Horror Is Universal: THE MUMMY (1932)
This article was originally published on WordPress in November 2019. Revisions have been made to provide additional context and information on the subject.
Today’s article, like the film it’s discussing, is going to be a little complicated. I had seen The Mummy once before, and when I began writing this series, I knew what angle from which I wanted to approach this film once I got to this point. Or at least I thought I did. When I rewatched The Mummy, I found that there was way more material to explore in addition to the points I had already planned to make. Some of this will be tricky and perhaps unpleasant to discuss, but it shouldn’t be completely ignored.
But first, we’re going to have a little fun. I want to begin by presenting to you an unusual theory. A j’accuse, if you will. It’s going to sound strange, but I believe I can convince you of its legitimacy. Here it is:
Universal’s The Mummy from 1932 is a very early prototype for the modern vampire romance.
“But Dana!” you exclaim. “That cannot be! The Mummy is not a vampire! He is the Mummy! We can’t have sexy mummies!”
First of all, I regret to inform you that we can and we have. I’ll get more into that later, but for now, blame the Victorians. Second of all, I’m not saying you can draw a direct, unbroken line from this movie to something like Twilight. What I’m suggesting instead is that there are themes and plot points in this movie, largely stemming from the circumstances of its creation, that have found their way into the paranormal romance stories of later decades and especially vampire romances. The seeds don’t fully germinate right away, but they are planted here nonetheless.
So, that will be one of two main topics I plan to cover in this article. The other will be an exploration of the film’s more…questionable elements, shall we say. There’s no denying that, like Dracula and Frankenstein, The Mummy was a remarkable filmmaking achievement for its time. But it doesn’t have quite as sparkling a legacy as some of its contemporaries, and I think that partially comes from its elements of racism and imperialism that 21st-century viewers are less willing to overlook.
Let’s get started. We have plenty of bandages to unravel.
The Plot: On an archaeological expedition to Egypt in 1921, Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) uncovers the find of a lifetime: the sarcophagus of a priest named Imhotep, who was buried alive for the crime of sacrilege, and the legendary Scroll of Thoth, said to contain spells for raising the dead. But the mummy and the scroll both vanish, and the only witness to the disappearance is a man who was driven mad by whatever he saw. Imhotep, he claims, “went for a little walk.” Eleven years later, Joseph and his son Frank Whemple (David Manners) uncover the tomb of the princess Ankh-es-en-amon, thanks to a clue given by a mysterious local gentleman calling himself Ardath Bey (Boris Karloff). Both Frank and Ardath Bey soon find themselves drawn to Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), a Cairo socialite who bears a strong resemblance to the dead princess. But that’s not the only weird thing happening: Helen is going into trances and speaking Imhotep’s name, a museum guard is found dead and the Scroll of Thoth turns up in Ardath Bey’s possession. It isn’t long before the Whemples and their friend Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan) start to suspect that Ardath Bey is more than what he seems. Maybe Imhotep’s mummy wasn’t stolen after all — maybe he really did get up and walk away, determined to reunite with the woman he died for thousands of years ago.
Part 1: The Normal Review Stuff
Let’s recap, shall we? We’ve got a sinister undead figure who rises from his tomb, driving a man insane in the process. The undead figure proceeds to pose as an upstanding member of society in order to prey on potential victims. He eventually sets his sights on a helpless young woman who has to be protected by her proper British love interest. And we’ve got Edward Van Sloan as the scholar of supernatural knowledge yet again? Seriously, I would want this dude on my monster-hunting team. He’s got the experience! But I know what you must be thinking: are we just remaking Dracula already?
Yes, to an extent. But there was more going on behind the scenes than just that. This was the first Universal Horror project not directly inspired by a work of literature, and it took some time for the studio to pin down their big idea. What pushed them in this direction?
If you’re familiar with Egyptology, you’ll know that the year 1922 sparked a big resurgence of interest in ancient Egypt. That was the year in which archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered the long-lost tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. The sudden death of Carter’s patron Lord Carnavon during this process gave rise to the theory that a supernatural curse was afflicting those who dared to defile the pharaoh’s tomb. The newspapers, of course, couldn’t resist such a tempting story. By the end of the 1920s, at least eleven deaths had been attributed to the alleged “curse of the pharaohs,” and that number would only climb as the years went on. One of the journalists present for the tomb’s unearthing was a familiar face: John L. Balderston, then writing for the New York World. Balderston reported on the fantastic discovery, and he carried the memory of that experience with him when he went to Hollywood.
