‘The Mummy’ 25 Years Later: A Fan’s Love Letter
I love The Mummy, and a huge part of why I love movies is because I love The Mummy. Figuring that love out is an exercise worth enduring. Ask yourself not what the best movie is, nor your favorite, but instead the movie that made you fall in love with movies. I can think of two. Peter Jackson’s King Kong (I saw it three times over Winter Break ’05) and Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy. Cinema lays claim to our world, and as children, the spectacle is a gateway to cinema as a technology of vision.
I’d read that phrase years ago in graduate school. Movies are data, but it’s data, it’s stuff, with meaning. What used to be cellulose nitrate before, commonly cellulose acetate with a coating of silver salts now. It’s not the material, but the process; the vision. The Mummy has a vision. It may not reconcile with the praxis of classic cinema, of auteur theory, but for me—and many others—it’s one of the most important movies ever made.
The Mummy has the most remarkably unremarkable origins. The Universal Monsters were remunerative, even into the 1980s, and while classic monsters graced the silver screen, even if not strictly adapted from the old canon (think An American Werewolf in London or Fright Night) there were no mummies. Executives wanted mummies. The inceptive take on Karl Freund’s 1932 classic was more akin to the horror reboots of today. Low-budget schlock with a familiar IP, popular enough to guarantee an audience, cheap enough to guarantee a profit.
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George A. Romero wrote a treatment and was at one point attached to direct. Clive Barker, after the success of Hellraiser, was also tapped. Mick Garris wrote a screenplay that allegedly saw an art museum in Beverly Hills make the mistake of rebuilding an ancient Egyptian tomb. Barker and Garris would both leave the project and return in the mid-1990s, but the failure of city-bound pig Babe mandated a hit. That’s when Stephen Sommers arrived. Thank that urban-bound pig.
His pitch eschewed the more conventional horror elements for something, while still, scary, also swashbuckling and romantic. An action-adventure period piece. Universal liked it, upping the original $10 million budget to something bigger. The final project reportedly cost $80 million.
Anyone in the business of making movies knows even the most esteemed projects hit their share of hurdles. Long-gestating developments especially iterate upon themselves as the years roll on. Moviemaking isn’t quick, and the slightest delay in production risks shifting audience (and executive) sensibilities. A sexy, sultry, violent Mummy might have made sense in 1990. No dice in 1999.
The rest, of course, is sensational, motion picture history (at least to some of us). The Mummy is the apotheosis of yesterday’s blockbusters. It was a globe-trotting adventure with the expectedly stellar tentpole effects that remain a commonality among today’s biggest releases. The rest of its production, like the central Book of the Dead, remain artifacts of a bygone era.
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Today’s biggest releases capitalize on dwindling star power, a desperate attempt to reclaim the Golden Age’s ideals, a time when names alone could sell a movie. This demurral toward a changing cinematic landscape accounts for ballooning budgets and impossibly expensive movies. Consider Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny costing anywhere between $295 and $387 million. Think of Marvel. Think of any Netflix fake movie with an exorbitant budget whose largest expenditure is a 2003 pop star with just enough clout to guarantee a weekend of watches.
The Mummy had Brendan Fraser, a burgeoning star after George of the Jungle, but it also had Rachel Weisz, a relative unknown. The Mummy accounts for her international breakout. John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, and Patricia Velásquez co-starred, similarly small names who found success in the hidden city of Hamunaptra.
Even Fraser, undoubtedly the biggest name, springboarded that success into a series of early-to-mid aughts blockbusters, some cute (Journey to the Center of the Earth), some best forgotten (Inkheart). Which is to say, The Mummy wanted to be an adventure, putting story before star power like the best of the nineties’ biggest releases.
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Then, of course, there’s the genre bonafides. Today’s horror landscape is markedly different than the landscape 25 years ago. We are in a Golden Age of horror all its own, but that horror is often small and intimate. Legacy sequels and remakes might warrant a little more, but even the most successful among them (Evil Dead Rise, Scream VI) cap out in the mid-budget range. The former titles had $15 and $33 million budgets respectively. And sure, The Mummy isn’t straight horror, balancing its more intense thrills with earnest humor and swoon-worthy romance—later on, we’ll arrive at some fan reactions, and you likely won’t be shocked to hear how many people did and still do crush on Rick and Evelyn—but when it tilts into its lineage, it delivers in spades. Let’s talk about it.
