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The Universal Mummy

The occasion of my first seeing a Mummy picture still remains a significant event in my memory, although it took place over forty years ago. When I was nine, the neighborhood theater, the Rio, started running a so-called "Spook Show" every Friday night, adding a horror film or thriller to its regular double feature. My parents did let me attend one of the early programs, the 1941 The Black Cat, starring Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi accompanied by my somewhat older cousin, who promptly took off to a more secluded part of the auditorium for a rendezvous with her boyfriend. But this was the last program I was destined to see for some time, and the question of whether or not I was to be allowed to go to the Friday night show quickly become a bone of contention at home. 

My parents had two objections, one of which, I realize in retrospect, had some merit. In those days, juvenile crime had by no means reached its present day proportions, yet gangs as well as the tough guys called "rogues" by my classmates did hang out at the Friday showings and the audience was in general a fairly rough one. The other objection was a good deal less persuasive--especially to a ten-year old. Like most respectable middle-class parents, mine viewed horror films as little better than pornography; protecting their child from this dangerous stuff was a responsibility only slightly less incumbent upon them than making sure he didn't fall into the hands of dope dealers--who already did exist then in those remote bland, Eisenhower years--or join the Communist Party. By contrast, the father of a neighborhood buddy, a highly articulate, self-educated electrician from Oklahoma--a connoisseur of horror flicks who had seen Tod Browning's now lost London After Midnight as a child and described it to me--dumped his kids at the Rio every Friday before going out for night of two-fisted drinking. How I envied my friend!

This opposition not only hardened my resolve but invested horror films with the special aura that surrounds any kind of forbidden pleasure. (Any similarity between these events and the following discussion of the theme of tabooed fantasy in Mummy 1 is hardly coincidental.) It thus came as a real surprise when, one Friday afternoon as we were walking home together, my mother, under a false impression--that I did nothing to correct--about my progress in liquidating my endless math assignments in my miserable fifth grade class, announced that that evening I could go the horror show. The movie I saw was The Mummy's Ghost. In fact, this was not the first horror film I had seen: apart from The Black Cat, I had also managed to see King Kong when it was revived in 1953 or so and shown at a Sunday matinee. 

But my mother had refused to let me go and see the double bill of Frankenstein and Dracula when it played on a Sunday and in my mind The Mummy's Ghost would always rate as my first real horror film, the first that featured one of the famous monsters. And in the long interval between seeing the first and the second programs, I had been increasing my monster literacy. Every Friday, the Rio would put up a poster announcing next week's attraction, and I would run down to see it as soon as I could get out of the house. 

After school let out for the day, having memorized the names of the principal actors and the director, I would spend hours after school in the branch public library, poring over an old edition of The Motion Picture Almanac, devouring everything I could find about them. I thus did not come to The Mummy's Ghost completely unprepared. I knew that this Lon Chaney was the son of the famous silent star; that this picture was part of a cycle of Mummy films; and that it, like most of the famous horror films, had been made by Universal.

How thrilling for me was everything associated with those Friday programs. The poster announcing the next week's attraction had the allure of a sacred relic. Unlike the posters for current releases from studios like MGM or Paramount, which had the brightly colored look of magazine ads, those for the Realart reissues of the old Universal horror films--probably copied from the originals--were done in dark shades of black, red, orange, blue, green, or magenta laid on in a thick impasto. During the week, I would return every time I had an opportunity to gaze at this bewitching object and try to imagine from the art work what the plot of the film could be like. (On the sly, at school I would even try to make my own mini-posters with crayons and drawing paper, replete with all the credits I had memorized.) 

On the night of the showing, my excitement steadily increased as I sat through the first feature, and then the second followed by an intermission that seemed interminable, until the lights went down. First there was a cartoon, and then the Realart logo, two film reels spelling out the name "Realart" appeared on the screen.  At that moment in my viewing career, that seemed to me the most magic of all logos, only slightly rivaled by RKO's radio tower atop the globe. Some day,I hope that a film student will write a doctoral dissertation on the subject of old-time studio logos, which were a good deal more than just commercial insignias. 

It is common today in film theory to make a distinction between the diegetic--what belongs to the story and its characters--and the non-diegetic--credits, music, etc. But this distinction seems highly arbitrary to me. In the old days of the studios, the first appearance of the logo was as much a part of the the entire experience of watching the movie as the opening chords of a symphony by Haydn or Mozart, serving to introduce the first movement, are part of the entire work.

