The occasion of my
first seeing a Mummy picture still remains a
significant event in my memory, although it took place over forty
years ago. When I was nine,
the neighborhood theater, the Rio, started running a so-called
"Spook Show" every Friday night, adding a horror film
or thriller to its regular double feature. My parents did let me
attend one of the early programs, the 1941 The Black Cat,
starring Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi accompanied by my
somewhat older cousin, who promptly took off to a more secluded
part of the auditorium for a rendezvous with her boyfriend. But
this was the last program I was destined to see for some time,
and the question of whether or not I was to be allowed to go to
the Friday night show quickly become a bone of contention at
home.
My parents had two objections, one of which, I realize in
retrospect, had some merit. In those days, juvenile crime had by
no means reached its present day proportions, yet gangs as well
as the tough guys called "rogues" by my classmates did
hang out at the Friday showings and the audience was in general a
fairly rough one. The other objection was a good deal less
persuasive--especially to a ten-year old. Like most respectable
middle-class parents, mine viewed horror films as little better
than pornography; protecting their child from this dangerous
stuff was a responsibility only slightly less incumbent upon them
than making sure he didn't fall into the hands of dope
dealers--who already did exist then in those remote bland,
Eisenhower years--or join the Communist Party. By contrast, the
father of a neighborhood buddy, a highly articulate,
self-educated electrician from Oklahoma--a connoisseur of horror
flicks who had seen Tod Browning's now lost London After
Midnight as a child and described it to me--dumped his kids
at the Rio every Friday before going out for night of two-fisted
drinking. How I envied my friend!
This opposition not only hardened my
resolve but invested horror films with the special aura that
surrounds any kind of forbidden pleasure. (Any similarity between
these events and the following discussion of the theme of tabooed
fantasy in Mummy
1 is
hardly coincidental.) It thus
came as a real surprise when, one Friday afternoon as we were
walking home together, my mother, under a false impression--that
I did nothing to correct--about my progress in liquidating my
endless math assignments in my miserable fifth grade class,
announced that that evening I could go the horror show. The movie
I saw was The Mummy's Ghost. In fact, this was not the
first horror film I had seen: apart from The Black Cat, I
had also managed to see
King Kong when it was revived in
1953 or so and shown at a Sunday matinee.
But my mother had
refused to let me go and see the double bill of Frankenstein and Dracula when it played on a Sunday and in my mind The
Mummy's Ghost would always rate as my first real horror film,
the first that featured one of the famous monsters. And in the
long interval between seeing the first and the second programs, I
had been increasing my monster literacy. Every Friday, the Rio
would put up a poster announcing next week's attraction, and I
would run down to see it as soon as I could get out of the house.
After school let out for the day, having memorized the names of the principal
actors and the director, I would spend hours after school in the
branch public library, poring over an old edition of The Motion
Picture Almanac, devouring everything I could find about
them. I thus did not come to The Mummy's Ghost completely
unprepared. I knew that this Lon Chaney was the son of the famous
silent star; that this picture was part of a cycle of Mummy
films; and that it, like most of the famous horror films, had
been made by Universal.
How thrilling for me was everything
associated with those Friday programs. The poster announcing the
next week's attraction had the allure of a sacred relic. Unlike
the posters for current releases from studios like MGM or
Paramount, which had the brightly colored look of magazine ads,
those for the Realart reissues of the old Universal horror
films--probably copied from the originals--were done in dark
shades of black, red, orange, blue, green, or magenta laid on in
a thick impasto. During the week, I would return every time I had
an opportunity to gaze at this bewitching object and try to
imagine from the art work what the plot of the film could be
like. (On the sly, at school I would even try to make my own
mini-posters with crayons and drawing paper, replete with all the
credits I had memorized.)
On the night of the showing, my
excitement steadily increased as I sat through the first feature, and then the second followed by an intermission that seemed interminable,
until the lights went down. First there was a cartoon, and then the
Realart logo, two film reels spelling out the name
"Realart" appeared on the screen. At that moment in my viewing career, that seemed to
me the most magic of all logos, only slightly rivaled by RKO's
radio tower atop the globe. Some day,I hope that a film student
will write a doctoral dissertation on the subject of old-time
studio logos, which were a good deal more than just commercial
insignias.
It is common today in film theory to make a
distinction between the diegetic--what belongs to the story and
its characters--and the non-diegetic--credits, music, etc. But
this distinction seems highly arbitrary to me. In the old days of
the studios, the first appearance of the logo was as much a part of the the
entire experience of watching the movie as the opening chords of
a symphony by Haydn or Mozart, serving to introduce the first
movement, are part of the entire work.
