by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 29, 2008

You'll be surprised at what this movie lacks - a mummy. While there's a lot of dialogue about ancient curses, the mummy is almost never seen in this movie, with a total screen time of less than time minutes.

"The Mummy" was released in 1932, and motion pictures had only included sound for the last five years. This required actors to cluster near the microphone at all times, and resulted in long scenes in which the camera wasn't moved while the actors were speaking. It's almost like watching a filmed play, and unfortunately, the dialogue is melodramatic

For this reason, its best scene is probably its recreation of an ancient Egyptian funeral ceremony, which uses a voice-over while the camera simply captures the pageantry of its torchlight procession. As the scenes unfold, Boris Karloff, the high priest of the temple, softly tells the back story which motivates his character. ("I knelt by the bed of death... I murmured the spell that raises the dead.") A few shots suffer from "silent movie acting" - abrupt changes in expression and exaggerated and deliberate gestures. But it culminates with a genuinely scary moment, when for stealing the dead-raising scroll, soft-spoken Karloff is bandaged. The camera lingers as the bandages cover first his mouth and then his eyes, before he is buried alive.

At the time, critics complained that it followed the structure of Dracula a little too closely. There's a mysterious foreign man lures a young damsel towards a horrific destiny. In this case, it's Ardath Bey, played by Boris Karloff. (Identified in the movie's credits as simply "Karloff!") Reading an ancient scroll brings the mummy back to life, and it's his slow awakening which is scary, rather than his actions afterwards. The mummy walks away into the night, his bandages dragging across the dirty tomb floor, and disappears from most of the movie.

But shortly after a strange human appears among them, who's peculiarly interested in Zita Johann. Though the posters showed the resurrected mummy, it's this resurrected priest, Im-ho-tep, who's becomes the chief antagonist.

There's a lot of archeological mumbo jumbo about unbroken seals and spells or curses, but there's only one or two moments that are genuinely scary. It was ten years later that Hollywood began producing new films with their classic monsters, and those are the mummy movies that are generally scary.

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