After the successes of 1931, Universal naturally wanted to put another horror picture on its schedule. Carl Laemmle Jr. told writers Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer to get to work developing a story. While doing research, the pair stumbled across some information about Alessandro Cagliostro, an 18th-century Italian occultist. Together they wrote a nine-page treatment titled Cagliostro. In this earliest version of what would become The Mummy, a 4000-year-old magician terrorizes modern-day San Francisco, murdering women who remind him of an old treacherous lover (Weaver et al. 64). Balderston was then brought on to write the actual screenplay, which barely resembled the original treatment by the end of the process. It was Balderston who relocated the narrative to Egypt and recast the magician as an ancient priest. Balderston was also responsible for the plot and character elements lifted from Dracula, which, as you may remember, he’d also written the screenplay for. And so, out of this figurative Petri dish of ideas rises The Mummy.
We’ve got Karl Freund in the director’s chair this time around. We last encountered him as the cinematographer and uncredited co-director of Dracula. A German immigrant born in what is now the Czech Republic, Freund had directed one film in his homeland before coming to the States. The Mummy was going to be his big directorial debut. But don’t let his lack of experience in the director’s chair fool you: by this point in his life, Freund was already a legendary cinematographer. His invention of the unchained camera — a camera that is not fixed to a tripod and can be moved around a set more easily — reinvented the way that films could look and how they could be shot. He had worked on over 100 films, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. He’d won himself a contract with Universal in 1930 when he helped director Lewis Milestone create the famous “butterfly finale” of All Quiet on the Western Front (Weaver et al. 65-66). Though he never became a hugely successful director after The Mummy, his cinematography career would continue to flourish. In 1937 he would win an Oscar for filming The Good Earth. In the 1950s, he would become the cinematographer for I Love Lucy, where he perfected the three-camera filming system and designed the “flat lighting” system that is still used by many sitcoms today. Long story, this guy is a big deal.
It was also a no-brainer for Universal to get Boris Karloff back on screen in the title role following the huge success of Frankenstein. He even gets to talk in this movie! When you’re watching these movies in chronological order like I am, it isn’t until you get to The Mummy that you realize just how much of an overnight sensation Karloff was because of Frankenstein. In the film that made him immortal, he’s not even credited onscreen until the very last moment. But in The Mummy, his name is literally the first thing you see after the Universal logo, even before the title of the film. Also, we have a proper Universal logo now.
The second-most important name in the cast is our female lead, Zita Johann. She had been acting on Broadway since 1924 when she got cast as Helen Grosvenor, her third third film role. Out of the seven films she would make, this one is by far her most enduring. Her experiences here were probably one reason why she only made seven films: she did not enjoy working with Karl Freund, later saying that he “made life very unpleasant. It was his first picture as a director, and he felt he needed a scapegoat in case he didn’t come in on schedule…Well, I was cast as the scapegoat — and I saw through it right away” (Weaver et al. 66). In other interviews, she described being overworked to the point of falling unconscious and being sent into a pit of lions for a sequence that was deleted from the final film (Weaver 69-70). After all that, it’s no surprise she decided never to work for Universal again.
The final key member of the cast/crew is, of course, makeup artist Jack Pierce. For this film, he would need to create two different looks for Boris Karloff, one for the mummified Imhotep and one for the Ardath Bey disguise. What he ended up with was some of his finest work and one of the most iconic, grueling makeup jobs ever put on film. But we’ll discuss that when we talk about the opening sequence.