It was a few weeks before I made it back
again to the Friday night show, but I knew that I had gotten my
foot in the door. Soon I was able to go to nearly every week--in
addition to the Saturday and Sunday matinees--and I embarked upon
the ambitious project of trying to see all of the famous monster
cycles, a project in which I had unequal luck before the theatre
discontinued the programs.
Of the Dracula pictures, I was
only able to see the first film; of the Frankenstein cycle, I was able to catch the first four
movies--including what must have been an original nitrate print
of The Bride of Frankenstein, since it contained the beautiful old
Universal logo of the airplane circling the globe, which I had never previously seen--but neither Frankenstein
Meets the Wolfman nor The House of Frankenstein. I had
my best luck with the Mummy movies--of those, the only one I
missed was The Mummy's Hand, which never played at the
Friday night show.
However, since the films were shown out of
order, I actually saw the original Mummy last, after having seen
the later installments in the saga. While I was able to
reconstruct the sequence of events in the subsequent
productions--especially since most of them, like serials, began
by recapitulating the action of the preceding movie--I was
utterly perplexed by the Mummy 1. The
monster was not called Kharis but Imhotep; his girlfriend was
named Anck-es-en-Amon instead of Ananka; and he only appeared in
mummy wrappings at the very beginning of the movie.
What was
this? Although I was appropriately impressed with the scene in
which Imhotep comes back to life, I spent the rest of the time
trying to reconcile what was taking place with what I had seen in
the other Mummy movies. It
was only years later, when I was in college and watched the film
on television that I realized it is, of course, not only the best
of the series but one of the masterpieces of the horror film
genre in the early 1930's.
Strictly speaking, Mummy 1 is a combination of two popular genres of the
period: horror and the exotic. However, owing to the division of
labor between the studios, where one studio specialized in
certain genres and another in quite different ones, the
combination was not a common one. While Paramount was the main
producer of exotic films just as Universal that of horror
pictures, Universal hardly ventured into the exotic apart from Mummy 1--the opening scenes of Stuart Walker's The
Werewolf of London (1935), which take place in the Himalayas,
and the African sequences of Lambert Hillyer's The Invisible
Ray (1936) are among the exceptions.
Paramount made two outstanding pictures that blended the exotic with horror,
the enthralling Isle of Lost Souls (1933) and the
entertainingly sadistic Murders in the Zoo (1933), but apart from these
memorable exceptions, the studio only made a couple of horror films--Supernatural
(1933) directed by Vincent Halperin, and Stuart Heisler's The
Monster and the Girl (1941) are the titles that come to
mind--and they have big-city settings. Nevertheless, there is a
strong affinity between the two genres. The horror film deals
with unusual or improbable or even impossible experiences that
are as exotic in comparison to the experiences usually depicted
in commercial movies as are the settings of the exotic in
comparison to the settings of typical American productions. In that sense, the
traditional horror genre might be described as an example of the
implicit exotic, an exoticism more of spirit than of setting.
On the other hand, important differences
remain between the two genres. Thematically, the instinctual dominates the
horror genre just as desire dominates the exotic. In this way, however, the two genres stand in an
inverse relation to one another: in both genres, a prohibited
object--exemplified by the return to paradise in the exotic or by
the return of the dead to life in horror--occupies a central
place, but the emergence of this object still has a positive
significance in the exotic. In the exotic, the object is always
desirable, even if taboo. Not so in horror: the eruption of repressed desire on the screen has immediately
disastrous consequences, first of all insanity, for whoever comes
in touch with it.
Renfield (Dwight Frye), Count Dracula's first
on screen victim, becomes utterly depraved through contact with
the Count and ends up a patient in Dr. Seward's madhouse,
providing some of the most memorable scenes in the film.
Moreover, the film by no means exculpates Renfield: even if he is
ignorant of the Count's true purpose in calling him to
Transylvania, he still fails to heed the warnings he receives at
the inn and goes on to the castle--just as in a classic horror
story. Less obviously but far more culpable, Renfield's
subsequent readiness to make himself the vampire's instrument
shows how a will to be seduced, not simple weakness, must have
always existed within him. By contrast, Mina, unlike Renfield or
Lucy--who moons over the prospect of becoming Countess
Dracula--attempts to struggle against the vampire's power, as if
she were a swimmer fighting an undertow.
