for the alternate angles.  They also generated various types of sand: dust-like, debris-heavy (including textured bandage fragments)  which were rendered through a  multi-camera setup. This allowed the compositors to choreograph the intensity of the dust according to the tempo of the scene.  Practical SFX sand and dust elements were also used to compliment the CG FX renders and build up the complexity of the shot.  

As the film reaches its dramatic climax, the scorpions, representing the evil possession, make a reappearance. Katie’s possessed and decaying grandmother spits a black scorpion into another character’s mouth, before a horrifying sequence where it bursts out of her throat.

This complex shot involved a CG wound, scorpion, FX blood and saliva, all integrated with 2D blood splat elements and squibs. The complex nature of the scorpion going into a mouth and piercing out of a throat required the animators to create two different CG creatures to fit both areas convincingly, although only one is visible. The final shots combine 2D and 3D elements for the creature and the gushing blood, with the actress’s terrified performance adding to the realism of the final shot.

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VFX supervisor Nathalie Girard says, “”Collaborating with the clients on The Mummy was a remarkably fluid process. They granted us the creative latitude to experiment with conceptual approaches. While the horror genre—specifically this level of graphic detail—was a departure for our core team, the opportunity to push those visual boundaries kept everyone deeply invested in the final frame.”

After months of refining blood spatter, scorpion-eating, beetles and gore, the visual effects team can finally step out of the darkness. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a riveting, disturbing watch, and we have loved helping create it. It’s messy, it’s visceral, and it’s exactly what the genre needed.