Alone among the pantheon of classic film monsters, The Mummy was a true Hollywood original.
Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster (and his Bride). The Wolf Man. The Phantom of the Opera. The Invisible Man. They’re the accepted pantheon of dark gods, the canonical Universal Monsters that brought life (and death!) to the first great cycle of gothic horror in American film. They also have one other thing in common: none of them are originals. Before their stories were committed to film, they were characters in novels, plays, and folklore. The same thing cannot be said for the final member of this elite fraternity, however. The Mummy, as undeniably iconic as the rest, was born in Hollywood. It may be surprising, but it’s true. Before Boris Karloff donned the linens in The Mummy (1932), ancient Egyptian corpses simply stayed dead. They didn’t stay buried, though, and that’s where the story of The Mummy begins. Incidentally, for purposes of clarity, I’ll be using a lower case “mummy” to refer to real-life embalmed corpses and a capitalized “Mummy” to refer to the iconic monster movie version.
Now, if we started the story at the very beginning, we’d have to go all the way back to Ancient Egypt’s mythic past. According to Egyptian mythology, the first mummy was Osiris, a great pharaoh and founder-hero killed by his jealous brother Set. Luckily, Isis, the sister-wife of the dead king, happened to be extremely adept at resurrection spells. With the help of the funeral god Anubis, Isis raised her husband from the dead by properly preparing his corpse. However, he did not return to reclaim his throne; Osiris was now alive and well in the afterlife, reigning as pharaoh in the land of the dead.
That’s the mythic version, but the true origin of the practice is decidedly more mundane. The incredibly arid soil of Egypt means that some degree of mummification is inevitable with ground burial; the bodies basically become person jerky. But because the Egyptians believed that, like Osiris, they would awaken to live their next life in the same body, it might pay to be as well-preserved as possible. Funerary priests developed ever more complex (and effective) mummification rituals over millennia, until mummies developed the linen-sheathed look we associate with them today.
In 1799, European interest in Ancient Egypt exploded with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphs. Until that point, Egyptian writing had been utterly indecipherable, and a three-thousand year civilization along with it. The Victorian world became utterly obsessed with Egypt. Egyptomania was running wild. The nascent field of archaeology birthed a subdiscipline — Egyptology — to catalogue its artifacts. Egyptian revivalism became a popular movement in art and architecture. And, most importantly for our purposes, Egypt began to figure in popular literature.
In 1827, British novelist Jane C. Loudon wrote The Mummy! Despite the exclamation point, it wasn’t a musical; instead, it was about a mummy called Cheops, revived in the 22nd century by advanced technology. It’s not really an ancestor of The Mummy, though, because it’s speculative sci-fi rather than horror. Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars is closer; it combines mummies with supernatural horror, but the bodies themselves don’t move around. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe published a parodic short story called Some Words with a Mummy. Here, an unembalmed corpse called Allamistakeo — yes, really — is awakened by scientists, and they all retire to discuss history over cigars and wine. The elements of The Mummy — the wrappings, the revival of a dead body, supernatural malevolence — were there, but not all together. Egypt and its ancient dead were not widespread symbols of dread in popular culture.
In November of 1922, Egyptomania was still going strong (fads lasted longer before the Internet), and it reached its height when Howard Carter and George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon made what turned out to be the one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of all time: the completely intact tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. The opening of Tut’s tomb was big news, but things didn’t get horrific until six months later, when Lord Carnarvon died in April of 1923. He had succumbed to infection after nicking a mosquito bite whilst shaving, but that doesn’t sell newspapers. Instead, the media devised a “mummy’s curse” to explain the death of the otherwise hale Egyptologist. From then on, when anyone who was even remotely involved in the excavation — that lasted ten years and employed hundreds of men — suffered any misfortune, blame was laid on the mummy’s curse. The so-called Curse of the Pharaohs became one of the biggest components of pop culture’s image of Egypt.
We’re getting back to Hollywood now, I swear. The film colony had become interested in cashing in on the public’s love affair with Egypt. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) used Egyptian imagery to raise the bar for Hollywood spectacle. What’s more, it had its world premiere at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, a Hollywood landmark that set a new standard for moviegoing opulence. So, when Universal Studios honcho Carl Laemmle, Jr. was looking for a worthy follow-up to Dracula and Frankenstein, it’s hardly surprising that his mind would drift to the supposedly haunted sands of Egypt. He assigned story editor Richard Schayer the following task: find a horror novel set in Egypt and turn it into a screenplay. Schayer found no such novel, and was forced to come up with his own story.
