The Mummy (1932)

“Maybe he got too gay with the virgins in the temple?”

More Firefly tomorrow, but tonight is Hallowe'en. I couldn't resist a classic horror film!

Wow. This is so much better than the later Hammer version. The story’s a lot more coherent, for a start, even if the plot is borrowed straight from Universal’s Dracula from the previous year, with Ardath Bey as the Count (he even pays a social call on our heroes!), Helen as Mina, and Muller and Van Helsing. It even contains some lavish location scenes. I’m sure I recognised the Tomb of Hatshepsut (I’ve been there, you know!) and I was amazed to read that it was all filmed in Southern California.

Boris Karloff is great as the sinister Ardath Bey (that’s an oddly Ottoman title for 1932, surely?), an intelligent and eloquent villain so different from Frankenstein’s Monster and so much more interesting than a lumbering mummy with arms outstretched. Also interesting is that Imhotep’s background should hinge so strongly on the idea of being alive- very evocative of Poe. Mercifully, unlike the later Hammer film, there are no horrible scenes of tongues being removed.

Excellent as Karloff is, though, and good though it is to see him being so brilliant in a speaking role, there’s something more than a little uncomfortable about seeing Karloff, with his Anglo-Indian heritage, playing the part of the ethnic “other”. Yes, it’s a mummy film, and made in 1932 to boot; it’s hardly surprising to see sinister foreign characters in a film like this, but it’s a little awkward to watch in this day and age. Also raising an inevitable eyebrow is the moment where Helen, the only woman in the film, is simply told to go to bed by all the men!

Still, 1930’s social attitudes aside, this is a well-paced thriller with a real sense of threat, and none of the campness of James Whale’s stuff. The plot is far less convoluted, and makes far more sense, than in the later Hammer film (even if it owes an awful lot to Bram Stoker). Setting the whole thing in Egypt makes the whole thing much more evocative, although of course such a thing would be far easier for a film made at the height of the British Empire than for one made during Nasser’s rule!

There are a few moments which particularly stand out; the young man’s laughter, as he is driven mad by the sight of Imhotep coming to life, is hard to drive from the mind. So is the hilariously blatant “as you know, Bob” exposition, as two random blokes whom we never see again see fit to introduce Helen to us at the party! But for the most part the film is taut and tense. There’s a powerful sense of the Gothic, with an ancient magical power from the past threatening to return to the present, and set against the modern world of science and reason. Ardath Bey even has a rather fab scrying pool, which he uses to cause heart attacks in people who get up his nose. Brr.

The ending is quite hilarious in how closely it follows Dracula, with the film’s very own Van Helsing using the film’s very own Mina as bait in a trap for the film’s very own Count Dracula. But there’s a rather pleasing departure from this at the climax, as Helen (well, Ankhenesamun), rejects Imhotep and destroys him by magic. His centuries of suffering out of “love” for her are all for nothing!