DeMille would release his epic Cleopatra. (Many 1920s movie houses would have been adorned with extravagant Egyptian décor.) Two years after The Mummy, Belgian cartoonist Hergé would publish the complete Cigars of the Pharaoh. The Art Deco aesthetic of the 1920s took cues from Egyptian culture. The Mummy was just one piece of art reflecting this fascination with Egypt. Even into the 1930s, pop culture was fascinated with Ancient Egypt, particularly ( largely apocryphal) stories about curses striking down those explorers who had violated the sanctity of these resting places. Notably, the original version of The Mummy was released in December 1932, just a month over a decade from the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb.

So, what exactly does the Mummy represent? There are some big ideas tied to the monster. The Invisible Man is about the fears of what a person might do if nobody else was watching. The Wolfman is about the animal trapped inside each human being, struggling to break free. Dracula represents threatening sexuality, what Stephen King called “ the ultimate zipless fuck.” Frankenstein and his monster are about the horror of technology run amok and reproductive monstrosity. The Mummy films always stand apart from the general tone of the monster movies around them, as if the production team has no real idea about what it is supposed to be doing with the core concept, and so adopt a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach that is curiously compelling.īy now, casual audiences understand the basic hook into each of the other classic monsters. The Mummy is interesting because it’s consistently the outlier in these cycles - sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, sometimes just for strangeness. It arrived late to the party started by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 1990s. It was the third of director Terence Fisher’s updates of classic movie monsters for Hammer Horror in the 1950s, behind The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula. It followed Dracula and Frankenstein as the third of the major Universal Classic Monsters of the 1930s. The Mummy has been part of every major wave of Gothic monster movies. Halloween is fast approaching, so it seems like as good a time as any to talk about that most maligned of movie monsters: the Mummy.

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