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: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)

On paper, Universal's 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue sounds terrific; it adapts a chilling story from Edgar Allan Poe, stars Bela Lugosi, and offers Expressionist cinematography by Karl Freund, complete with all the lurid sensibility that Pre-Code horror can provide. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't work as well in practice, especially for viewers who know and appreciate Poe's original tale. While Lugosi is truly terrifying as the menacing Dr. Mirakle, the picture suffers from a weak leading man, creaky monster effects, and too much deviation from its source material that also leads it into some extremely thorny issues regarding racist tropes. Fans of Pre-Code horror and/or Edgar Allan Poe might be willing to forgive some of its failings for Lugosi's sake, but overall this is a far less successful picture than stand-out classics like The Black Cat (1934) and Roger Corman's Poe cycle.

Lugosi plays a character who doesn't exist in the original tale, a mad scientist obsessed with proving evolution by injecting the blood of his captive gorilla into beautiful young women. His experiments have inevitably proved fatal to the women, but Dr. Mirakle blames the failure on the women's "impure" blood instead of his own mad theory. When the gorilla takes a particular shine to lovely Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox), Dr. Mirakle plans to kidnap her as his next test subject, but Camille's suitor, Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames), rightly suspects the doctor of having sinister motives.  

Deviations from the source create more problems than opportunities here. Poe's tale focuses on the murders of two women and the clever detective, C. Auguste Dupin, an important forerunner of and inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Weirdly, the Universal picture isn't a detective mystery at all, even though Poe's story is widely considered the original example of the genre. Instead, Leon Ames plays a medical student named Pierre Dupin, who already knows who did it when his sweetheart, Camille, disappears and her mother's corpse is found stuffed up a chimney. Ames is not particularly effective in this role, and the problems are all the more noticeable because Pierre is such a ho-hum hero compared to Poe's brilliant detective. The locked room mystery of the short story gives way to a bizarre mad scientist plot that draws on deeply racist imagery about gorillas as substitutes for Black men and their supposed desire for White women. Mirakle's experiment is a thinly veiled take on miscegenation that results in the deaths of the women whose blood has been "contaminated" by that of the gorilla. None of this comes from Poe's story, in which a pet orangutan gets loose from its owner and cannot really be held responsible for its actions. On a more practical level, the gorilla who replaces Poe's orangutan is very obviously a guy in a bad gorilla suit, except during closeups, when he transforms into an actual chimpanzee. It's a jarring and absurd switch every time it happens, but the movie does it repeatedly, even recycling the same shot of the chimp pressing against the bars of its cage.

All of these problems detract from a fine performance by Lugosi, who certainly knows how to leer menacingly at an audience and deliver a chilling monologue. His face is by far the scariest thing in the movie; its signature feature is an impressive monobrow that sprouts over his trademark burning gaze. The Expressionist influence reaches it high point during the experiment scene with Lugosi's only onscreen victim, a kidnapped streetwalker played by Arlene Francis. Tied to a huge wooden X like a martyr or a witch at the stake, Mirakle's victim exposes a lot of pretty flesh and casts a striking shadow on the laboratory wall. When she dies as a result of his injections, he seems surprised, even though he has her positioned over a convenient trapdoor that drops her body directly into the river. These effective scenes connect Murders in the Rue Morgue to German Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) as well as better Universal horrors like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932), reflecting the influence of cinematographer and occasional director Karl Freund after his relocation from Germany to Hollywood.

Robert Florey, who directed Murders in the Rue Morgue, eventually moved to television work, but before that he directed the 1946 horror, The Beast with Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. Karl Freund also directed Lorre in another Expressionist horror feature, Mad Love (1935), and I would recommend either Lorre picture over Murders in the Rue Morgue. Leon Ames is much more in his element in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), A Date with Judy (1948), and Little Women (1949); Murders in the Rue Morgue was one of his first screen appearances, and it's not really his fault that he's miscast. Poe adaptations and loose retellings abound, with the most recent being the 2023 Netflix miniseries, The Fall of the House of Usher. Roger Corman, however, still reigns as the king of Poe on film, with Vincent Price as his star of choice. Start with Corman's House of Usher (1960) and proceed to Tales of Terror (1962) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) for a sample of their best efforts.

Classic Films in Focus: MAD LOVE (1935)

Also known as The Hands of Orlac, Mad Love (1935) offers an unusually literate and even lyrical take on the mad doctor motif, a staple of the classic horror genre. This MGM production from director Karl Freund features well-known horror stars like Peter Lorre and Colin Clive in the leading roles, and it retains its creepy charms thanks to their performances and a number of startling flourishes that modern viewers will still find unsettling more than 75 years after the film's original release. Mad Love is an especially good place to enjoy the peculiar talents of genre icon Peter Lorre, here cast as a strangely sympathetic monster whose worst actions stem from passionate but unrequited love.

Lorre plays the brilliant but unhinged surgeon Dr. Gogol, who spends his days curing lame children and his evenings obsessing over the beautiful actress, Yvonne (Frances Drake). When Yvonne's pianist husband, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), loses his hands in a train wreck, Gogol secretly replaces them with the hands of Rollo (Edward Brophy), a knife-throwing murderer recently sent to the guillotine. Stephen soon becomes disturbed by his hands' predilection for hurling sharp objects, while Gogol hatches a plan to drive Stephen mad in order to claim Yvonne for himself.

In addition to his bald head and unnerving expression, Dr. Gogol possesses a curiously poetic soul. He seizes upon a wax figure of Yvonne as his personal Galatea, hoping that his love for the original will make him another Pygmalion. Later, having decided with Oscar Wilde that "each man kills the thing he loves," Gogol tries to strangle Yvonne with her own hair while reciting "Porphyria's Lover," the Robert Browning poem about a similarly homicidal lover. The literary connections underline Gogol's dual identity as a man who might give life or take it away. We see these opposing sides of him in various scenes throughout the film, as he operates on crippled children but also compulsively attends executions. Because he has the capacity to do good and appreciate beauty, Gogol demands our sympathy even as we recoil from his madness. He evokes the same conflicted response in Yvonne, a dangerous reaction given its results.

Colin Clive might seem an odd choice for the romantic lead, for he is not at all handsome, but there's great poetic justice in having the former Dr. Frankenstein fitted with a dead man's hands. The dead man, Rollo, is himself a character from Tod Browning's 1932 film, Freaks, with Edward Brophy reprising the role. Frances Drake makes a lovely heroine, especially in her costume from the theater of horrors where she performs, although some of her transitions with the wax figure can be jarring.

Don't miss the scene in which Gogol impersonates a resurrected Rollo, definitely one of Lorre's scariest and most hysterical performance highlights. Karl Freund is best remembered today as the director of The Mummy (1932). For more of Peter Lorre's villains, see M (1931), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Colin Clive plays Dr. Frankenstein in both the 1931 film and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but you'll also find him in Christopher Strong (1933) and Jane Eyre (1934).