New 'The Mummy' footage shows terrified Tom Cruise drowning in rats

The operating word for The Mummy, Universal's first in its multi-installment monster-movie franchise, seems to be "terrifying."

Plane crashing, swarmed by ravenous rats, falling down a deep hole, drowning, being chased by swimming zombies while drowning, being mummified and buried alive, stalked by big hairy spiders -- it's all there and more.

The studio showed an extended trailer for its June 9 release at Cinemacon on Wednesday, with Tom Cruise introducing via pre-recorded video -- this “bold, romantic, epic, terrifying monster film” -- and the emphasis on "terrifying" was his.

(To make sure we understood that scariness was the priority here, Uni showed a beautiful montage of its black-and-white monster classics -- Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man and the original, The Mummy -- and they are still hair-raising on a big screen.)

Here's what we saw:

Somewhere in an Egyptian city, a sinkhole opens. It opens swiftly and violently, sucking down a whole lot of buildings and cars and it nearly gets Cruise, too. The hole is clearly miles deep, and this group of explorers on hand can't resist descending into it.

Then, our backstory: The woman who was entombed here had been groomed as Egypt's next queen some 2,000 years ago, "but her thirst for power led her down a dark path."

That's probably putting it mildly. Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is into some bloody, murderous, way-far-out-occult stuff -- and for her crimes against nature she is mummified and sealed into one creepy-ass casket.

Flash-forward to our heroes in her sinkhole. "This isn't a tomb," says Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). "It's a prison."

At some point they get that casket into the cargo plane that we've seen in previous trailers. And it doesn't go well from there.

From what we saw Wednesday, there's no doubt that plane crashes. And Cruise's character dies in that crash.

We know this because he wakes up in a body bag.

"You are alive because you were chosen," a voice says. "By evil. The ultimate evil."

And from there it gets terribly unpleasant for Cruise, who is better than anyone at communicating terror and fear in the midst of all the action.

Ahmanet is relentlessly pursuing him -- "she is using you to regain [her powers]" and is hell-bent on remaking the world in her own twisted, antiquated image -- and does a lot of thrusting her arms out and opening her mouth to create tempestuous shitstorms of havoc.

There's a lot of suffocating panic, drowning panic and chasing panic on the part of Cruise, who is selling it wholesale.

No telling when this footage will be released publicly, but it's clearly another level for Universal's monster-movie plans.