If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Even if this film disappoints, the mummy certainly won’t be done lumbering toward cinema screens anytime soon. Judging from the trailer to the Tom Cruise-powered franchise-building Mummy revamp, it looks likely the retribution this time will erupt from an accidentally discovered mummified ancient sorceress (Sofia Boutella) who murdered her father. It didn’t make a difference to the box office and two further adventures were exhumed.
While audiences felt pity for Karloff’s mummy, in this remake he was a fully-fledged antagonist, totally devoid of sympathy. The story hinges on the unintentionally awakened shape shifting creature that summons the ‘ten plagues of Egypt’. “Most of this movie is based on real myths and real legends even though it’s a story about a 3,000-year-old walking, talking corpse,” claimed director Stephen Sommers of the first campy film in the series.
The dawn of the 21st Century ushered in a whole new mummy franchise (1999-2008) that starred Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz and reverted back to the legend of Imhotep. The film-maker also notably produced Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), which centred on the budding sleuth uncovering an underground Egyptian cult who mummify live human sacrifices as part of their sadistic ritual. Roland Emmerich’s Stargate (1994) concerned the gateway to a distant planet that mirrored ancient Egypt and played upon its exotic lure and despotic history with an alien masquerading as the Egyptian god Ra. Spielberg’s first Indiana Jones adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) hinged on the search for the Ark of the Covenant in Egypt. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster borrowed from Universal’s uneven sequels and adopted the moniker Kharis for the towering creature (Christopher Lee) having mistakenly presumed it was the name of a real Egyptian god. Hammer Studios brought the mummy back to fearsome life with Terence Fisher’s The Mummy in 1959, a film that honoured the original legend and recognised the creature’s romantic appeal by reinstating an Ankhesenamun figure named Princess Ananka, (Yvonne Furneaux). The idea of a mobile mummy would have been totally alien to the ancient Egyptians and goes against the entire concept of mummification, sought to preserve the dead for a still and peaceful afterlife. The Mummy’s Hand (1940) was the first in a reimagined but decidedly dumbed-down franchise. Despite popular belief, Karloff actually only appears as the titular bandaged being during the memorably unnerving 10-minute opening of the original film: it was only in the follow-ups that the revived creature became the lumbering threat we know today. It took another eight years before the next mummy film from Universal surfaced.
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