With another box-office hit Hammer Studios were a major presence in English cinema, albeit one mired in controversy and resentment. Undaunted, the Fisher-led creative team turned to another classic Universal monster. The resultant The Mummy was another startlingly effective horror film although in retrospect not quite considered the landmark that the previous two movies were. Nonetheless, The Mummy was an intelligent and strikingly realized movie in which Fisher expanded on his growing criticism of the inherent values and perversity in British society, here tackling the theme of cultural arrogance. With the plot of scientific interference in an age-old “foreign” curse, Fisher depicted English scientists as defined by an arrogant sense of their own superiority and a total disregard for the foreign cultures whose history and lands they plunder for artifacts they then appropriate. For Fisher, these selfish fools must face the inevitably monstrous consequences of their cultural Imperialism: again, arrogance is punished. What emerged was a clash of archaeological ethics versus religious and cultural integrity in which Fisher presented both sides but tellingly had much sympathy for the supposed villain – the Egyptian who uses the resurrected mummy to seek revenge.
The Mummy works best as an analysis of the monstrousness of all “tradition”: whether it be that passed between the English father and son scientists or that handed down through the Egyptian ages. Indeed, the younger generation in both cases fails to overcome the burden of tradition and forge a unique identity: they both seek to resurrect the past in some way and in so doing doom themselves. Hence, a paradox deepened: not only was this modern arrogance demanding a punitive, irrational response from the past to humble it but those who sought to serve their historical legacy were denying any progress. Fisher and a returning Sangster thus consolidate the notion of the “curse” and its repercussions on the individual so obsessed. In The Curse of Frankenstein it was psychological, in The Horror of Dracula it was sexual-physiological and in The Mummy it is cultural. The sly necrophilia in all three movies is here found in another clash between scientific objectivity and historical / religious myth and Fisher’s colour sense had accordingly developed as the explosive, emotional result of the clash between the rational and the irrational. The Mummy was thus more somber and stylized than its predecessors and the three films being an evolving dissection of “civilization” and “monstrousness”. read more