The combination of career triumph and personal tragedy made it a moment he would never forget. His mother, he says, “knew how I felt about her and we had a great relationship” but her passing was marked, for him, by an added sadness that he “hadn’t seen her properly in a couple of years”.

“When you’re buried in making a movie you don’t necessarily have a lot of time. I was about to take three months off for the first time in three years to spend a bunch of time with her. That’s why I think it’s important to never put off talking to people.”​

Their last interaction before he travelled to New Zealand to begin filming Evil Dead Rise had been somewhat marred by the restrictions around the pandemic.

“I went to New Zealand by giving my mom a really quick hug in a park because I didn’t want to risk making her sick and she didn’t want to risk making me sick. That was pre-vaccine. Then I went away for eight months and I was back and luckily got to go on a couple of nice trips with her and do some stuff. When you’re making a movie, truth be told, even when you’re hanging out, there’s 90pc of your brain still processing what’s going on at the time.”

Grieving has been tough, he says. “You wait for the shock to wear off and then you get into that process. Grief is a journey. Someone very close to me said: ‘It’s like an elevator with no buttons and you’re on it and it’s going to decide what direction it goes. It’s not just going to go up and down, it could go left or right.’”

Pauline was waked and it wasn’t a purely sombre occasion, he recalls.

“We made the jokes that we know she would’ve found really inappropriate while we were standing over her coffin, because we wouldn’t be us if we weren’t doing that. I think even in the darkest moments, there can be humour.”

The irony is that his mother, he’s sure, would have “hated” Evil Dead Rise. “She’d be like, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ But she would’ve also been really proud of what it means to other people. She was a creative person so she would’ve really appreciated that.”

There is much to appreciate in the movie, the latest instalment in the iconic horror franchise. Already there has been huge buzz about Cronin’s film, which has an almost unprecedented (for a horror film) 96pc rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the popular review aggregate site, and taken in almost $100m (€92m) at the box office.

Evil Dead Rise both cleverly doffs its cap to the DNA of its predecessors and demonstrates Cronin’s ability to put his own distinctive mark on the series reboot.

The action begins in a setting that will be familiar to fans of the other films – a cabin in the woods – but quickly shifts into a condemned building in downtown Los Angeles, where Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a young mother, is coping with being abandoned by her husband while raising her young children.

When Ellie’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) arrives from her life as an on-the-road music technician to discuss the pressing matter of her possibly unwanted pregnancy, the scene is set for a confrontation with malevolent forces that wreak carnage on the family, building into a satisfyingly gory climax.

There’s a huge level of meticulousness throughout the whole film, from the gorgeously composed shots (including one especially arresting one of a triangular house flanked by sinisterly striated trees) right down to the Book of the Dead, a hand-drawn tome, which the children discover and which foretells the terrible events that befall the family,

The original Evil Dead, directed by Sam Raimi (who went on to do the Spider-Man trilogy) and edited in part by the Coen brothers, was released in 1981 and quickly became a cult classic, with the likes of Stephen King citing it as among his favourite horror movies.

“I know the [earlier] movies extremely well, I was a fan from childhood,” Cronin says. “But I needed to separate being a fan and also then being a filmmaker with my own voice and my own vision. Finding a story that I wanted to tell, finding a set of characters to populate that story, that was step one. I didn’t actually have a lot of fear.

“Once I found that story and found those people, then I could go and have a lot of fun with it. I enjoy almost that way of taking what’s familiar, but twisting it and making it fresh.”

For Cronin that meant crafting a movie that is, at its heart, “about family” and the of idea of a character, Beth, who is “at a crossroads in terms of living a life on the road or potentially that burden, depending on your point of view, of having a kid and laying down roots, which doesn’t necessarily suit everybody”.

“That’s something in me, with the job I have, the career I have with all the travel. I find those two divergent roads are things I think about quite a lot.”​

Cronin (41) grew up in Skerries, Dublin, the youngest of four siblings. There was quite an age gap between him and the elder kids and growing up in a house with adults meant a certain precociousness was inevitable.

Part of that was watching films meant for adults – the first one he remembers seeing was Jaws, with the sight of Ben Gardner’s head emerging from the boat hull being “burnt in my brain”. Before the age of 10 he had watched horror classics like Poltergeist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and, of course, Evil Dead.