It was a few weeks before I made it back again to the Friday night show, but I knew that I had gotten my foot in the door. Soon I was able to go to nearly every week--in addition to the Saturday and Sunday matinees--and I embarked upon the ambitious project of trying to see all of the famous monster cycles, a project in which I had unequal luck before the theatre discontinued the programs. 

Of the Dracula pictures, I was only able to see the first film; of the Frankenstein cycle, I was able to catch the first four movies--including what must have been an original nitrate print of The Bride of Frankenstein, since it contained the beautiful old Universal logo of the airplane circling the globe, which I had never previously seen--but neither Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman nor The House of Frankenstein. I had my best luck with the Mummy movies--of those, the only one I missed was The Mummy's Hand, which never played at the Friday night show. 

However, since the films were shown out of order, I actually saw the original Mummy last, after having seen the later installments in the saga. While I was able to reconstruct the sequence of events in the subsequent productions--especially since most of them, like serials, began by recapitulating the action of the preceding movie--I was utterly perplexed by the Mummy 1. The monster was not called Kharis but Imhotep; his girlfriend was named Anck-es-en-Amon instead of Ananka; and he only appeared in mummy wrappings at the very beginning of the movie. 

What was this? Although I was appropriately impressed with the scene in which Imhotep comes back to life, I spent the rest of the time trying to reconcile what was taking place with what I had seen in the other Mummy movies. It was only years later, when I was in college and watched the film on television that I realized it is, of course, not only the best of the series but one of the masterpieces of the horror film genre in the early 1930's.

Strictly speaking, Mummy 1 is a combination of two popular genres of the period: horror and the exotic. However, owing to the division of labor between the studios, where one studio specialized in certain genres and another in quite different ones, the combination was not a common one. While Paramount was the main producer of exotic films just as Universal that of horror pictures, Universal hardly ventured into the exotic apart from Mummy 1--the opening scenes of Stuart Walker's The Werewolf of London (1935), which take place in the Himalayas, and the African sequences of Lambert Hillyer's The Invisible Ray (1936) are among the exceptions.

Paramount made two outstanding pictures that blended the exotic with horror, the enthralling Isle of Lost Souls (1933) and the entertainingly sadistic Murders in the Zoo (1933),  but apart from these memorable exceptions, the studio only made a couple of horror films--Supernatural (1933) directed by Vincent Halperin, and Stuart Heisler's The Monster and the Girl (1941) are the titles that come to mind--and they have big-city settings. Nevertheless, there is a strong affinity between the two genres. The horror film deals with unusual or improbable or even impossible experiences that are as exotic in comparison to the experiences usually depicted in commercial movies as are the settings of the exotic in comparison to the settings of typical American productions. In that sense, the traditional horror genre might be described as an example of the implicit exotic, an exoticism more of spirit than of setting.

On the other hand, important differences remain between the two genres. Thematically, the instinctual dominates the horror genre just as desire dominates the exotic. In this way, however, the two genres stand in an inverse relation to one another: in both genres, a prohibited object--exemplified by the return to paradise in the exotic or by the return of the dead to life in horror--occupies a central place, but the emergence of this object still has a positive significance in the exotic. In the exotic, the object is always desirable, even if taboo. Not so in horror: the eruption of repressed desire on the screen has immediately disastrous consequences, first of all insanity, for whoever comes in touch with it. 

Renfield (Dwight Frye), Count Dracula's first on screen victim, becomes utterly depraved through contact with the Count and ends up a patient in Dr. Seward's madhouse, providing some of the most memorable scenes in the film. Moreover, the film by no means exculpates Renfield: even if he is ignorant of the Count's true purpose in calling him to Transylvania, he still fails to heed the warnings he receives at the inn and goes on to the castle--just as in a classic horror story. Less obviously but far more culpable, Renfield's subsequent readiness to make himself the vampire's instrument shows how a will to be seduced, not simple weakness, must have always existed within him. By contrast, Mina, unlike Renfield or Lucy--who moons over the prospect of becoming Countess Dracula--attempts to struggle against the vampire's power, as if she were a swimmer fighting an undertow.