Something else you’ll notice when you watch these movies in chronological order is how The Mummy feels way more like a conventional film than its predecessors did. There are a few different reasons for this. One is the presence of a genuine musical score instead of a mostly diegetic soundtrack. But the more important reason, I think, is Karl Freund’s direction and the camerawork of cinematographer Charles Stumar. Freund was among the most adventurous and envelope-pushing filmmakers of his time when it came to how he used his cameras. Once he developed a camera that didn’t need to stay on a tripod, he took full advantage of his new creative freedom. He was known to put cameras on carts running along tracks, hang them from cranes or even walk around wearing one in order to get the shot he wanted. You can see this kind of ambition on display in The Mummy, particularly in one shot where the camera swings above a pair of actors before diving down into a pool of smoke to transition into a flashback. Actually, there are quite a few instances of early film trickery here. Jumping ahead to the very end of the film, this is the first time in Universal Horror where you see the monster perish onscreen. Imhotep rapidly decomposes into a pile of bones, an image which special effects designer John P. Fulton — another name we’ll run into later — achieved by filming a succession of lap dissolves using a bust of Karloff with different makeup applications (Soister 149). My personal favorite effect in the film is when a painted backdrop fixed to a rolling cylinder is used to create the illusion of the camera soaring from one end of Cairo to the other in just a few seconds. It’s little moments like this which make The Mummy a visual treat and, in some respects, a technological step forward from what we’ve seen in Universal Horror before.
That also includes the makeup, of course. You can’t talk about The Mummy without talking about the mummy. You might be surprised to learn that Karloff only appears in the traditional mummy get-up — that is, all wrapped up in bandages — in the opening scene where he’s restored to life. That’s partially due to the plot, but also because Pierce’s makeup was so elaborate. Allegedly inspired by the mummies of Seti I and Rameses III, the makeup took eight hours to apply and involved covering Karloff’s face with spirit gum, putting clay in his hair and wrapping him in bandages treated with acid. Karloff actually had trouble moving and speaking in the costume, which is why you don’t really see Imhotep in action until he becomes Ardath Bey. The makeup application process may have been grueling, but the end result is incredible to look at, and Imhotep’s jerky, limited movements make the resurrection scene a lot creepier.
The Ardath Bey makeup often gets overlooked by audiences and critics because it’s not as visually impressive as the Imhotep makeup. But less can be just as effective as more, and Pierce’s masterful work instills a distinct sense of creepiness into the look of Ardath Bey. The promotional material for this film would refer to Boris Karloff as “Karloff the Uncanny,” and that’s a well-earned nickname in this instance. From the moment he appears onscreen, you get the impression that something is just not right with Ardath Bey. The ancient, dry and brittle-looking skin combines beautifully with Karloff’s stiff movements and his deadpan, erudite line readings. Sure, he looks like he would poof into dust if you shoved him hard enough — but he might just take you down with him.
Once the bandages come off, you get to see way more of Karloff’s capabilities acting-wise. Imhotep/Ardath Bey is written as a Dracula stand-in, but Karloff plays him with a different energy than what Bela Lugosi was doing the year prior. The stiff physicality and moments of inhuman behavior are still there: we are dealing with another walking corpse, after all (plus Karloff has the creepy death stare down pat, as you can see above). But Imhotep doesn’t possess the same ruthlessness and arrogance that Dracula does. He’s more calculating, more secretive and more subdued. He’s a guy with a plan, not an apex predator looking for a meal. His mask of normality is fixed on more firmly, and he does his best not to take it off. There’s an element of distaste with his current state of existence, though not any regret for the original transgession that condemned him to said state. More on that later.
The oher bright spot in the cast besides Karloff is Zita Johann, who makes the damsel-in-distress Helen a lot more interesting and fun to watch than she has any right to be. I also want to point out the great work from Bramwell Fletcher, the actor playing the archaeologist who resurrects Imhotep. He’s only in one scene, but he gives one hell of a performance. Actually, the whole resurrection sequence stands out as one of the best scenes in the movie.
