How The Mum­my set the tone for the mod­ern hor­ror blockbuster

Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios was going through a tran­si­tion­al peri­od in the 1990s. Film­mak­ers were mov­ing away from the campi­ness which had char­ac­terised their famed mon­sters for decades, opt­ing for more real­is­tic adap­ta­tions of the time-hon­oured source mate­r­i­al. Among the most notable exam­ples of this are Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la, direct­ed by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, direct­ed by Ken­neth Branagh. Both per­formed well at the box office but crit­ics were quick to point out that for every dra­mat­ic flour­ish or taste­ful homage, there was a joy­less­ness that dimin­ished their over­all impact.

It was as if strip­ping the sto­ries of their inher­ent campi­ness was to remove the very thing which made them so appeal­ing in the first place – the kind of appeal that was forged in Stephen Som­mers’ 1999 remake of The Mummy.

In terms of plot, Som­mers’ film fol­lows the basic out­line of the orig­i­nal 1932 ver­sion. A group of explor­ers stum­ble upon the tomb of the tit­u­lar mum­my – in both cas­es, a high priest named Imhotep – only to unleash his evil spir­it and be faced with the con­se­quences. There’s a sub­plot involv­ing Imhotep and the res­ur­rec­tion of his lost love, an ancient curse, and the two films even share sim­i­lar time­frames (1926 and 1932). But this is essen­tial­ly where the sim­i­lar­i­ties stop. Som­mers felt that emu­lat­ing the qui­et inten­si­ty of the orig­i­nal would be unwise, and instead veered into less com­mon ter­ri­to­ry. The result? A hor­ror film that effort­less­ly inte­grat­ed ele­ments of action and adven­ture. Or, an adven­ture film that effort­less­ly inte­grat­ed ele­ments of horror.

Som­mers’ abil­i­ty to slip between styl­is­tic extremes can often make it hard to deter­mine which is more accu­rate. There are cer­tain­ly scary moments in The Mum­my, but they have a nos­tal­gic com­fort to them, and even when the film veers into the grotesque – as when a plague of flesh-eat­ing scarab bee­tles is unleashed – the effect is evoca­tive of an old-school B‑movie. Imhotep trans­forms from a trag­ic vil­lain in the orig­i­nal to an unstop­pable killer, and the CGI effects, which were ground­break­ing at the time, pro­vide a scope and weight to the evil that make him more spec­ta­cle than scary.

In terms of action, the film bucks a hor­ror tra­di­tion by hav­ing its char­ac­ters will­ing­ly thrown down with the mon­sters. Where sur­vival is the goal of most pro­tag­o­nists, Rick O’Connell (played with career-defin­ing swag­ger by Bren­dan Fras­er) seeks out the fight, leap­ing into dan­ger and dis­pos­ing of Imhotep’s min­ions by way of shot­gun blasts and sword­play. He should be out­matched, but Som­mers allows the luna­cy to slide.

As a result, O’Connell becomes the camp embod­i­ment of the ide­al action hero – so capa­ble and brave that the mon­sters seem to be the ones at a dis­ad­van­tage. Even at his low­est ebb, he’s unde­terred by the fact that he needs to, ​“res­cue the damsel in dis­tress, kill the bad guy, save the world.” And why shouldn’t he be? He’s the hero. This escapist men­tal­i­ty may not be the most authen­tic for genre purists, but it’s made up for by the film’s fre­net­ic pace.

The suc­cess of The Mum­my sin­gle-hand­ed­ly ush­ered in a new age of hor­ror block­busters. Sud­den­ly, mon­sters were main­stream, and stu­dios scram­bled to release their own revi­sion­ist hybrids of hor­ror, CGI, and gun-tot­ing action. Films like Sleepy Hol­low, Van Hels­ing and The Broth­ers Grimm are tes­ta­ment to this, respec­tive­ly blur­ring genre lines and turn­ing once ordi­nary men into extra­or­di­nary adven­tur­ers. Even lat­er, less­er iter­a­tions like Hansel & Gre­tel: Witch Hunters and the franchise’s own sequels, The Mum­my Returns and The Mum­my: Tomb of the Drag­on Emper­or con­tin­ued to draw big audiences.

Things seem to have come full cir­cle with Alex Kurtzman’s 2017 The Mum­my. In a move that tidi­ly sums up today’s fran­chise cli­mate, Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios has cre­at­ed a reboot of their own remake, com­plete with an over­ly capa­ble hero, large set pieces and a CGI mon­ster. Will it prove a suc­cess at the box office? Prob­a­bly, when you fac­tor in for­eign mar­kets. Though in try­ing to be too many things at once – a rein­ven­tion, a mature thriller, a teas­er to a larg­er cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse – the reboot runs the risk of los­ing the sim­plic­i­ty that made Som­mers’ film so much fun in the first place. The ini­tial wave of (most­ly neg­a­tive) reviews all but con­firms this.

So while it may have worn thin in this par­tic­u­lar instance, the fact that 1999’s The Mum­my is still the blue­print in Hol­ly­wood speaks to its long-last­ing impact. There’s not a mon­ster reboot today that isn’t in some way indebt­ed to the film’s win­ning blend of hor­ror, adven­ture and high camp. Cheesy though it undoubt­ed­ly is, it remains the first and the finest hor­ror block­buster of the mod­ern age.