Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/30/24: Mummies

Universal’s The Mummy, 1932

The 1930s and 1940s were a golden age for horror movies AND graphic design for horror movie posters. Look at the color, the composition,  the pleasing mix of typefaces in the poster above! It’s gorgeous.

Which brings me to the subject of mummies.

Mummies are part of the rarefied classic movie monster club that includes Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster. Universal movies all, and subjects of a failed 2010s attempt to bring them into the modern age as an interconnected movie franchise. The concept lacked legs, though it gave us the stunning re-visualization below.

The Mummy, 2017. That’s Sofia Boutella in the title role as cursed Princess Ahmanet.

The original Mummy was about the discovery of the tomb of High Priest Imhotep by a British expedition. (King Tut’s tomb was found a scant ten years before and was still much in the news.) The expedition’s leader reads an ancient scroll he finds, bringing Imhotep back to life, and promptly goes insane. Ten years later, Imhotep, now in the guise of a modern Egyptian historian, sees a woman he believes is the incarnation of his lost love Princess Anck-es-en-Amon, with whom he carried on a forbidden affair. She also happens to be the love interest of Frank, the son of the original expedition’s doctor.

Unlike the Frankenstein and Wolfman movies, The Mummy had an obvious sexual aspect. It was also the only Universal monster movie that had a script co-written by a woman: Nina Wilcox Putnam.  The theme of romantic predator and prey was similar to that of Dracula, but unlike Dracula’s dreary gothic setting, the Egypt of The Mummy was colorful, exotic and sensual.  A 2001 sequel called The Mummy Returns even featured a duel-to-the-death between two female characters (Rachel Weisz and Patricia Velasquez) wearing skimpy clothing and golden masks, armed with swords in each hand. But, back to the plotline of the original.

Imhotep kidnaps the love interest and chaos ensures as her would-be male rescuers find themselves out of their league. Going against the usual burger and fries of helpless victimhood, she saves herself by praying to a statue of Isis in the mummy’s tomb. The statue emits a beam of light that ignites Imhotep and burns him to death in spectacular fashion.

The 2017 reboot, in contrast, featured a male ingenue and a female mummy. Ahmanet was a Egyptian princess who was cursed and mummified alive, coming back to life with black, branded symbols on her face and an ability to generate a freaky extra pupil in her eye that coincides with her telekinetic powers. She seeks a magic dagger that will reincarnate the Egyptian god Set into the body of the assholish explorer (Tom Cruise) who discovered her tomb, but winds up captured, chained, and experimented on by Dr. Jekyll. Yeah, big question mark there. There’s a wild scene where, hanging from the laboratory ceiling seemingly by her vagina, she turns into a frenzied human spider in her struggles to escape.

I saw the movie, and though it wasn’t very scary or involving, I did enjoy its visual style. Overall it was hard to make a “hot Goth chick” (as one reviewer said) truly terrifying without rendering her not hot, and perhaps that was the reason for the movie’s failure, along with its convoluted plot.

One thing all the Mummy movies have in common, though, is their Egyptian setting and Egyptian names. So here’s a list for your own version of this movie monster.

Mummy Names (Egyptian only)