The sequence starts rather normally, with Joseph Whemple, his assistant and Dr. Muller all debating about what to do with the chest they found alongside Imhotep’s body. Whemple and his assistant want to open the chest, while Muller insists it be left alone out of respect for the warning/curse etched on the lid. Muller then asks Sir Joseph to step outside so they can discuss the matter in private. This leaves the assistant alone in the archaeologists’ HQ with both the chest and the mummy. After a long internal debate, the man finally pries open the chest himself and removes the Scroll of Thoth from its resting place. Hastily translating part of the scroll into English, he whispers it to himself. His voice is barely audible to the viewers, but the mummy propped up across the room seems to hear it just fine: in a close-up, his eyes slowwwwly open as his hands start to come down from their folded position. The hapless archaeologist doesn’t realize what he’s done until it’s too late, until Imhotep is right behind him with the scroll in his hand. He bolts up from his chair screaming, but that’s not the worst of it: he then descends into peals of demented, shrieking laughter as the mummy disappears. It’s a truly haunting sound that’s the perfect finishing touch on a scene with great tension and payoff. There’s no jump scare, no wailing crescendo of music that tells us how we’re supposed to feel. The whole scene plays out in silence that gets more and more agonizing until it’s broken by what, in that moment, feels like the worst noise you’ve ever heard. When I attended the recent Fathom Events screening of this movie, I was disappointed to find that music had been edited into the resurrection scene. Rather than creating empty space, the silence that’s supposed to be there gives more power to the images onscreen by letting them speak for themselves. It also assures that when you do finally hear a noise, that moment becomes even more significant. The resurrection of Imhotep is easily one of the most frightening moments we’ve looked at in this series so far. It’s a shame, then, that the rest of The Mummy never quite reaches that same height.
Partially it’s to do with the screenplay. The major flaws there are things I want to save for the later sections of this article. As a whole, however, I would say it’s mostly pretty average and bland. There aren’t many lines or monologues that stick in your head, nor is there much interesting banter between the characters. The most memorable lines we get are the ones that come off as unintentionally funny and/or disturbing, mostly because of how language has evolved since the 1930s. For example…
“Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple!”
“Don’t you think I’ve had enough excitement for one evening, without the additional thrill of a strange man making love to me?”
The acting doesn’t help matters, either. While Karloff and Johann are both fine, nearly everyone else is just going through the motions here. Edward Van Sloan and David Manners in particular are just copying their Dracula characters. I don’t want to put too much blame on the cast since the script doesn’t give them much to work with.
No, the thing that makes The Mummy never quite deliver on the promise of that opening scare is the same thing that makes it unique and even influential. The Mummy is not really scary after that opening because it is not primarily a horror movie. It is primarily a romance movie.
Part 2: The Romance Stuff
How in the hell, you ask, can a movie about a dessicated 3700-year-old corpse coming to life be a romance? With the aforementioned corpse as the romantic lead, no less?
I don’t blame you for thinking I’m crazy, but I’m not the only person who’s noticed this. In May 2015, for example, the British Film Institute included The Mummy on a list of ten great romantic horror films, along with titles like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1992 film Candyman. I’m singling these two out from the list along with Mummy because, as I will demonstrate, all three of them are on the list for the same reason.
Let us therefore accept that this is a love story involving a mummy. The natural first question after that is “why?” As in, why are Imhotep’s behavior and intentions toward his female target romantic in nature? The Universal version of Dracula, which we’re borrowing heavily from here, isn’t a romance. Drac just wanted to eat/enslave the women he came across, not woo them. So why isn’t Imhotep just focused on sucking out Helen’s soul or something like that?
I believe that to find the answer, we only need to look back at the European pop culture of a few decades prior. I think that Balderston, whether he was aware of it or not, was drawing from a literary subject dating back to Victorian times. The subject? Mummy romance.
Yes, you read that right. Mummy romance.
The most blatant examples come from the mid to late 1910s, AKA right as Balderston’s writing career was beginning, and they come in the form of novelty songs. Tin Pan Alley gave us such interesting titles as “Mummy Mine” and “My Egyptian Mummy,” the latter of which I will quote for you so you can understand what we’re dealing with:
My Egyptian mummy from the land of the pyramids,
We were sweethearts years ago.
That’s why I know, though you were turned to stone,
I almost hear you moan.
I’m in love with you. I’m in love with you.
(Brier 158)
If prose is more your thing, we can head back to the Victorian era proper. In 1840, for example, the French writer Théophile Gautier published a short story entitled “The Mummy’s Foot” in which the narrator meets and falls for the spirit of an ancient Egyptian princess after acquiring her mummified foot. We can also go back to our old friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his short story “The Ring of Thoth,” published in 1890. The narrator of that tale meets an Egyptian man named Sosra who claims to be 3500 years old and is still mourning the death of his lover millenia ago. He had discovered the secret of immortality but was unable to share it with his lover before her passing. With her mummy now on display in the Louvre, he watches over her until he can find a way to become mortal again.
