The Mummy (1932): Karloff's Slow-Burn Romance of the Undead

Everybody knows what a mummy does. It lurches out of a sarcophagus trailing bandages, arms out, one leg dragging, and pursues a screaming woman at a walking pace across a set. Boris Karloff does this for roughly eight seconds of a seventy-three-minute film, in a single scene, and then spends the remaining seventy-two minutes in a fez and a well-cut suit, being extremely polite.

The shambling mummy of popular memory comes almost entirely from the Kharis sequels — The Mummy’s Hand in 1940 and the run that followed, with Tom Tyler and then Lon Chaney Jr in the wrappings. The 1932 film they were nominally sequels to is a different animal: a slow, mournful, weirdly erotic picture about a man who has waited three and a half thousand years for a woman to come back.

The eight seconds

The scene is the most famous thing Universal ever shot without showing you anything.

An expedition has opened a coffin. A young assistant, Ralph Norton, is alone in the tent, translating the Scroll of Thoth aloud by lamplight, chuckling at the incantation. Karl Freund holds on the scroll. Then on the sarcophagus. Then on the mummy’s arm, which is gone from the frame’s edge. Then on the young man’s face as something enters behind him — and Freund cuts to a hand, a trailing bandage crossing the floor, and Bramwell Fletcher’s laugh, which climbs from amusement into a howl and keeps climbing while the door swings and a shape passes.

You never see the mummy walk. You see a bandage, a hand, and a man losing his mind, and the sequence has been terrifying audiences for over ninety years on the strength of an editing choice. Freund had been a cinematographer for two decades — he shot The Golem in 1920, The Last Laugh, Metropolis, and Dracula for Tod Browning the year before this — and The Mummy was his first film as director. He arrived knowing precisely how much to withhold. The restraint principle is the whole desk’s oldest argument, laid out in why less monster is more.

Jack Pierce’s bandage makeup took something in the region of eight hours to apply, involved cotton, collodion and clay, and Karloff described the ordeal for the rest of his life. It appears in one scene. Universal spent a day of its star’s endurance on a shot that mostly shows a wrist.

It is Dracula, and it knows it

The structure is a straight lift, and the personnel confirm the intent.

John L. Balderston wrote the screenplay. He had co-adapted Hamilton Deane’s stage Dracula for Broadway, which was the property Universal filmed in 1931. Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing, plays Dr Muller, the occult authority who knows what is happening and cannot make anyone listen. David Manners, who played Harker, plays Frank Whemple, the decent young man who loves the girl and is useless. The story: an ancient undead foreigner comes to a modern city, fixates on a young woman who is the reincarnation of his lost love, controls minds at a distance, and is opposed by a European scholar with a book.

Universal was remaking its own hit with the serial numbers filed off, and it worked — the film did strong business and locked in the studio’s method for the decade. The dynasty is mapped in the Universal monsters.

The story credit went to Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer, whose original treatment was called Cagliostro and concerned a three-thousand-year-old magician killing women with injected nitrates. The Egyptian dressing came later, and it came for an obvious reason: Howard Carter had opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Lord Carnarvon had died the following year, and the popular press had spent a decade selling the curse of the pharaohs to a public that could not get enough of it. Balderston had covered the tomb opening as a working journalist. He knew exactly what he was monetising.

Karloff in a suit

What separates the film from its own sequels is that Karloff plays Imhotep as a person.

Ardath Bey — the identity Imhotep adopts, a grave-dry Egyptian gentleman advising archaeologists on where to dig — is a study in stillness. Karloff barely moves. He is shot mostly in slow track-ins, and Freund lights his eyes with a small dedicated light so that they carry a faint glow when he wants them to, an effect Freund had used on Lugosi in Dracula and refines here. Karloff’s voice does the rest: precise, quiet, a little tired.

The tiredness is the performance. Imhotep was buried alive for sacrilege — condemned to conscious entombment, which the film shows in a flashback and which is the nastiest idea in it — and he has been awake, in some sense, for thirty-seven centuries. Karloff plays a man for whom everything is an inconvenience except one thing. When Bey tells Helen that he has waited, the line has weight because Karloff has spent an hour showing you the weight.

Zita Johann is the film’s other half, and she has the harder job. Helen Grosvenor is half-Egyptian, and Johann plays her as someone who is already half-persuaded — drawn to the museum, drawn to Bey, sensing the previous life pushing up through her own. Johann was a serious stage actress with an interest in reincarnation, and she fought the studio over the film’s excised material; a long sequence of Helen’s previous lives was shot and cut, and reportedly survives nowhere. The film as released keeps only the Egyptian flashback.

That flashback is the film’s best passage. Freund shoots it as a silent film — no dialogue, no intertitles, just Egypt, a scrying pool, and the story of Imhotep stealing the scroll to resurrect the dead Princess Anck-es-en-Amon and being caught. Freund had spent his career in silent cinema. Given ten minutes to make one, in a talkie, he does it flawlessly.

Where it sits

The Mummy is the quiet one in the Universal cycle, and it is the least imitated because its central idea is the hardest to sell. Karloff’s monster wants a marriage. He is patient, cultured, and grief-stricken, and the film’s horror comes from the intensity of an emotion that has had thirty-seven centuries to concentrate.

The nearest relative in feeling is Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, forty-seven years later, which arrives at the same place: a monster exhausted by his own duration, envying the mortals he preys on. Two years after The Mummy, Freund’s old colleague Edgar Ulmer would build The Black Cat around Karloff as a much colder immortal, with David Manners again wandering through as the nice young man.

The film is widely available in restored form and looks superb — Freund’s photography survives beautifully, and the museum sequences have a depth that the sequels, shot fast and flat, never approach.

Spoilers below

Imhotep’s plan, when he finally states it, is the reason the film has an ending problem and an ending triumph at the same time.

He does not want Helen. He wants Anck-es-en-Amon, and Helen is the vessel. So the plan is: kill Helen, embalm her, mummify her properly, and then use the Scroll of Thoth to raise her as an immortal, at which point the princess will be restored and the two of them can be together forever. He explains it to her, in the museum, calmly, as though describing a sensible course of treatment. He shows her the knife.

The horror there is precise and modern. He is offering her eternity and requiring her death to deliver it, and he cannot understand why she might object, because the person he is talking to is a temporary inconvenience standing between him and his wife. It is possession dressed as devotion.

And then the resolution, which arrives in about forty seconds. Helen, on the slab, with the ancient personality surfacing and taking over, prays — as the princess, in Egyptian — to the statue of Isis. The statue’s arm rises. It fires a beam of light. The Scroll of Thoth burns. Imhotep, deprived of the thing keeping him upright, collapses into dust and bone on the floor, and the film is over.

A goddess turns up in the last minute and solves the plot. It is the kind of ending that would sink most films, and it half-sinks this one; Frank and Muller stand about having achieved nothing whatsoever, which is at least honest about them. What redeems it is the shot of what is left: a jumble of dry rubbish on flagstones, one hand still reaching. Karloff spends seventy-three minutes convincing you that thirty-seven centuries of waiting has a texture, and the film disposes of him in a heap you could sweep up. That is either the cruellest joke in Universal horror or the saddest, and it plays as both.