This post is part of the CMBA Fall Blogathon for 2025, showcasing Early Shadows & Pre-Code Horror. Find more blogathon posts by visiting the CMBA website!
When we think about body horror as a subgenre, we usually imagine the gruesomely detailed visual images of more modern movies like Eraserhead (1977), The Thing (1982), or The Fly (1986), which have their ardent fans but are sometimes too stomach-turning for those who prefer the subtler thrills of classic horror. Silent and Pre-Code horror does, however, include many examples of body horror, from the contortions of Lon Chaney in The Unknown (1927) and the tortured face of Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs (1928) to the inhabitants of Island of Lost Souls (1932) and the circus performers of Freaks (1932). These early films could get away with more provocative forms of horror than those arriving after the Hays Code cracked down in 1934, and they often use that freedom to great effect. It's striking, therefore, that Universal's The Mummy (1932) only suggests its most extreme bodily suffering in flashes, leaving viewers to imagine the extent of horrors implied but unexplored. What we actually see of Imhotep, the titular mummy, is filtered mainly through the perspectives of European characters whose sense of him as an unnatural Eastern/Other denies his humanity, but when we shift our point of view to Imhotep himself we begin to grasp the full horror of his situation and experience.
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| Boris Karloff stars as the undead Imhotep/Ardath Bey. |
Our colonialist perspective of Egypt is formed by the way the story opens and unfolds, with British archeologists uncovering the tomb of the priest Imhotep (Boris Karloff) in 1921 and then unintentionally waking him. While they speculate about the crimes that might have warranted Imhotep's unusual burial, they don't express much sympathy for him as a human being who clearly suffered an awful fate. When Imhotep wakes, his appearance alone is enough to drive Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) mad, even though the mummy doesn't lay a hand on him. A decade later, we catch up with the Europeans back in Egypt, this time uncovering the tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-Amon (Zita Johann) with the help of the mysterious Ardath Bey, whom they fail to recognize as Imhotep himself. Despite warnings about the supernatural from Dr. Muller (Edward Van Sloan), Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) and his son, Frank (David Manners), only understand Egypt as a subject, both academic and colonial, and they recognize its power as manifested through Imhotep too late. Ultimately, of course, Imhotep is destroyed, and the half-Egyptian Helen (also Zita Johann) is saved from his clutches, but the story ends without any denouement that might articulate the meaning of the tale we've just seen.
Much of the plot of The Mummy is recycled from Dracula (1931), a narrative with its own preoccupations with British imperialism and the Eastern Other, but transferring the story to Egypt makes those tensions much more overt. The film lets them bubble to the surface in ways that undermine the "official" perspective being shaped by the modern Europeans. Dr. Muller warns his English friends to respect the ancient culture they are pillaging, but Sir Joseph doesn't listen. Ardath Bey bitterly comments on his inability to excavate the princess himself because only foreigners are allowed to do so, while Frank complains about being forced to keep his find in Egypt instead of whisking it away to London. Helen, caught between the two worlds and wrestling with the awakened soul of Ankh-es-en-Amon inside her, laments the modernity of Cairo in the twentieth century and yearns for the "real" Egypt of the past. There's no denouement when Imhotep is destroyed because it's only through the power of his own world, and Helen's invocation of the ancient goddess Isis, that he is defeated at all. Dr. Muller and Frank have nothing to do with it, and they serve merely as spectators, not heroes, in the final scene. We get no sense that Frank has ever understood any of the events that have transpired, but Helen might really be changed by her experience, so their success as a romantic pair is left uncertain. The ending, however, implies that Helen will be absorbed into English whiteness through marriage to Frank, erasing her past identity as Ankh-es-en-Amon and the Egyptian heritage passed to her from her (dead) mother.
