Men We Love: Boris Karloff

The Mummy (1932)

The Mummy is the third great Universal horror film of the 1930's, after Dracula and Frankenstein, and the only one that does not have a literary source. It was conceived as a sort of collage of successful elements from other films--Boris Karloff's charismatic Frankenstein pasted on top of most of the plot of Dracula, with an Egyptian setting to capitalize on the world-wide craze for all things Egyptian that followed the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Although the elements of the plot were thrown together purely based on what the producers thought would sell tickets, the end result is something much greater than the sum of its parts. In particular, the resemblance to Dracula, though remarkable on the surface, does not touch the story's substance. While in Dracula triumph is found through human ingenuity, The Mummy is a fatalistic passion play in which the humans are merely spectators in the world of the gods.