When this author was a wee lad, the sight of the rotting, bandage-wrapped remains of a mummy named Kharis, in a rerun of an old 1940 movie called The Mummy’s Hand, disquieted me enough to turn off the movie and go right to bed. The mummy, which first became a horror staple as part of the first wave of Universal monster movies back in the 1930s, seems to have that effect on a lot of people ever since the opening of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 — along with a popular fascination with the so-called “curse of the pharaohs” — led Universal Studios to produce The Mummy in 1932.
Directed by Karl Freund (previously the cinematographer on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Tod Browning’s Dracula), the film starred the legendary Boris Karloff as Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian high priest who is mummified and buried alive after trying to use a sacred spell to revive his dead lover, Princess Anck-es-en-Amon. When Imhotep himself is accidentally revived thousands of years later, he disguises himself as a historian named Ardath Bey and enacts a plan to murder and resurrect a woman named Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johann), who is the reincarnation of his lost love.
