CMBA Fall Blogathon 2025: Horrors of the Colonized Body and Soul in THE MUMMY (1932)

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.

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. 

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)

Classic Films in Focus: DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936)

Dracula's Daughter (1936) acts as a direct sequel to the 1931 Dracula, picking up mere moments after the earlier film ends. This time, however, the narrative focuses on Van Helsing (mysteriously altered to Von Helsing) and a new representative of the undead, the Countess Maria Zeleska, played with unearthly poise by Gloria Holden. Although its fame pales in comparison with that of the Lugosi picture, Dracula's Daughter offers an intriguing vision of feminine monstrosity, and it encourages us to pity the tragic fate of a beautiful woman enslaved by uncontrollable desires.

Edward Van Sloan reprises his role as the good doctor, who finds himself charged with murder for the deaths of both Renfield and Count Dracula. Unable to convince Scotland Yard of his sanity and his reasons for killing the Count, Von Helsing enlists the aid of his former student, Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger).  Meanwhile, Countess Zeleska arrives in London and begins preying on victims of her own with the help of her servant, Sandor (Irving Pichel). Jeffrey attracts the vampire's attention because she hopes that his skill as a psychiatrist can free her from her bloodthirsty curse, but her interest arouses the jealousy of Jeffrey's assistant, Janet (Marguerite Churchill), and of Sandor, as well.

Von Helsing provides a link between the two stories, and Edward Van Sloan is once again very convincing as the wise vampire hunter, but Dracula's Daughter really concerns itself much more with its title character and other new arrivals on the scene. Because of the earlier film, it takes less time to explain the back story and the habits of the vampire, so the movie is able to pack all of its action into a tight running time of just 71 minutes. Most of that focuses on the Countess' growing obsession with Dr. Garth, who is already engaged in a prickly, contentious courtship with his assistant, but the movie takes time out for a few attack scenes and a poignant funeral pyre for Dracula. We see visual and thematic links to the earlier story, as well, with the Countess rising from her coffin and avoiding mirrors and crosses.

All of the actors acquit themselves well, but the movie really belongs to Gloria Holden, whose exotic beauty commands the screen in frequent closeups lit from beneath to emphasize her unnatural nature. Unlike Dracula, the Countess longs for a normal life and yearns to escape her monstrous urges. She hopes at first that her father's death will liberate her, but a test of her will soon shows that her appetite for human blood remains unabated. She cannot help being what she is, but the darkness inside her is too powerful to resist. The camera registers the subtle struggle of her conflicting urges in shots that often show only the Countess' eyes, in which Sandor claims he can see death. Throughout the picture, she is a complex character, never reduced to mere monstrosity. Like the goddess Kali, she embodies contradictions. The Countess is an artist who creates and a killer who destroys. She is a woman who yearns for love and a predator who must devour. Holden invests her with grace and a sense of tragic grandeur, making us wish it that was not already a century too late to save her from her fate.

Be sure to note Hedda Hopper in a small role as Lady Esme and lovely Nan Grey as Lili. Lambert Hillyer, who directed Dracula's Daughter, was a silent film veteran who also made The Invisible Ray (1936) and dozens of B Westerns. Gloria Holden appears in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Corsican Brothers (1941), and The Eddy Duchin Story (1956). Look for Otto Kruger in Treasure Island (1934), Saboteur (1942), and High Noon (1952). Although he's quite menacing as Sandor, Irving Pichel is probably better remembered today as the director of more than 30 pictures, including The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and Destination Moon (1950).

Classic Films in Focus: FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

Let's be clear about one thing: Frankenstein is the man, not the monster. Although films like the 1931 Frankenstein have irreparably muddled the original story in the public imagination, Mary Shelley's novel, way back in 1818, was about human vanity, the perils of scientific progress, and spectacularly irresponsible paternity. Her protagonist was the over-reaching scientist, the man who thought he could be God, and that is why the novel bears his name. We forget much of this when we watch classic films based on the story because the monster becomes the whole show, and the movie monster is a far different creature from the one that Shelley imagined. Despite its gross infidelity to its source material, director James Whale's Frankenstein has become a high point in the history of horror, a watershed event on whose existence countless subsequent films depend. If you want to understand the visual and thematic vocabulary of classic horror, you have to start here.

The film's version of the story owes much of its material to Peggy Webling's 1927 dramatic adaptation. We get Henry Frankenstein, not Victor, and the scene is modern day. Henry (Colin Clive) wastes no time in getting his gruesome creation up and lumbering, although his friends try very hard to talk him out of it. Lovely Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) waits to marry him, even though Henry's best friend (John Boles), who, oddly enough, is named Victor, clearly would be glad to step in as the groom. Henry's mentor is Dr. Waldman, played with typical gravitas by Edward Van Sloan; the good doctor tries to talk Henry out of the experiment, but he seems reluctantly fascinated by the whole thing himself, so his entreaties have little effect. Eventually, Boris Karloff's monster takes over, and the rest of the picture belongs to him. The other characters are just the grist for his mill, so to speak (it's a bad joke, and you'll get it once you see the ending).

Given these deviations from its source material, what is it about Frankenstein that makes the movie so great? Whale's direction counts for a lot; he takes this whole enterprise seriously in terms of art, and the scenes he creates get referenced and remade in later films with justified reverence. Boris Karloff invests the monster with tragic grandeur; there is pathos in his expression, and a terrible innocence in the way that he flings little Maria to her death. How could he know better? Newly born yet rejected by his creator, the monster's crimes have more to do with a childlike ignorance of right and wrong than with the kind of brain that rests inside his huge, bolted head. Dwight Frye makes his own horror icon with cringing, sadistic Fritz, who will become the model for so many Igors after him. It might have helped if they had stuck with the original ending and killed off Henry; that climactic fall certainly looks fatal, and poetic justice demands punishment for such hubris.

Over time, these elements become the stuff of comedy and parody, but in 1931 it isn't funny yet. In fact, the movie opens with a warning, delivered with just a wry smirk by Edward Van Sloan, who lets the audience know what it's in for. Looking back at Frankenstein as we do, through the layers of sequels, spoofs, and revisions, such a warning hardly seems necessary. Karloff's craggy, scarred face is as familiar to us as an old friend, but what was it like to see him for the first time? There he is in the film, backing through the door, the actor's name left a blank in the opening credits, a mystery and a horror. When the heavy brow, the leaden eyes, and the poor, patchwork features are revealed at last, we are meant to shudder with a deep sense of dread. The dead thing lives, and man has usurped the very throne of God. In the age of plastic surgery, we ought to understand that horror more.

Karloff would return to the role of the monster in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939), while Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Glenn Strange would take the character on in later classic films. Here's a bit of mind-bending trivia along those lines: in Casino Royale (1967) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), the actor in the monster role would be David Prowse, better known for playing that other monstrous walking corpse, the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, Darth Vader. Don't think George Lucas saw the similarities? Watch Whale's Frankenstein, and then go watch the ending of Revenge of the Sith (2005).

For more from James Whale, see The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Karloff also stars in The Mummy (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and several Mr. Wong films, although I especially like him in Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946). Edward Van Sloan is best remembered as Van Helsing in Dracula (1931), a role he reprised in Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Look for Colin Clive as Rochester in the 1934 adaptation of Jane Eyre and in movies like Christopher Strong (1933) and Mad Love (1935). Clive’s death in 1937 cut short his film career while he was still in his thirties.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.