Even in Frankenstein, the doctor apparently suffers a nervous breakdown after the creation of the monster, an occurrence which has far-reaching effects upon the subsequent development of the plot. Paralyzed by his collapse, Frankenstein resists the suggestions of Doctor Waldman (Edward van Sloan) to destroy the creature but he also fails to intervene when Fritz (Dwight Frye) tortures it--with the result that it not only grows stronger but quickly develops an inveterate hatred of humankind. (In this way, the movie condenses into a matter of hours events that stretch over several years in Mary Shelley's novel.) 

But the most memorable combination of the themes of the Instinctual and Insanity, of course, takes place at the very beginning of Mummy 1, when a young archaeologist, Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), after deciphering the opening hieroglyphics of The Scroll of Thoth inadvertently revives the mummy Imhotep (Boris Karloff) and goes mad. The sequence makes quite explicit the implicit premise of Dracula: the archaeologist who has been warned by the occultist and scholar Professor Muller (Edward van Sloan) not to open the casket which contains the scroll, violates the prohibition and suffers the consequences. But is it just the sight of the mummy restored to life which causes Norton to lose his sanity?

In terms of the underlying psychological causality, it is not quite accurate to say that Norton inadvertently revives the mummy. To be sure, he had not consciously foreseen this outcome of his action; however, the conscious action, translating the text, has an unconscious motivation which has little to do with furthering the progress of Egyptology. The context not only underlines the significance of breaking the taboo on reading the scroll but also gives it a strongly erotic connotation when Norton jokes that perhaps Imhotep himself had been buried alive for violating a sexual prohibition: "Poor old fellow! Now what could you have done to make them treat you like that? Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple." 

Moreover, as I argue in The Apotropaic Mummy, the symbolic implications of the mise en scène make it clear that the mummy is the phallus whose terrifying erection Norton provokes by reading the beginning of the spell from the Scroll of Thoth. But the masculine fantasy of an unfailing, permanent erection, a plenitude of phallic power and the ultimate defense against castration anxiety, is as forbidden as it is impossible. And everything that Mummy 1 relates later about the history of Imhotep's crime makes it clear that this fantasy must have motivated his sacrilegious acts as well, since the object of his desire was a doubly tabooed object: a sacred virgin of Isis and a corpse. 

What Norton sees, what drives him mad, is the realization of his own desire--the desire to be the monstrous phallus that will penetrate the female genitals symbolized by the box containing the scroll--and the film shrewdly elides this moment by never showing a face-to-face confrontation between the two, only Norton's horrified reaction to what he sees. Transgressive desire and the indefinite repetition of a culpable fantasy organize the scenario at work behind the scenario of Mummy 1, although the film in a certain way succeeds where Imhotep and Norton fail, by offering the audience a highly camouflaged representation of this fantasy--a representation which only lasts a brief duration in the ongoing flux of images which make up the whole film.

In The Monster Show, David J. Skal dismisses Mummy 1 as little more than a spinoff from Dracula: "The picture is a good example of the kind of creative conservatism the studio system fostered; virtually every plot element as well as key performers (not to mention some props and set decorations) were recycled from Dracula…." However, the judgement seems a hasty one to me. It is certainly easy to understand that Universal would borrow features from a proven hit in order to improve the chances of a new release, but the similarities end there. As in Frankenstein, in Dracula the dominant theme is that of the violent eruption of instinctual forces, forces associated with natural predators and the night. From the very beginning, the film visually links the figure of the vampire--itself a prototype of the predator--with nocturnal images of vermin and spiders, not to mention the famous howling of "the children of the night" on the soundtrack

Moreover, the recurrent return of night signals a potential threat to the inhabitants of the daylight world: the repeated shots of the setting sun serve not only to give a certain rhythm to the action but to signal the return to life of the chthonian forces that have only been kept at bay, not dispelled during the day. The world of Dracula is completely inverted, one in which most of the action takes place at an insane asylum at night. Yet in the terms of the film, Dr. Seward's sanitarium--the symbolic embodiment of the irrational powers within the human mind that correspond to the destructive natural ones without--becomes a fortress that must be guarded just as if it were a castle in the middle ages waiting for an attack by barbarian hordes, kept in a state of permanent wakefulness by the electric lamps which appear as props in so many scenes in the movie and point up the artificial fragility of civilization.

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Metamorphoses of the Mummy

The Mummy (1999)

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