Even in Frankenstein, the
doctor apparently suffers a nervous breakdown after the creation
of the monster, an occurrence which has far-reaching effects upon
the subsequent development of the plot. Paralyzed by his
collapse, Frankenstein resists the suggestions of Doctor Waldman
(Edward van Sloan) to destroy the creature but he also fails to
intervene when Fritz (Dwight Frye) tortures it--with the result
that it not only grows stronger but quickly develops an
inveterate hatred of humankind. (In this way, the movie condenses
into a matter of hours events that stretch over several years in
Mary Shelley's novel.)
But the most memorable combination of the
themes of the Instinctual and Insanity, of course, takes place at
the very beginning of Mummy
1, when a young archaeologist,
Ralph Norton (Bramwell Fletcher), after deciphering the opening
hieroglyphics of The Scroll of Thoth inadvertently revives the
mummy Imhotep (Boris Karloff) and goes mad. The sequence makes
quite explicit the implicit premise of Dracula: the archaeologist who has been warned by the
occultist and scholar Professor Muller (Edward van Sloan) not to
open the casket which contains the scroll, violates the
prohibition and suffers the consequences. But is it just the
sight of the mummy restored to life which causes Norton to lose
his sanity?
In terms of the underlying psychological
causality, it is not quite accurate to say that Norton
inadvertently revives the mummy. To be sure, he had not
consciously foreseen this outcome of his action; however, the
conscious action, translating the text, has an unconscious
motivation which has little to do with furthering the progress of
Egyptology. The context not only underlines the significance of
breaking the taboo on reading the scroll but also gives it a
strongly erotic connotation when Norton jokes that perhaps
Imhotep himself had been buried alive for violating a sexual
prohibition: "Poor old fellow! Now what could you have done
to make them treat you like that? Maybe he got too gay with the
vestal virgins in the temple."
Moreover, as I argue in The Apotropaic Mummy, the symbolic implications of the mise
en scène
make it clear that the mummy is the phallus whose terrifying
erection Norton provokes by reading the beginning of the spell
from the Scroll of Thoth. But the masculine fantasy of an
unfailing, permanent erection, a plenitude of phallic power and
the ultimate defense against castration anxiety, is as forbidden
as it is impossible. And everything that Mummy 1 relates later about the history of Imhotep's crime
makes it clear that this fantasy must have motivated his
sacrilegious acts as well, since the object of his desire was a
doubly tabooed object: a sacred virgin of Isis and a corpse.
What
Norton sees, what drives him mad, is the realization of his own
desire--the desire to be the monstrous phallus that will
penetrate the female genitals symbolized by the box containing
the scroll--and the film shrewdly elides this moment by never
showing a face-to-face confrontation between the two, only
Norton's horrified reaction to what he sees. Transgressive desire and the
indefinite repetition of a culpable fantasy organize the scenario
at work behind the scenario of Mummy 1, although the film in a
certain way succeeds where Imhotep and Norton fail, by offering
the audience a highly camouflaged representation of this
fantasy--a representation which only lasts a brief duration in
the ongoing flux of images which make up the whole film.
In The Monster Show, David J. Skal
dismisses Mummy
1 as little more than a
spinoff from Dracula: "The picture is a good example of the kind of
creative conservatism the studio system fostered; virtually every
plot element as well as key performers (not to mention some props
and set decorations) were recycled from Dracula…."
However, the judgement seems a hasty one to me. It is certainly
easy to understand that Universal would borrow features from a
proven hit in order to improve the chances of a new release, but
the similarities end there. As in Frankenstein, in Dracula the dominant theme is that of the violent eruption
of instinctual forces, forces associated with natural predators
and the night. From
the very beginning, the film visually links the figure of the
vampire--itself a prototype of the predator--with nocturnal
images of vermin and spiders, not to mention the famous howling
of "the children of the night" on the soundtrack.
Moreover, the recurrent return of night signals a
potential threat to the inhabitants of the daylight world: the
repeated shots of the setting sun serve not only to give a
certain rhythm to the action but to signal the return to life of
the chthonian forces that have only been kept at bay, not
dispelled during the day. The world of Dracula is completely inverted, one in which most of the
action takes place at an insane asylum at night. Yet in the terms
of the film, Dr. Seward's sanitarium--the symbolic embodiment of
the irrational powers within the human mind that correspond to
the destructive natural ones without--becomes a fortress that
must be guarded just as if it were a castle in the middle ages
waiting for an attack by barbarian hordes, kept in a state of
permanent wakefulness by the electric lamps which appear as props
in so many scenes in the movie and point up the artificial
fragility of civilization.
Continue
Metamorphoses
of the Mummy
The
Mummy (1999)
Home
E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net