“When there’s that age gap there’s only so much you’re not allowed in the room before you’re allowed in the room. They wanted me to be in the room and have fun, I’m the little brother. A lot of the time, because I was scared, I was actually watching them react to the movies, and that lit the fuse for me.

“Something I’ve reflected on a lot as my career has gone on is that what I’m really trying to do is show off to my siblings, to scare them.”

In the family everyone had their own “creative endeavours” and his Dad used to make Super 8 films, which Cronin would later digitise. His school reports tended to say things like, “great student, should talk less and concentrate more”, and Skerries seemed a fairly cinematic kind of a place to grow up.

“It definitely fuelled my imagination. We’ve got islands, we have a lighthouse, there’s Smuggler’s Cave, there’s an old quarry. Even the housing estate I grew up in had quite an American feel. Almost like it could have been in E.T.” Indeed Spielberg was a huge influence on him, as was that other great chronicler of suburbia, John Hughes.

Growing up he worked in supermarkets to earn pocket money and gain a bit of independence and says he “actually loved it”.

In fact there was a time when a junior management job came up and there was a choice between taking that or going to film school and pursuing his dream.

“There was a little crossroads. Am I going to pursue this dream of being a filmmaker or I could take this job and I can get a car loan tomorrow, that kind of way.

“Even now I find incredible comfort in supermarkets and it’s because of having worked in them. I’d happily go and do a shift in my local SuperValu because you used to leave with everything organised and it’s done and you go home. Movie making is the opposite. Everything is on fire all the time.”

He opted to go to the National Film School (IADT at the time) and made a horror short called Through the Night, which played at genre festivals around the world. With funding from Filmbase he then made a fantasy adventure short called Ghost Train, which was his love letter to Spielberg. But it was only with 2013’s Ghost Train – another well received horror short – that the doors towards his first feature began to open.

That feature was The Hole in the Ground, which starred Seána Kerslake and James Cosmo, a solidly scary horror, which went to Sundance in 2019. It was while in the US doing promotion for the movie that he was contacted by the team of horror legend Raimi (who executive produces the new instalment).

Raimi told Cronin he saw “a very precise” intelligence at work in The Hole in the Ground, and he felt it was something that would suit the new Evil Dead film. From there Raimi and Bruce Campbell – who starred in the original movie and also executive produced Evil Dead Rise – “gave me the car keys and were like, ‘go figure out what you would do with this world.’”

There was a certain sense of hoping he was living up to the legacy they had created. “But in making a movie, there’s a line you cross where I’m the captain of the ship. I can’t really show that. Even if there is fear and insecurity, it’s not something you can really show.”​

Campbell took him out to Musso and Frank, a famous steakhouse in “down-and-dirty” Hollywood and was “the full showman”. Cronin got to return the favour, after a fashion, by bringing Campbell to an old “spit-and-sawdust” pub in Skerries. “He was looking for the top-shelf tequila. He’s handing his card over saying, ‘leave it open. And they’re like, ‘leave it open? What does that even mean? We don’t even take cards, let alone leaving the tab open.’”

Cronin compares himself to Beth, the sister torn between life on the road and settling down and, like so many of his generation, he finds Ireland a cold house for creatives, in that getting an actual house is next to impossible.

“I’ve been through the ringer, which is really, really frustrating. For me, and I don’t mind talking about this, I know there’s no connection between the industry that I work in and create and then trying to get an appropriate mortgage to buy somewhere decent to live.

“It frustrates me that I go and secure millions of dollars from a Hollywood studio, and then I bring millions of those dollars back into the country and employ people. And they [the bank] just go, ‘oh, we don’t really like the fact that you have two accountants’. I’m like, ‘I have two accountants because I work in the movie business and I need these’. It’s really frustrating.”

If he keeps going with the success he’s had, his name will soon speak for itself, even to philistine lenders. After a tough few months, dealing with personal grief and public pressure, the film finally coming out has been “a helpful catharsis” and he’s ready to take some time off.

But still there is a creative itch. “Right now, I just can’t wait to start writing again.”​

‘Evil Dead Rise’ is in cinemas nationwide from April 21 

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