That story was not The Mummy, at least not yet. Schayer and screenwriter Nina Wilcox Putnam turned in Cagliostro, a script about the infamous Renaissance charlatan that claimed to have lived for centuries. In the film treatment, though, Cagliostro is the real deal, an ancient Egyptian alchemist who has been artificially prolonging his life with nitrate treatments. He spends his numberless days murdering women that resemble his lost love, and killing all others that stand in his way with a Nikola Tesla-style death ray. Pleased, Laemmle handed the treatment over to John L. Balderston, the man who had adapted the stage-plays for Dracula and Frankenstein for the screen. A former newspaper reporter who had covered the unearthing of Tutankhamun, Balderston made several changes to Cagliostro, the sum total of which essentially created a monster.
Crucially, Balderston’s screenplay moves the action to Egypt and transforms its main character into a mummy. Rather than a self-medicating alchemist, Boris Karloff’s Imhotep is himself the victim of a curse, denied access to the afterlife of other Egyptians.His obsession with Helen Grovesner (Zita Johann) is based in love, not hate; her 20th century body contains the soul of Ankh-es-en-Amon, the priestess for whom he was embalmed alive. He’s still willing to kill anyone standing in his way, but he does so using arcane magic rather than half-baked science. His own power can be countered by manipulating the same supernatural sources that keep him alive, via artifacts like the Scroll of Thoth or votives of Isis.
Modern viewers are often surprised that the original 1932 film does not contain many of the tropes we associate with The Mummy. A lot of it is there, sure; the story is set in Egypt, the Mummy is an embalmed corpse raised from the dead by magic, and he’s driven by a misguided quest for love. On the other hand, Imhotep doesn’t lumber around with arms outstretched, he doesn’t throttle his victims, and he doesn’t abduct screaming ladies. Karloff’s cerebral revenant spent a vanishingly small fraction of his screentime as a bandaged hulk, but that is the version of The Mummy that captured the popular imagination. In almost all future iterations of The Mummy, the Imhotep archetype would be split into two complementary figures: the bandaged brute and his sinister master.
The lumbering brute of the popular imagination is a product of Universal’s second cycle of gothic horror films. This series is easily differentiated from the first by a clear decline in production values and an increasing reliance on sequels. Beginning with The Mummy’s Hand (1940), the series would follow the exploits of Kharis (Tom Tyler), a different embalmed Egyptian. Kharis’ story is a loose remake of The Mummy; they even re-use stock footage of Boris Karloff and intercut it with Tyler. The franchise’s descent into B-movie filler notwithstanding, Kharis would be the true template for Hollywood Mummies going forward. He is raised from the dead to do the bidding of an evil master, drags his bandaged body around slowly, does not speak, and if he does show interest in a woman, it’s normally expressed in a King Kongian, carry-her-off fashion.
The Mummy provided an array of enduring themes and tropes — ancient curses, still-powerful Egyptian gods, love that survives across lifetimes — but the second film provides the version of the mythology’s central character that codified The Mummy in popular culture. It’s the post-Kharis Mummy that shambled his way through Universal sequels, Hammer remakes, and meetings with Abbott and Costello. He shows up in everything from episodes of Jonny Quest (1964) to the Goonies-meets-Ghostbusters cult classic, Monster Squad (1987). He shows up to fight giant robots in Japan. He’s the one that gets made into iconic model kits, the one that gets even further homogenized into sadly departed Halloween cereal mascots.
Hollywood has offered alternatives to this popular depiction, sure, but nothing has really stuck. Frankly, I wouldn’t expect them to. You won’t find a bigger fan of The Mummy(1999) than me — it’s a vastly underrated dieselpunk masterpiece that would probably be universally beloved if it were called Indiana Jones and the Book of Amon-Ra — and it’s been endlessly rerun on basic cable. It got two sequels, an animated series and a spin-off franchise. Its version of the undead has been enormously successful by any metric, but if you hand a kid a crayon and ask him to draw you The Mummy he’s not gonna sketch Arnold Vosloo. In the popular imagination, Frankenstein’s Monster will always be stitched together, Dracula will always sound like Bela Lugosi, and The Mummy will always limp around in linens. That’s the power of Hollywood; like the power of the old gods over Imhotep, its influences will continue to be felt across the ages.
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