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| Imhotep prepares to make Helen undead like himself. |
Through these pressure points and gaps Imhotep himself is constantly breaking, demanding that Helen and the viewer see him differently, as a very human man whose love for her has caused him to suffer unspeakable horror. We first see him as a dead thing, the gleam in his dark eyes signalling his rise to embodied consciousness after thousands of years. We don't know what happens to him during the decade before the Whemples return to Egypt, but somehow he reforms himself into a semblance of a living man, learns English and, presumably, Arabic, as well, and manages to survive in a twentieth-century Egypt that is utterly alien to him. As Ardath Bey, he's a remarkable figure, thin, stiff, and seemingly fragile, with skin still desiccated and features sunken. Sometimes mummies in horror films are presented as little more than wrapped zombies, mindless and shuffling, but Imhotep is a fully aware human being trapped inside a mummified body, a living soul yoked to a dried up corpse. He reveals to Helen the transgressions that led to this fate, hoping to awaken her own memories of their forbidden love. Unable to accept the death of the princess, Imhotep defied the gods by attempting to resurrect her, but he was caught and punished by being buried alive. We are shown the torture Imhotep endured as, fully conscious and struggling, he was wrapped as a mummy and thrown into his sarcophagus. We don't see his actual death by asphyxiation as his coffin ran out of air, but his last moments must have been utterly terrifying, unable to move, see, or even scream. Imagine then his horror on returning to consciousness in his own corpse, an outcast from both the living and the dead. Obsessed with his beloved when he was alive, condemned to eternal suffering for her sake, and tortured by his own decayed flesh, Imhotep is almost certainly insane, but he is determined to be seen by Helen/Ankh-es-en-Amon as a man who has endured horrors for her love, and not as a thing without a human soul.
When we consider Imhotep as a man and not a thing, we become aware of the scope of the bodily horror he experiences. The Mummy doesn't dwell at length on the horror of Imhotep being a living soul inside a dead body, but it's present in Boris Karloff's physical performance and the anguish his character reveals only to Helen. Dracula might be undead, but his body is not a dry husk, while zombies are usually shown as animated corpses that lack self-awareness. Imhotep has the worse of both curses; he has the consciousness of a living man but exists in a mummified corpse. A more fully developed exploration of this theme can be found in Roger Corman's adaptation of the Poe short story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in Tales of Terror (1962), in which Vincent Price plays a dead man forced to continue to inhabit his decaying corpse by a sadistic hypnotist (Basil Rathbone), while the horror of a man who finds himself made monstrous dominates stories like The Wolf Man (1941) and The Fly (1958). In The Mummy, the horrific nature of Imhotep's existence is suggested most strongly in the third act, when Imhotep seeks to seduce or force Helen into sharing his fate. "No man ever suffered as I did for you," he tells her, hoping to convince her to "face moments of horror for an eternity of love." Even as her awareness shifts to that of the princess, Helen still recognizes the nightmarish nature of the immortality Imhotep wants her to embrace. She recoils when she see the flaky print of Imhotep's hand on a table, realizing that instead of "moments of horror"Imhotep wants her soul to exist forever trapped inside a dead and mummified body like his own. "I loved you once," she tells him, "but now you belong with the dead." The worst part of the gods' curse isn't just that Imhotep must animate his own dried corpse, but that he finally suffers rejection from the woman for whom he endured such a monstrous fate.
The complexity underlying The Mummy has made it particularly ripe for sequels and revisions, although most later mummy movies fail to invest the supernatural character with Imhotep's gravitas and emotional depth, thus continuing to obscure the idea of the mummy as a figure of body horror. Vampires and werewolves have gotten better treatment in films like An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Lost Boys (1987), and Blade (1998), but the mummy's unique identity as ancient and Egyptian still makes it harder for us to imagine the mummy as an actual person instead of a thing. For some of the more interesting later takes on the monster, see the 1959 Hammer remake or the 1999 reboot directed by Stephen Sommers (both also titled The Mummy), the latter of which really does highlight the body horror aspects of Imhotep's live burial, if not his subsequent supernatural existence.
See also: 12 Mummy Movies Worth Watching
Classic Films in Focus: THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)