Say, doesn’t the Ring of Thoth sound a whole lot like the Scroll of Thoth? And isn’t the story of Sosra and his lover a lot like the story of Imhotep and the princess? Ankh-es-en-amon dies tragically while Imhotep persists into the modern day, yearning to reunite with his beloved. As Richard Freeman notes in his article “The Mummy in context,” there’s even a section in Doyle’s story that lines up almost perfectly with a key moment in the film.
In a frenzy I broke my way through the attendants, and rushed through hall and corridor to my Atma’s chamber. She lay upon her couch, her head high upon the pillow, with a pallid face and a glazed eye.
(Doyle 56)
Perhaps you could make the argument that Balderston plagiarized Doyle, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make with this comparison. I’m saying that there was a decades-long tradition of stuff like this which Balderston would have been aware of, and it almost certainly would have inspired his screenplay.
But still, what does that have to do with vampire romance and that movie about the candy guy who likes bees? Easy. They’re all connected by the same plot thread, the one that Balderston introduces into his mummy romance narrative as a way to connect Imhotep with the modern-day heroine: reincarnation.
We see it so often in books, movies, songs and the like: a love so powerful that even the wear and tear of multiple lifetimes can’t destroy it. By 1932, interest in the concept of reincarnation was taking hold in the West, that process having started with — you guessed it — the Victorians a few decades prior. Examples of its use in Western stories popped up every now and then, but it had yet to really take hold as a narrative trope. Reincarnation as a plot point in romance stories specifically was even rarer, though not entirely unheard of: it’s a major plot point in H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novel She. As far as I can tell, one of the earliest attempts (at least in Hollywood film) to tell a story like this was The Mummy.
So here’s the backstory. Imhotep was a high priest in the pharoah’s court, and his secret lover Ankh-es-en-amon was a priestess of Isis. When she died young, he was so distraught that he stole the Scroll of Thoth and tried using it to resurrect her. Because this was an especially big no-no, he was sentenced to be buried alive without any way for his soul to enter the afterlife. That’s why he was still around to be resurrected in modern times. Meanwhile, Ankh-es-en-amon was reincarnated as Helen Grosvenor, which is why the two look so similar.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula would replicate this setup almost perfectly with Prince Vlad renouncing God and becoming a vampire after the death of his wife, whose reincarnation Mina Harker becomes the new object of Vlad’s affections. And it wasn’t even the first Dracula adaptation to use this plotline: the 1973 version by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis got there first! It was used in the 2013 Dracula series on NBC as well, to prove that this practice has endured into the 21st century. Candyman focuses on the horror aspect over the romance aspect and only hints at reincarnation, but it’s still the story of a man cursed for the crime of being in love — in this case, a Black man murdered by a lynch mob for impregnating a white woman — and enduring into the modern day as a malevolent spirit until he unexpectedly crosses paths with a reincarnation of his lover. And the female lead’s name in that film? Helen. Probably a coincidence, but a fascinating one nonetheless.
And here’s the big thing: The Mummy plays up the tragic romance aspects of its story for all they’re worth. When you see this backstory play out on screen, it’s legitimately sad, due in no small part to Karloff’s acting. He doesn’t have any dialogue as the living Imhotep, but he tells us a lot with nothing but his facial expressions: Imhotep is heartbroken by his loss and aware that what he’s doing is wrong. He knows his punishment is inevitable if he’s caught, but he’s desperate enough to try it anyway. And in the present, the conversations that Imhotep has with Helen are when the movie’s dialogue finally steps beyond just being average and becomes truly poetic:
Ankh-es-en-amon, my love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods. No man ever suffered as I did for you.
It was not only this body that I loved, but thy soul! I destroy this lifeless thing! Thou shalt take its place but for a few moments and then rise again, even as I have risen!
It’s the same kind of language that we’ll see in stuff like Bram Stoker’s Dracula several decades later, where it’s meant to be unambiguously hot.
Another thing that The Mummy has in common with modern romance stories is that it’s centered on the female lead. While Mina was mostly a side character in Universal’s Dracula, Helen is the protagonist here despite the presence of a Van Helsing counterpart and Jonathan Harker counterpart. She’s the one who undergoes the most dramatic change over the course of the film. She’s the one with the strongest connection to Imhotep/Ardath Bey. In the climactic scene of the film, she is the one who ultimately defeats him when she comes to an important realization about who she is and who she wants to be:
I loved you once, but now you belong with the dead! I am Ankh-es-en-amon, but I…I’m somebody else, too! I want to live, even in this strange new world!
