Horror Film Friday: 'The Mummy' starring Boris Karloff, the Uncanny!

If Frankenstein's monster was a misunderstood overgrown child, then Imhotep was just a hopeless romantic. Even today, The Mummy remains a bizarre entry in the Universal Monsters cannon. Here, the audience is presented with another terrifying Boris Karloff monster, but he turns out to be sympathetic. After all, he just wants to spend the rest of eternity with the woman he loves.

The Mummy is unique in early horror history for a number of reasons, but the first is that it is an original story. Carl Leammle Jr. knew that an Egyptian-themed horror movie to follow Dracula and Frankenstein would be great idea, since King Tutankhamen's tomb had only been discovered a decade before and the supposed curse surrounding it was still in the news. Unfortunately, there wasn't much fictional literature to base a movie on, so Hollywood had to concoct something original (gasp). John L. Balderson, who worked on both Dracula and Frankenstein, was assigned to work on it, bringing in another surprising element: romance.

While we might visualize The Mummy as being about some guy wrapped in toilet paper and walking around like Frankenstein's monster, Karloff is only briefly wrapped from head-to-toe. The film starts in Egypt, where Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) is leading an excavation. He digs up a priest named Imhotep, whose sarcophagus is marked with signs that he was sentenced to death, even in the afterlife. He was found with a mysterious wooden case that contained a scroll. When Whemple's assistant opens the case and reads the scroll, Imhotep is awoken and walks right off with it.

Flash forward 10 years and Whemple's son, Frank (David Manners, also in Dracula) is leading his own expedition. He's coming up empty, but then Ardeth Bey, who looks suspiciously like that undead Mummy, tells him where the tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon is. Frank is too excited to care about Ardeth Bey's credentials, so they dig up the tomb and bring the artifacts back to Cairo. Frank and his father don't know that Ardeth Bey is really Imhotep and he needed the princess' stuff dug up so he could bring her to back to life.

So who is the girl Imhotep plans on kidnapping to turn into Ankh-es-en-amon? That would be Helen, a British-Egyptian women played by real-life believer in reincarnation, Zita Johann. While we tend to think of these Universal horror movies as one-man shows, Karloff has a surprisingly strong supporting cast to work with, starting with Johann. She was a stage actress and her complete magnetism when onscreen is hard to resist. One can see why both Imhotep and Frank easily fall in love with her. But she's much more than a pretty face and a walking scream factory. She is really good in her scenes with Karloff, particularly that final act.

The rest of the cast is pretty run-of-the-mill. David Manners does the job, but he's not exactly heroic, especially since he gets knocked out leading up to the finale. Arthur Byron as his father is pretty good at dying (oops... spoiler... although, I'm talking about an 82-year-old movie). Edward Van Sloan is the Van Helsing of this movie, assuming that pointing his finger in Imhotep's face will stop him. (Of course, Van Sloan also played Van Helsing in Dracula! Talk about typecasting.)
The Mummy does excel at mood and darkness. That's thanks to director Karl Freund, who lensed Dracula for Tod Browning and brings in his unique use of light and shadow from Transylvania to Cairo. This is much darker than your typical 1930s drama, and even leans toward the shadowy noir world of the 1940s. Freund had figured out that Karloff had such a mysterious, spooky face that he didn't need intrusive make-up to make you scream. Just by placing the lights in the right way, putting the camera right in Karloff's face and you have an image embedded in the mind forever.

Overall, The Mummy is far more romantic than we expect from horror films, or any movie involving a mummy. But that's part of its “charm,” if you will. There's no adventure here like Universal's Mummy franchise from the '90s and 2000s and instead real tension with horror.

The plot for the film does slightly mirror Dracula (as made painfully obvious by the documentary included on the Blu-ray), but Count Dracula is less sympathetic than Imhotep. We don't know until the very end what Imhotep's real intentions are. Even people who aren't real horror fans can admit, the really terrifying movies are the ones where you can't figure out the ending.

You can talk about this film and others at the Film Friday Facebook page. You can check out past Film Friday columns here.