Day 13 of 365: The Mummy

I have The Mummy in my list of topics twice. I am guessing one is meant to discuss the original movie and one is for the remake. So, let's do the original movie. I was very surprised, when I finally saw it, that the gauze-wrapped zombie image was only used in the opening scene of the movie. After all, when you've been asleep for a thousand years, you don't want to stay in your bedclothes forever. Rather, the Mummy, after draining a few life forces, looks like Boris Karloff in a Fez. Which is still plenty creepy.

When I was a kid, I always assumed the horrible power of the mummy was that it was a dead body that came life and...I dunno, choked you or something? Monster Squad kind of fueled that idea. The real horror of the Mummy is that he was a practitioner of dark arts and magic that has never been seen in the modern world. Karloff, in order to advance his master plan, uses guile and, essentially, warlock powers to maneuver events to his pleasure. If it weren't for such a strong performance on his part, I doubt this monster movie would have made it into the ultimate pantheon of horror classics. Whenever the random number generator gets to the remake, I will talk about how surprisingly faithful an adaptation it was.