![the mummy movie franchise the mummy movie franchise](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91DqBUEHvTL._SL1500_.jpg)
In 1901’s The Romance of the Mummy, Théophile Gautier ascribed to the mummy a supernatural knowledge of its disturbed afterlife: “The clear, fixed glance, gazing out of the dead face, produced a terrifying effect the body seemed to behold with disdainful surprise the living beings that moved around it.“ Various real-life Victorian adventurers were believed to be impacted by the mummy’s curse. This sacrilege manifested itself in the many rumored curses that were popularly believed to be attached to the excavation of such finds - and which in some cases were actually written in tombs as warnings. “The body of the mummy had to be preserved in order for the deceased to attain eternal life.”Īlmansa added that “taking the body out of the tomb, not even offering him food that he’d need to survive the afterlife, would be seen as some kind of sacrilege against the deceased.” “The ancient Egyptians didn’t want the mummy to come back to life,” Egyptologist Federico Zangani told me. The mummy was the most prominent nexus of this fixation, in no small part because taking mummies from tombs was literal grave robbing. The origins of Egyptomania are significant because they connect cultural interest in Egypt to colonialism, conquest, and the consequences of tampering in the wrong domain - themes that have been associated with cultural depictions of Egypt for nearly two centuries. Mummies in particular were all the rage: The 1851 London World’s Fair included an Egyptian bazaar, and 350,000 entrants to the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition saw an exhibit in which a mummy transformed into Pharaoh’s daughter and back again societies and lecturers would host “unwrapping parties” in Victorian England in which mummified corpses were dramatically revealed to the public. In 1822, France formed the first official study of Egyptology, and the European fascination with Egypt - dubbed “Egyptomania” - kicked into high gear. Horatio Nelson obliterated the French navy on the Nile and essentially left Napoleon stranded in Cairo.īut while Napoleon’s Middle Eastern campaign was failing, the scientists he brought with him to Egypt were beginning to explore the region and unearth countless finds - including the Rosetta stone - which they took from burial sites and sent back to French and later British museums. Napoleon’s initial 1798 attempt, which was spurred partly by the desire to block English trading routes and partly by his fascination with the region, was mostly successful - or it was until British Adm. The European interest in Egypt was sparked by an odd episode in history: the year Napoleon spent invading the country. “There’s been interest in mummies since the 18th and 19th century, when English travelers went to Egypt and took mummies like souvenirs,” Vicky Almansa, an Egyptologist at Brown University, told me in a phone interview. Mummies - the preserved bodies of ancient Egyptians - have been a cultural fascination since the early 19th century, when interest in archaeological excavations of Egyptian tombs swept across Europe. Mummies have long been cultural mainstays, but not always for the greatest of reasons It's there that the mummy in pop culture resides - and the lack of attention to this heritage may be at the root of the new film’s critical and commercial failure. The answer lies at a strange crossroads, between humanity’s fear of the unknown, the war between science and religion, and our love of adventure. So how did this unlikely film spawn a beloved 1999 reboot and a disastrous new revival that serves as the rocky kickoff for an entire slate of new films in Universal's upcoming “Dark Universe”?
![the mummy movie franchise the mummy movie franchise](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/scorpion-king-reboot.png)
In fact, its titular monster is barely shown as a mummy at all. An eerie, surreal film, it’s part of Universal’s proud lineup of monster movies - but even for its day it was unique, focused more on atmosphere and character development than on traditional horror scares.
![the mummy movie franchise the mummy movie franchise](https://www.korsgaardscommentary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/the-mummy-1999-1024x683.jpg)
The 1932 film The Mummy is an unlikely progenitor of one of the major summer movie revivals of 2017.