MIAMI - Latino audiences have long shown up for horror, often more strongly than Hollywood fully reflects back on screen. According to UCLA's latest Hollywood Diversity Report, Latino moviegoers represented 29.1 percent of the audience for top horror films in 2025, one of the clearest signs that the genre continues to resonate powerfully with Hispanic viewers.
That makes Verónica Falcón's arrival in 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' feel especially meaningful.
The Mexican actress plays Carmen Santiago in the new supernatural horror film, a darker reimagining of the classic franchise directed and written by Lee Cronin, the filmmaker behind 'Evil Dead Rise.' The movie, which opens in U.S. theaters on April 17, stars Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, Natalie Grace, May Calamawy, and Falcón and centers on a journalist's family whose missing daughter returns years later after a terrifying encounter with an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
For Falcón, the role was more than just another genre opportunity. It was a chance to embody a woman who felt familiar from the very first page.
"Making film, and making horror, is very fun, but this is a movie on another level," Falcón told this reporter during a visit to Miami to promote the film. She said working with Cronin was "a great, great, great experience as an actress" and called him "one of the great creators of contemporary horror."
That admiration deepened when Cronin explained that Carmen was inspired by the most important women in his life. Falcón said she immediately understood the emotional blueprint because she saw the same women in her own memories. "When I read Carmen, she reminded me of many very important women in my life," she said, mentioning mothers and grandmothers she has known. "It's such a well-written character. Carmen is a grandmother."
That is where the role becomes distinctly Latino.
Falcón found traces of her own family in Carmen's world, especially in the details that many Mexican and Latino viewers will recognize without explanation. She spoke about the grandmother figure preparing endless food for the family, the crocheted touches around the home, and the images of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Carmen's house. "My mother, for example, was very devoted to the Virgen de Guadalupe," she said. "There are certain things you recognize immediately."
Instead of playing Carmen as a broad archetype, Falcón grounded her in lived cultural memory. The result sounds less like a stock horror grandmother and more like the kind of woman who anchors an entire family, the one who cooks, protects, prays, and quietly keeps the emotional weather of the house in balance.
That emotional credibility matters in a genre that Latino audiences have embraced for years, even as Latino leads and richly textured Latino family worlds have remained comparatively scarce. UCLA's report notes that Black and Latino audiences continue to make up a large share of horror moviegoers, underscoring how central these communities are to the genre's box office life.
Falcón, of course, has built a career on commanding the screen. After decades of work in Mexico, she became widely known to U.S. audiences through standout roles in Queen of the South, Ozark, and Perry Mason, developing a reputation for bringing intensity, elegance and danger to almost every scene she enters.
In The Mummy, though, she seems to be channeling many things (no spoilers,) including the fierce gravity of a Mexican matriarch.
Asked to imagine Carmen beyond the script, Falcón gave the kind of answer that reveals how fully she had inhabited the character. Carmen, she said, would wear Shalimar, love trios like Los Panchos and probably Agustín Lara, and would absolutely travel to Egypt. "She is a woman who deeply loves life," Falcón said.
And maybe that is what makes her so intriguing in a horror film. In a story filled with ancient dread, possession and resurrection, Verónica Falcón chose to build Carmen Santiago from the textures of Mexican womanhood, faith, music, food and memory. For Latino audiences who have long over-indexed in horror theaters, that kind of recognition can be as powerful as any jump scare.
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