There’s the innate claustrophobia of the hidden crypts and tombs. In those moments, Sommers frames the shots not like an action movie, but like Freund’s original. It’s oppressive, shadowy, and blocking puts characters at risk from unseen threats. Twice are characters mauled from the inside out by flesh-eating scarabs in crunchy, gooey set-pieces that push the boundaries of PG-13. Central antagonist Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) skulks about like a slasher villain, Egypt’s answer to Jason Voorhees. As he regenerates his power, he offs the poor supporting cast in increasingly gruesome ways, cutting out eyes and sucking souls clean. It’s a horror that the 2017 failed reboot never once came close to capturing.
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That aforementioned humor, too, works considerably better than most of its modern blockbuster ilk. For me, the bottom of the contrived humor chasm arrived with the releases of both Scream VI, mentioned previously, and Jurassic World: Dominion. Both were 90s classics that managed remarkable humor alongside their classic genre scares. Their 2020s releases, conversely, were at odds, disparate genres waging war until both were left weakened by the conflict.
It’s a trend I’ve spotlighted in several pieces before, the contemporary desire to undermine one’s own sincerity. In a digital age—a meme age, really—there’s an undercurrent of detachment from media, and while the methods of distribution have changed (e.g. streaming, premium video-on-demand), so too have audience attitudes. It’s CinemaSins on a larger scale, a nascent yet growing resistance to taking anything too seriously. So, preemptively, filmmakers will get themselves in on the joke, winking and nodding—see how stupid all this is—before the audience can do it first.
Motion pictures, at their core, need to believe in themselves before an audience can. Yes, The Mummy is full of silly stuff. One climactic scene concludes with Rick throwing a cat at Imhotep. Yet, a few scenes later, there’s a terrifying car chase through Cairo as an army of slaves emerges to hunt down Rick and his gang. One doesn’t negate the other, though the inverse is too often incentivized in today’s filmmaking market.
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It’s a large part of why, despite desires for a legacy sequel, I’m not sure The Mummy needs one. Both 2017’s reboot and 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor illustrated the best they could that the 1999 original was inimitable. The machinations of 1990s Hollywood cannot be artificially reproduced, no matter how hard anyone tries, and a new Mummy wouldn’t just unequivocally feel different—it would feel worse.
And The Mummy doesn’t deserve that. For a long while, I thought it was my movie. A key part of childhood that belonged only to me. Then I met my partner, and it was one of the first things we talked about. “What are you doing?”/ “Watching The Mummy. You?”/“!!!!!!” The movie, in his own words, made him bisexual.
And I wanted to hear from others. Who else loved The Mummy? What did it mean to different audiences of different ages and different generations? Like I was searching for a hidden city, it was my quest to find out.
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Michael Brandon Wright, whom I recently had the pleasure of chatting with about his Halloween fan film, shared,
“It didn’t introduce me to horror in general, but it did as far as going to the theater for horror, that and The Sixth Sense that my parents took me to for some reason. That movie terrified me. I had hands on my face, I remember. The Mummy was a movie that stuck with me as a kid. I was about seven when it came out, so I wasn’t exactly going to horror movies, but seeing a really fun and well-made blockbuster that was horror-based as a kid made that movie stick with me. And I certainly had a crush on Rachel Weisz, still do……I had a man crush on Brendan Fraser. He was perfect casting, funny and captivating, ‘Goodbye Beni’… so many great lines and character exchanges.”
I’ve been more enmeshed in just how instrumental the movie was to so many people, especially horror fans. We talked this way, that way, every way about gateway horror, and while it’s no doubt generational, I’d reckon The Mummy is it for millennials. It was big, it was scary, and it was popular. Almost everyone has seen it. It’s no wonder so many fans cling to it years later, much as I do, as the pinnacle of what moviegoing in the last century not only looked like but felt like.
