Too Real for the Tube: London Pulls Ads for 'The Mummy'

Posters for Lee Cronin's horror reboot, depicting a dead child, were deemed too disturbing for Underground riders

By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum

Commuters on the London Underground will not be seeing the face of Lee Cronin's new horror film staring back at them from the platform after all. Posters advertising The Mummy, Cronin's take on the classic monster tale, have been banned from the network after transport authorities judged an image depicting a dead child "too realistic" for public display.

The decision falls to Transport for London and its advertising partners, who vet campaign imagery before it goes up across stations and carriages millions of people pass through each day. It's a familiar tension for horror marketing: a genre built on dread has to sell itself in spaces where nobody signed up to be frightened, and where children and commuters alike have no choice but to look.

Cronin has built a reputation for horror that leans into unease rather than jump scares — his earlier film Evil Dead Rise traded in similarly unsettling family and childhood imagery. That instinct for the visceral appears to be exactly what tripped the wire here. Details on the new film's plot and release date were not included in the reporting available, and it isn't yet clear whether a revised poster will go up in the banned image's place.

What the episode confirms, again, is how differently horror imagery reads once it leaves the cinema lobby and lands on a train platform. A poster that might feel like a fair warning of tone inside a multiplex becomes something else entirely when a commuter with a child in tow has no way to opt out. TfL's ruling doesn't touch the film itself — only where its face is allowed to appear.

Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I'll let you know once I've actually seen it. For now, just don't expect to meet its poster on your morning commute.

— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.

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