THE MUMMY (1932) is an elegant, restrained psychological horror classic
#31DaysOfHorror: October 23
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
After the runaway success of Frankenstein and Dracula in 1931, Universal released The Mummy the following year, an original horror property not based on a specific work of literature. The Mummy is the story of an archaeological expedition to Egypt whose explorers accidentally revive an ancient mummy named Imhotep (played by the iconic Boris Karloff, who had also played Frankenstein). The rejuvenated mummy takes on the identity of an Egyptian man named Ardath Bey and convinces another expedition to exhume the tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon, his lover of thousands of years earlier. When he meets a woman who looks shockingly like Ankh-es-en-amon, Imhotep decides she must be a reincarnation and plans to kill her in order to bring her back to life as his bride.
I saw The Mummy when I was a kid, because I loved the Brendan Fraser version, and the part that stuck with me most was the brilliant scene at the beginning where the mummy comes back to life. Sure enough, it’s even better than I remembered, still just as effective now that I’m an adult. The sequence is long and carefully-filmed, nearly wordless, as the archaeologist transcribes the Scroll of Thoth and begins to mouth the words of the spell. The camera movements are assured and telling, making sure to let the audience know what’s about to happen, moving seamlessly between the man at the table and the mummy looming over his shoulder as if to say, “Heh, you know what’s about to happen, and he has no idea.”
And then… we cut to the mummy, who begins to almost-imperceptibly open his eyes and to breathe again… still in complete silence. There’s no dramatic score to punctuate the mummy’s movements, no cuts back to the frightened archaeologist to tell us how to react. We are left only to contemplate the horror of a long-dead man beginning once more to move.
The movie also makes the great decision not to show the bandaged mummy in his entirety at the beginning of the movie. Instead, as we see the archaeologist be driven completely insane and begin to cackle uncontrollably, all that we are given a glimpse of is the bandages slowly trailing out the door into the night. We’re left to imagine just how deeply horrific the mummy must look, and it’s much more effective than if we’d been allowed to see from the beginning.
However… I was surprised to remember that, by the time we next see Imhotep, he looks more like a regular (albeit really-wrinkly) Egyptian man, and he stays that way for the entirety of the film. The image that exists in the pop cultural memory of the evil mummy, arms outstretched, bandages trailing, ambling after his victims, doesn’t come from the original The Mummy.
Instead, this is much more of a psychological, mystical horror film. The mummy doesn’t chase and choke its victims; instead, he stands above a scrying cauldron and squeezes the life out of them from afar. The majority of the film is about him trying to convince a woman named Helen (Zita Johann) that she is the reincarnation of his lover, Princess Ankh-es-en-Amon, and it’s about the two men (played by David Manners and Edward Van Sloan) who are trying to protect her even as she falls more and more under his spell.
In that way, The Mummy owes a significant debt to Dracula. The characters of Dr. Muller and Frank Whemple are very much analogous to Abraham Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker; they are an expert and unwitting apprentice, forced to join up to battle a supernatural evil that is attempting to win over the woman that the latter man loves. Fittingly, both sets of characters are played by the same two actors — Edward Van Sloan played Van Helsing in Dracula and then Dr. Muller in The Mummy, while David Manners was Jonathan Harker in Dracula and then Frank Whemple in The Mummy.
We tend to think of the success of the Universal monster movies as having been driven largely by the actors who played the monsters —huge, iconic names like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. — but the Universal monster movies also made major stars out of the cast of supporting players, like David Manners. The actor, who was gay, was one of the first hundred actors to have a star installed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; after he withdrew from Hollywood at the height of his fame and opted for a life studying philosophy, his star has since been removed for reasons that don’t appear to have been made public.
The Mummy has had quite the legacy. It inspired a series of sequels, which don’t directly continue the plot, as well as a remake of sorts and a whole additional series by Hammer Studios (with a mummy played by Christopher Lee). Then, there was the 1999 remake/reimagining as well as the sequels and spinoffs that followed that film. (Did you know there was a Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power released in 2015, starring Lou Ferrigno and Barry Bostwick?) And finally, of course, there is the much-maligned 2017 film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, which is intended to launch the “Dark Universe” interconnected series of Universal horror remakes. I haven’t seen the new film, but from what I understand it’s not nearly as elegant and restrained as this original. Which is quite a shame.
But where can I watch it? The Mummy (1932) is streaming now on Shudder.
