Is it safe to say that, after Suspiria and The Beyond, we could all use a breather? I, for one, have had my fill of sadistic, stomach-knotting violence for, oh, at least the next couple days. (Nothing puts a damper on one's culinary enthusiasm like watching a dozen eyeballs get popped out like grapes from their peels.) So let's take a little trip back through the gauzy mists of time, to the studio era, when horror was beautiful, mellow, and unlikely to disturb either one's sleep or one's appetite.
I've seen Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, more times than I can count. The same goes for James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which, in any case, doesn't hold a cobwebbed candelabrum to Mel Brooks's classic Young Frankenstein (1974). But I realized that I had a gap -- a gaping, festering hole, in fact -- in my horror education. I'd never seen The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff and directed by Karl Freund, the cinematographer of Browning's Dracula and a member of the cinematography team responsible for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).I mentioned needing a breather: Now consider the makeup session Karloff called "the most trying ordeal I have ever endured." You've read about how the ancient Egyptians made their mummies; here's how Universal Studios did it. As Gregory William Mank's Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (2009) relates:
The 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. transformation took place in [Jack P.] Pierce's cosmetology sanctuary, where a photograph of King Seti II served as a model. Pierce pinned back Boris's ears, dampened his face and covered every facial area (including eyelids) with thin cotton strips, covered the cotton with collodion and went to work with spirit gum and an electric drying machine... Boris's only pleasures during the procedure: a cigarette and tea. The makeup application made speech virtually impossible and the star had to pantomime every time he wanted a fresh smoke. Then came beauty clay slicking back the actor's hair... 22 different colors of makeup covering the actors face, hands, and arms, 150 yards of acid-rotted linen (passed through an oven, so it looked decayed), bandages taped in the body joints so that the star could move, and a dusting of Fuller's earth.Well, here's the big reveal: Karloff appears as a mummy for about five minutes, in the first scene. He doesn't even kill anyone as a mummy. A young archaeologist named Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) reads a forbidden papyrus; the mummy awakens; the mummy takes his papyrus back, and takes off. Norton dissolves into hysterical laughter -- which is impressively painful to listen to -- and we're later told that he "died laughing -- in a straitjacket." That's the last we see of this or any mummy. The next time we encounter Karloff, the resurrected priest Imhotep, he is a "modern" Egyptian named Ardath Bey, who wears a fez and a veritable Lone Ranger mask of kohl.
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