Lee's Mummy

I DVR’d a couple of those Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee Hammer horror flicks that TCM has been showing this month. I remember, in a vague sort of way, watching these as a boy in the 70s. My local ABC affiliate in New York, channel 7, would show a movie every day at 4:30, and these would follow a weekly theme. Invariably, a Hammer horror week would surface every year around Halloween.

As a boy it was coded in my DNA to be fascinated with all things horror – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy. I also recall quite fondly watching the black-and-white Universal films of the 30s and 40s featuring these creatures. But it was the Hammer flicks that always left me a tad uneasy. Perhaps it was Technicolor richness of the films, in which blood was always a bright red. Perhaps it was the gaunt and skeletal acting duo of Cushing and Lee. Whatever the reason, I hadn’t watched these movies in over three decades, so I decided to record a bunch of them this month.

Last night I watched The Mummy (1959). I learned a couple of things. First and foremost, as a victim of both early MTV and modern movie editing techniques, I am desensitized to violence. Though regarded as pushing the limits for a 1959 film, The Mummy doesn’t show any onscreen deaths. There are a couple of successful and not-too-successful strangulations, some blasts from a shotgun, but not much of that rich red blood I somewhat anxiously remembered.

Compare this with the Brendan Fraser remake 40 years later. Over-the-top violence, gruesome fates lustfully portrayed for our eyes, nonstop and often tiresome action sequences. Hammer’s Mummy is like reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV while 1999’s is like reading the comic book – excuse me, graphic novel – of the English king’s exploits. But my eyelids did droop during certain long stretches of exposition and padding as I would often contemplate the phony sets or the hammy acting of the extras.

But what makes Hammer’s Mummy better than its remake – or it’s predecessor starring Boris Karloff two decades earlier, if I may be as bold to say so – is Christopher Lee’s mummy. What a nightmare, especially for an enthusiastic boy with an overactive imagination! The most chilling scene, easily, is when the Mummy arises from the bog, a golem of decayed bandages, rotted flesh, and dripping mud and muck. You can almost smell the damned thing as it rises to do it’s master’s unholy bidding. When it pays a vengeful visit to Cushing’s father, trapped in an insane asylum, chills ran up and down my arms.



And its eyes! Twice the film closes in on Lee’s eyes, as his character, Kharis, caught in an act of perceived desecration, is entombed alive in the crypt of the Princess, his love. Sheer panic and dread, terror and desperate resignation. So much more emotion glimpsed in those few seconds than all of Kharis’s agonies at his testosterone-fueled gruesome punishment in the Fraser remake. Which is why, I guess, you know the name Christopher Lee and not the name of that other actor who played his character in the remake.

As a side note, I absolutely love the English culture’s stress on manners and social protocol. It’s like what I read in James Clavell’s Shogun, only minus the plethora of random beheadings over social faux pas. The verbal interplay and the jousting subtext beneath it, when Peter Cushing pays a welcoming call to his “neighbor,” Mehemet Bey, the Egyptian who is coordinating the Mummy’s murderous rampage, is screenwriting – and acting – par excellence. Next to the bog scenes, it probably held my interest most.

I liked it. I did.