This time, Ardath Bey thinks he’s found a clue to the whereabouts of the lost grave of the princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. The stranger is something of an amateur Egyptologist himself, and though the customs of his land forbid him to disturb the ancient tombs, he is not above pointing a few white guys from England in the right direction now and then. All that changes, though, when a man named Ardath Bey (Boris Karloff) walks into Frank’s camp with a very promising artifact. As a matter of fact, the younger Whemple is not nearly so successful an Egyptologist as his old man, and a couple of dusty potsherds are all he has to show for an entire season of fieldwork.
Ten years later, Whemple’s son Frank (David Manners, from Dracula and The Black Cat) is following in his father’s footsteps. This has the not-unpredictable effect of bringing Imhotep’s mummy to life, and the crispy old priest immediately relieves the apprentice Egyptologist of both the scroll and his sanity, and then shambles off into the night, somehow avoiding the attention of the two older scholars.
Müller takes Egyptian magic very seriously, and he fully believes not only in the power of the curse, but also in that of Isis’s spell, a power which falls smack in the middle of the category “Things Which Man Was Not Meant to Know.” It’s really a moot point, though while Müller and Whemple argue out in front of Whemple’s headquarters in the field, the archaeologist’s young assistant impetuously opens up the cursed coffer, removes the Scroll of Thoth, and begins transcribing it, muttering its words aloud as he does so. The old scientist, like his younger and more skeptical colleague, believes the coffer contains the legendary Scroll of Thoth, on which was written the text of the spell that Isis used to raise Osiris from the dead. The coffer’s lid is inscribed with a curse, condemning anyone who opens it to madness and death, and Müller is adamant that Whemple heed the ancient warning, and bury the chest back in the sand where he found it. But the most interesting thing in the old tomb is a badly decayed cedar chest housing a large gold-plated coffer. Müller (Edward Van Sloan, of Dracula and Dracula’s Daughter), turns up evidence that Imhotep was interred alive.
Not only that, a cursory examination of the mummy by Whemple’s colleague, Dr. To begin with, his coffin was vandalized before the tomb was sealed, the hieroglyphs spelling out the incantations ensuring safe passage to the afterlife chiseled away. And if the state of his grave-goods is any indication, he did not die a popular man. Whemple has found the grave of Imhotep, a member of the priestly class who lived more than 3700 years ago. The Mummy’s script milks this sensational episode for all it’s worth, beginning with the discovery of another untouched tomb by an Egyptologist named Dr. You may recall that some of the men who excavated that ancient grave died soon thereafter under mysterious circumstances, giving rise to rumors of a generic “Pharaoh’s curse” lingering over all the burial grounds of ancient Egypt.
#The order the mummy movies 1932 movie
It was also possibly the very first US horror movie designed to cash in on a cultural fad from the world beyond Hollywood- in this case, the lingering afterglow of the Egypt-mania that swept the Western world in the wake of the 1922 discovery of King Tutankamen’s undisturbed tomb. The Mummy was among the first of these films. But suddenly, in 1932, American filmmakers began turning out horror movies whose screenplays were original stories in and of themselves. In fact, the only American horror film from this very early period that I can think of off the top of my head which was not based on some novel or play is the long-lost silent vampire flick London After Midnight. Hyde, The Cat and the Canary, The Lost World, The Phantom of the Opera- all were based on well-known stage plays or novels of more or less classic stature. Everyone knows the origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, but those are only the most obvious examples.
It isn’t a point that’s brought up very often, but most of the very oldest American horror movies had a literary or dramatic basis.
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