I think this particular line is emblematic of the many conflicts that Helen is going through in this film. On one level, it’s a choice between life and death. On another level, it’s a choice between the two men who love her. And on a deeper, more sinister level, it’s a choice between the two parts of her heritage, between ancient and modern. Between white and non-white.
Part 3: The Racist Stuff
As interesting as it can sometimes be, the trope of mummies as horror story monsters is, overall, a little bit sketchy. We could call it a specific flavor of zombie-type horror, but modern zombies just don’t carry the same set of implications that mummies do. They’re both reanimated corpses, yes, but a zombie is more generic. Anyone can be a zombie. With a mummy, on the other hand, you’re specifically taking the funerary practices of an ancient non-Western culture and using those as the basis for a monster. The mummy is scary because it’s exotic and out of the ordinary for white audiences. It’s mystical and unknowable, and therefore it is difficult to understand and control. And in late 20s/early 30s Egypt, when the country was an independent kingdom in theory but under British occupation in practice, there was nothing scarier than a foreign, unknowable force that couldn’t be controlled.
In The Mummy, these themes of racism and imperialism are on display all over the place. They start with the mythology of the story itself, which is, to use a technical term, “spooky mystical BS.” Absolutely nowhere have scholars and archaeologists found evidence that the ancient Egyptians believed mummies could rise from the dead. The Scroll of Thoth is a total fabrication on Balderston’s part (though possibly inspired by another Conan Doyle short story, “Lot No. 249”), created because the story needs a magical MacGuffin. The only part that’s somewhat accurate is the presence of Isis as a prominent deity, and even that is on thin ice: the cult of Isis, for example, was definitely not all-female as the film implies.
This is all part of the fetishization of ancient Egypt that happens throughout the film. Dr. Muller speaks of it as though it’s a mythical land where the old ways and gods are still in control, where the landscape and climate itself have the power to drive a man insane. And then there’s Helen, who shows an obsession with all things ancient Egypt and seems disgusted by the trappings of modern society. She describes Cairo as “dreadful” and says that the pyramids are “the real Egypt.” On a surface level, her sentiments are intended to represent Ankh-es-en-amon’s spirit inside her. But when you compare her comments to Dr. Muller’s, a common line of thought starts to appear: ancient Egypt is the “true” Egypt, the “legitimate” Egypt, the Egypt that actually matters. It’s spoken of like a single giant relic as opposed to a country that still exists with a culture and history beyond ancient times.
Helen is at the center of the conflict between modernity and ancient mysticism. Literally at the center, in fact, because she she’s mixed-race. We are told early on that Helen’s father is the governor of Sudan — “English, of course” — and that her mother was from an old Egyptian family. The other characters keep harping on the fact that she isn’t completely white. It even becomes a source of danger for her, because Imhotep’s powers of mind control only work on other Egyptians. No, that’s not me making an assumption: Dr. Muller literally says that Imhotep was able to brainwash the Whemples’ Nubian servant because of his “ancient blood.” Imhotep can attack the white protagonists in other ways, but it’s telling that the film puts this specific limitation on his power: try as he might, he can’t corrupt the good, proper Englishmen.
Speaking of good proper Englishmen, let’s talk about Frank Whemple, our “hero.” The quotation marks are there because he kind of sucks. Looking at the film from a 1930s perspective, i.e. not getting into all the ugly sentiments conveyed by his behavior, he’s just a boring character. He goes from not believing in magic to believing in magic after all, and that is the extent of his character development. But things are different if we’re looking at the film from a modern perspective and analyzing its outdated attitudes. If someone wanted to rewrite this story to have Frank be the villain, you wouldn’t have to change much about him. It’s that bad at times.
This is mostly due to the blatant pro-imperialist stance that Frank exhibits throughout the film. He’s often arrogant and dismissive toward Egypt and its people. He views archaeology as a means to personal glory rather than education. He’s angry that the artifacts from Ankh-es-en-amon’s tomb are going to stay in their native country, saying they should be in the British Museum instead since Englishmen found them (which is an omission of truth at best and an outright lie at worst, since Ardath Bey told them where to dig). All in all, he’s pretty reprehensible, and that’s not even getting into the many ways he’s possessive and creepy toward Helen. And nothing happens to him that causes him to rethink this mindset. If anything, the events of the film only reinforce his ideas and make it look like he’s right. I think that’s one reason why it’s so easy in modern times to view The Mummy as a romance film with Imhotep as the primary love interest: it’s because the love interest that we’re supposed to root for is actually the one that sucks. Well, sucks more, I guess. Imhotep doesn’t smell like roses, either.
