The Mummy (1932)

n ancient, Egypt a man (Boris Karloff) is punished for attempting to magically revive his dead love and is turned into a living mummy.

In modern day, his body is found and accidentally revived.

Ten years later, the living mummy, looking nearly-human, is now passing himself as Ardath Bey. He helps archaeologists find the tomb of his love; but as it turns put her living soul has already reincarnated in the body of Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johan).

While nothing more than a thinly disguised version of nearly the same story as Dracula, there is enough of a twist here to make the story interesting again.

Superstitious belief overrides logic much too quickly, which I would assume is the point of the story; but there is little of the resistance from scientifically thinking minds that one would expect.

Ardath Bey is immediately unmasked as the living mummy without any basis or any sort of evidence (other than the possible ramblings of an insane mind ten years earlier.)

Dr. Muller (Edward van Sloan) himself admits the museum guard died of natural causes!

Contrary to some science-fictional tendencies in some of the Universal Horrors, this is a 100% irrational fantasy: In Dracula, at least we knew Mina Harker was being drained of blood; here “[Medical] science is helpless in a case like this!” even though no real ailment even exists.

We are being fed a story, which we believe based on what we see but none of these characters truly ever see anything.

Dr. Muller makes baseless, crazy predictions “He’s going to kill her, and make her a living mummy like himself!” Such good luck that these guesses all prove to be real!

If the Egyptian gods are real (as is undeniably established – there is no mention of Christianity here!) and if there was any wisdom in the ancient preservation of a mystic scroll, why would Van Helsing (erm.. excuse me,) Dr. Muller want immediately to destroy it? (Why didn’t the ancients destroy the scroll to begin with?)

Additionally, there are some odd aspects of the plot and the direction:

People place lights in the back of the object containing the text to read it rather than using it to illuminate it.

A man dies of shock, but everyone indicates he’s been murdered (…so which is it, shock, or murder?)

Ardath Bey also, too conveniently, forgets an invaluable scroll.

It's a bit odd that the reincarnated princess digs this dried up mummy so much, (she also does not care much for modern Cairo, even before revealed as such); Bela Lugosi as Dracula makes more sense, but then, other than memories of love, we don’t really know what their relationship was those thousands of years ago.

Ardath Bey is an initially disappointing sort of mummy, (other than a fleeting glimpse, he hardly provides the sort of bandage-wrapped mummy mayhem from the sequels I was expecting when I saw the film as a kid,) but he nevertheless seems not to be bothered by having to murder in order to get what he wants: He remains a solid monster.

He uses long-distance ‘evil sendings’ to kill, (was he a sorcerer in his past life? He must have been); just not quite what I expected some decades ago when I first saw the film.