"The Mummy" Review

 

by Daniel White

Shocktober

"Oh! Amon-Ra--Oh! God of Gods--Death is but the doorway to new life."

Atmosphere is everything in Universal's The Mummy (1932), and acclaimed cinematographer Karl Freund provides it by the pyramidful. In one of his few outings as a director, Freund who cut his teeth working in German Expressionism (The Last Laugh, Metropolis), delivers a phenomenally beautiful fright flick, as striking as anything produced in Hollywood at the time.

A subdued, menacing Boris Karloff stars as Imhotep, an ancient mummy who is unearthed by a team of English archaeologists. Assuming the identity of Ardeth Bey, he obsessively pursues Helen (the sultry Zita Johann, costumed equisitely, I feel compelled to point out), a half-Egyptian beauty who is the reincarnation of his lost love, Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Make up artist Jack Pierce is not credited but he created Karloff's wizened, wrinkled facial features. Perhaps not as startling and distinctive as his Frankenstein monster from the previous year but just as effective. Karloff is creepy-looking and matches his diabolical demeanor with a somber, intense portrayal.

The plot borrows freely from 1931's Dracula and the movie even employs two of the actors from that "monster" hit for Universal, David Manners and Edward Van Sloan. Bramwell Fletcher gets the Dwight Frye "loony" role as a young archaeology assistant who is driven mad by a marauding mummy. For whatever reason, this film never became quite as iconic as Dracula and Frankenstein, maybe because it's more of a mood piece than a movie of the macabre. However, it is a sumptuous and spooky slice of cinema and more than holds its own as one of the triumvirate of terror in Universal's early horror films (a blood curdling quartet if you include 1934's The Invisible Man).

With the same haunting refrain from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake that was used in Dracula, and Charles Stumar in charge of the splendid cinematography, The Mummy can be found on Tubi.