And what about Imhotep’s final defeat? It’s worth discussing because of how it plays out. You see, despite Imhotep having critical limits on how he can use his magic against the white protagonists, they are not the ones who ultimately destroy him. Only divine intervention, it seems, can get rid of Imhotep: the film ends with Helen/Ankh-es-en-amon praying for mercy to a statue of Isis, which comes to life and strikes Imhotep dead. It’s a far cry from something like Dracula, where scientific ingenuity and mastery of the monster’s weaknesses help the protagonists kill said monster. But when you think about it, of course the protagonists wouldn’t be able to defeat Imhotep. Not being able to subdue him is part of the horror. Like I said, the foreign unknowable force is scary to the white imperialists because there is no way to bend it to their will. It can only be destroyed by something equally foreign and unknowable and even more powerful, something the protagonists also don’t understand and can’t control. It’s almost Lovecraftian, in a way.
To me, the horror in The Mummy is all based around the idea of established order losing control of something it thought it had subjugated. Ancient artifacts literally run wild, striking back at those who would keep them locked up in museums. Helen, a mixed-race individual, is in danger of having her whole identity overwritten by her non-white heritage. The English protagonists are attacked repeatedly and nearly killed by Imhotep’s magic, which they are ultimately helpless against. It’s a story that, when you analyze it, speaks to the fears born out of the history shared by Britain and Egypt. It is the story of an imperial world turned upside down.
Of all the films we’ve discussed in this series so far, The Mummy is perhaps the weakest and the one with the most complicated legacy. In terms of tone, it lacks the intense eerieness of Dracula and the boisterous theatricality of Frankenstein, leaving it drifting without a clear identity. The script is derivative, most of the characters are flat, and the racist/imperialist themes of the story will make it hard for modern viewers to stomach. I wouldn’t recommend it to a casual viewer, but I can’t in good faith say that you should never watch it. Jokes about vampire romance aside, this is quite an influential movie in several ways. The camerawork and makeup are great technical achievements. Boris Karloff and Zita Johann have wonderful chemistry and elevate the material they’re given. The resurrection scene is an unforgettable moment of horror. It’s great fun to compare the film to later supernatural romances and analyze how it may have influenced the genre. Even the questionable attitudes can be the jumping-off point for a discussion of archaeology, the effects of imperialism and societal fears both past and present. In short, while The Mummy is by no means a great film, it’s an entertaining one with a lot to offer. Like many flawed works of art, the flaws themselves add something new and valuable to our ongoing conversations about storytelling and history. The Universal Horror canon would be a little less bright without it.
Final Rating: 3.5 Stars
So what’s next for Universal at this point? Doing an original story has paid off well enough, but there must be some more great horror classics the studio can adapt for the big screen. Maybe that H.G. Wells guy has something they could use…
UP NEXT: The Invisible Man (1933)
Works Cited & Further Reading
Blyth, Michael. “10 Great Romantic Horror Films.” BFI, 21 May 2015, www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-romantic-horror-films.
Brier, Bob. Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession With the Land of the Pharoahs. St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Ring of Thoth.” The Cornhill Magazine, Jan. 1890, pp. 46–61, https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=The_Ring_of_Thoth.
Freeman, John. “THE MUMMY in Context.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, Mar. 2009, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.7566.
Mallory, Michael. Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror. Universe Publishing, 2021.
Landis, John. Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares. Reprint, DK Publishing, 2016.
Schroeder, Caroline. “Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties About Race, Ethnicity and Religion.” Journal of Religion and Film, vol. 7, no. 2, 2003, scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1084&context=cop-facarticles.
Soister, John. Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studios’ Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery Films, 1929-1939. 2nd ed., McFarland and Company, 2005.
Weaver, Tom, Brunas, Michael, & Brunas, John. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 (2nd ed.). McFarland & Company, Inc. 2007.