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The Mummy [Karl Freund, 1932]
Boris Karloff as Ardath Bay, the name the Mummy Imhotep uses in modern day Cairo.
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Las Luchadoras Contra La Momia [Rafael Portillo, 1957]
Popoca the Aztec warrior mummy attacks a tomb robber in La Maldición de la Momia Azteca.
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The Mummy [Karl Freund, 1932]
Boris Karloff as Imhotep the Mummy reaches for the sacred Scroll of Thoth; Bramwell Fletcher watches in terror.
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The Mummy [Terence Fisher, 1959]
Christopher Lee as Kharis The Mummy, after he’s been shot, but before he’s impaled.
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The Mummy [Karl Freund, 1932]
Boris Karloff with Zita Johann in a trance as the reincarnation of his lost love, the ancient Princess Ankh-es-en-amon.
“My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods. No man ever suffered as I did for you!”
Imhotep (Boris Karloff), The Mummy
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The Mummy [Stephen Sommers, 1999]
In this Universal Studios’ remake “Ardeth Bay” (Oded Fehr) is a separate character from the Mummy. The Mummy, High Priest Imhotep, was played by Arnold Vosloo and a lot of very expensive CG done by the folks at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic.
“Death is only the beginning”
Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), The Mummy
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The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor [Rob Cohen, 2008]
Brendan Fraser’s character Rick O’Connell’s third Mummy adventure, this time in China. Jet Li’s eyes are staring out of the Mummy face of Chinese Emperor Han.
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Bubba Ho-tep [Don Coscarelli, 2002]
The true story of what really happened to Elvis Presley. The Mummy was played by Bob Ivy. Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as President John F. Kennedy are both outstanding.
IN CONVERSATION
Guillermo Del Toro
“Horror films are a rollercoaster of the soul.”
Guillermo Del Toro wearing the hand of Hellboy on the set of Hellboy II: The Golden Army[2008].
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JL: Guillermo, how would you define a monster?
GDT: A freak of nature. Something that is unnatural. I think the difference between a monster and every other thing in horror is that the monster is a biological entity, it’s alive.
JL: What about a ghost?
GDT: A ghost is not a monster.
JL: What about a monster’s ghost? What about a ghost that kills people? You’re saying monsters have to be physical beings?
GDT: Or beings that come out of nature. They can be related to physics, like the Monster from the Id [in Forbidden Planet, Fred M. Wilcox 1956]. The Id is a monster.
JL: What about Frankenstein’s Monster?
GDT: Yes, Frankenstein created a monster.
JL: What about zombies?
GDT: Zombies would be monsters. Monsters have to be physical in some way.
JL: So, would Sissy Spacek in Carrie[Brian De Palma, 1976] be a monster?
GDT: I don’t think Carrieis a monster movie; it’s a horror movie.
JL: Aha! Are there any monsters in David Cronenberg’s movies?
GDT: The only Cronenberg monster movies are The Fly[1986] and The Brood[1979], because all the little freaks are monsters. And, to some extent, Rabid[1977], because the Marilyn Chambers character becomes a vampire monster. A monster is anything that can be deformed, that can be altered, but has some root in nature. Godzilla is a monster, the Gill-Man [from Creature From the Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold, 1954] is a monster.
JL: What about monsters from space?
GDT: They can be monsters, as long as they are physical entities.
JL: Can a robot be a monster?
GDT: I think you can have a monster robot, or a robot monster.
JL: You’re like me, Del Toro, you like monsters.
GDT: Yeah, I love them.
JL: You grew up in Guadalajara. What were your favorite monsters, as a child?
GDT: Frankenstein’s creature—the Boris Karloff version [1931]—The Gill-Man, and the monster in Alien[Ridley Scott, 1979]. In fact, these are still my favorite monsters.
JL: Why do you love the Alien monster?
GDT: Because it broke every rule about how to shoot a man in a suit. The suit was designed to break the silhouette of the man inside, and Ridley Scott had him walking on all fours, or backwards.
JL: I love that monster, but I didn’t like that metallic tongue with teeth thing that came out of its mouth. It just didn’t feel organic to me.
GDT: I loved that! Anyway, those are my first three. Then would come the werewolf in The Wolf Man[George Waggner,1941]. I used to dress up as Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man when I was a kid. I’d go to school dressed as a wolf man! I had the Wolf Man mask, but I didn’t buy the Don Post werewolf hands. I bought the gorilla hands, because they were better-looking. So I went with the gorilla hands, gorilla feet, and the werewolf mask to my secondary school.
JL: What did your parents think of that?
GDT: They let me do it! And I bought the cheap artificial hair and would put it under my checkered shirt, and the other kids beat the crap out of me! (Laughs.)
JL: What is it that you find most intriguing about werewolves?
GDT: The blackout is the most interesting part.
JL: You mean that the werewolf has no memory of what happened the night before when he changes back to being human?
GDT: Yeah, like David waking up in the zoo pen in An American Werewolf in London[John Landis, 1981]. And how incredibly earnestly Lon Chaney, Jr. suffered in The Wolf Man.
JL: Curt Siodmak (screenwriter of The Wolf Man) was the first to push the idea of the werewolf as a victim.
GDT: And one of the great sufferers ever is Lon Chaney, Jr. You really wanted to tell him that everything was going to be all right. What attracts me most about the Wolf Man myth was the sympathetic nature of the character.
JL: When Dr. Jekyll drinks his formula, he becomes Mr. Hyde, who is a manifestation of Jekyll’s lust and bad thoughts. Whereas the werewolf is Other, it’s completely not you, it’s like you become this separate beast.
GDT: The Wolf Man becomes a werewolf in spite of himself.
JL: The werewolves in The Wolf Manand American Werewolfare victims; Frankenstein’s monster is a victim…
GDT: The Gill-Man in some ways.
JL: He’s a total victim!