The Mummy (1932)

Few horror films from the early sound era open with as much raw, atmospheric power as this one. A torchlit excavation. A cursed scroll. And Boris Karloff, fully swathed in decaying bandages, stirring back to life with a slowness that makes your skin crawl. It's one of the most haunting sequences I've seen from the period, and even with the film approaching its centenary, that opening hasn't lost a single gram of its dread.

Those first twenty minutes are extraordinary. Deliberate, mythic, and genuinely unsettling in a way that feels almost sacred, or rather, sacrilegious. You feel the weight of what's being disturbed. Karloff doesn't need to do much: a hand emerging from wrappings, those pale, barely-blinking eyes catching the torchlight. It's primal horror delivered with absolute confidence. The silence around him does as much work as he does. You sense, bone-deep, that something profoundly wrong has been set in motion, and that consequence is inevitable.

Then the film leaps forward ten years, and everything changes. Imhotep is no longer a shambling relic dragged back from the dead. He's an articulate, robed Egyptian scholar, speaking perfect English, wandering into the lives of archaeologists and quietly obsessing over a woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his ancient love. It's an interesting pivot, I'll give it that. The themes of obsession and eternal longing have real weight, and Karloff remains magnetic throughout, shifting from monstrous to melancholy without losing his grip on you. But the primal horror of that opening? It dissolves. The film trades dread for romance, mystery for melodrama, and the mummy himself becomes more tragic figure than anything that might actually frighten you.

I found myself genuinely mourning what it might have been. The same year gave us The Old Dark House (1932), which manages to sustain its atmosphere across a full runtime. Here, the second act stalls, the pacing softens, and the film never finds its way back to the chilling purity of its beginning. The dialogue scenes drag. The romance, though poetic in conception, lacks the tension needed to replace the horror it displaced. By the time we arrive at the climax, it feels like we've travelled a long way from that candlelit tomb, and not entirely in the right direction.

None of which makes it a bad film. It's essential viewing for anyone serious about the history of horror, and Karloff alone is worth your time. If you've followed my reviews of the classic Universal and pre-Code era monsters, you'll know I have a deep affection for this period, flaws and all. There's a reason Karloff's name became synonymous with the genre, and performances like this one show exactly why. He brings genuine pathos to Imhotep, making him sympathetic even as he's threatening, which is a harder trick to pull off than it looks. I'd put him alongside his work in The Black Cat (1934) as evidence of just how much he could do within the constraints of the era.

But the honest verdict is this: The Mummy is a film of two halves, and only one of them fully delivers. It's more fascinating as a historical artefact than as a sustained piece of horror, more interesting to study than to be scared by. The opening is masterful. The rest is a slow, atmospheric, occasionally beautiful let-down.

Three stars. Had it kept its bandages on all the way to the end, it might have been immortal.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1932  | Watched: 2026-03-02

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Related on Movies With Macca

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