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That feeling is why I love movies. It’s also why T.W. Burgess, author of Mister Howl, loves movies. He wrote,
“Looking back, it’s now evident just how important The Mummy was in doing something that people have been trying to emulate ever since. Throwing you into a swashbuckling, thrill ride akin to watching those original Universal monster movies for the first time whilst relating a legendary horror story. It somehow perfectly balances being an ideal gateway horror for younger viewers whilst still never holding back on the scares (the bugs under the skin and sarcophagus deaths got SUCH a reaction in the cinema).”
I additionally tweeted out a prompt, wanting to hear from other users online. You can check out the entire thread here. It’s replete with love, lore, and enduring admiration for The Mummy.
A common occurrence, previewed above, is just how damn hot so many audience members found the two leads. Shane Anderson was kind enough to put it this way:
“I grew up in the cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses where they heavily restrict what you watch. Nothing remotely supernatural or potentially inviting the devil into your house etc. (the usual garbage). This was the first Supernatural, horror-tinted film I saw when we left the cult and it changed my DNA as a storyteller. Later I’d realize I was also crushing HARD on Fraser and his delicious forearms.”
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It’s a tender story about the power of spectacle to broaden one’s horizons, and a story about the power of Fraser’s forearms to change the trajectory of one’s life. We’ve all been there. Matt Konopka (@KillerCritics), has been there too. A regular contributor for the site, Matt was kind enough to share his thoughts on The Mummy with me, sharing the following with me:
“When I was a kid, I rarely did birthday parties. To celebrate my annual trip around the world, my family and friends would instead go to the movies to see whatever had caught my interest at the time. In May of 1999, that film was Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy. Not even thirteen yet, I could hardly process just how significant the filmmaker’s interpretation of Universal’s classic horror story would become, but that didn’t stop my pre-teen brain from recognizing that I was witnessing something special. What I watched on that warm, spring day was what I now consider to be one of the last, great gasps of the blockbuster entertainment of the 90s.”
In virtually every respect, The Mummy is a perfect film. When we go to the movies, we look for a chance to escape our mundane reality and foray into a world not always unlike our own but full of excitement. Sommers’ The Mummy gave filmgoers everything they could possibly ask for. Chills. Thrills. Romance and laughter and even a little sadness…The Mummy has it all.
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A combination of the family adventure that made films like Indiana Jones or Star Wars so popular, and the gothic horror of Universal’s monster movies that to this day still inspire wide-eyed gasps and skin-prickling terror, Sommers’ film delivers on the very best of what movies can be. Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell and Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn whisk us away to a magical place where death is not final and love lasts for eternity, where sandstorms come alive and a little determination can overcome the most formidable of power.
I’m aware that some of my view on The Mummy has to do with nostalgia, but I nevertheless view that era of mid-big budget horror through rose-colored spectacles, hoping to see studios return to trusting horror and its fans with blockbuster adventures within the genre meant to be seen on the big screen. What Sommers achieved with The Mummy, a sense of jaw-dropping spectacle that somehow never overshadows but rather serves the small character moments that make Rick and Evelyn so charismatic and memorable…that’s something studios have been chasing ever since with films like Van Helsing (2004) or that other Mummy movie with Tom Cruise. Some have come close. Many have not.
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The Mummy is one of those singular moments in time you can’t recreate, that lightning-in-a-bottle kind of film that only comes around once in a while. And though we may never see anything on its level again, how exciting, to know it’ll be back in theaters for audiences new and old. Perhaps it’ll become another kid’s most cherished birthday memory, seeing Sommers’ film with family and friends on that screen of dreams for the first time.
If nothing else, I’m just glad to see that The Mummy has survived the sands of time, deserving of its God-like status for decades previous and all of those to come.”
As The Mummy turns 25, I encourage you to either revisit it or, better still, introduce it to someone new. Talk about it! While the cultural cache it yielded upon release may not have been quite as clear, it’s more evident now that The Mummy endures. From rides at amusement parks to podcasts and everything in between, The Mummy is everywhere. Per the film’s tagline, “The sands will rise. The heavens will part. The power will be unleashed.” Unleashed it was. Now, who wants to talk about how great The Mummy Returns is?
Categorized:Editorials
