The parents of a missing girl learn that she’s been kept alive for years inside a sarcophagus in “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” a horror film from Blumhouse Productions that arrives in theaters Friday.
It’s the latest twist on a franchise launched by Universal Pictures with 1932’s “The Mummy,” starring Boris Karloff. Since then, Peter Cushing, Brendan Fraser, Dwayne Johnson and even Tom Cruise have kept the franchise alive, if sometimes just barely. Opening weekend predictions for the new installment from writer-director Cronin (“Evil Dead Rise”) are hovering around a healthy $10 million.
It’s all part of a modern fascination with mummies, one that dates back to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and perhaps even further back to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Even before Karloff’s film came out, America had succumbed to Egyptomania: Office buildings boasted pharaonic motifs, the jeweler Cartier created winged-scarab brooches and the early radio stars Billy Jones & Ernest Hare sang “Old King Tut” (not to be confused with Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” a Top Twenty hit in 1978).
But mummies, so painstakingly preserved and eerily lifelike, seem to strike a particularly resounding chord. “I think everybody likes the idea of immortality,” said Bob Brier, an Egyptologist and senior research fellow at Long Island University. “When you look at a mummy, you’re looking at a person who died 3,000 years ago. But he’s a recognizable human being.”
One reason mummies appear almost ready to walk is that the Egyptians fully expected them to, Brier explained. “They believed that the body would literally get up and go again in the next world,” he said. “So you had to protect it. That’s why you mummified.”
In 1994, alongside a colleague at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Brier tried his own hand at mummification using ancient Egyptian methods — the first such known effort in 2,000 years. (The process was documented for a National Geographic television special that earned Brier the nickname “Mr. Mummy.”) One thing he learned: The well-known method of removing the brain through the nose is more complicated than it sounds. It requires first inserting a slender tool into one nostril, whisking the brain into what Brier called “a strawberry milkshake,” then letting it drain out. Another fun fact, he said: It takes about 400 pounds of natron, a naturally occurring salt mixture found in Egypt, to properly dehydrate a body.
The Maryland mummy is still holding up. It even went on tour last year. According to Brier: “It’s dead and well, as we say.”
The professor’s favorite mummy movie is the original. “It doesn’t give you a mummy as a horrible, soulless creature.” Brier explained. “He falls in love, and they want to be together forever. So there’s a kind of humanity to the mummy, which is what the Egyptians would have appreciated.”
Long Island has a mummy of its own, of course, at Centerport’s Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. In 1931, when wealthy Westerners were visiting Egypt to shop for Ottoman furniture and rugs, railroad heir William K. Vanderbilt II purchased a mummy — complete with sarcophagus and vitrine — from an antiques dealer in Cairo, according to Roberta Casagrande-Kim, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs. The following January, after obtaining a museum export permit, Vanderbilt shipped the mummy to America on the steam ship S.S. President Harrison, according to information from the museum.
“We know that she’s a woman,” the curator said of the mummy, whose name remains a mystery. Relatively new wisdom teeth plus a skeleton in good condition suggest the woman died young, possibly from a sudden illness. She was also surely wealthy, as slaves and the lower classes were rarely if ever mummified, Casagrande-Kim said. (In ancient Egypt, she explained, “there was no such thing as leveling up.”)
Mummy movies tend to be too gory for Casagrande-Kim, but she gives them credit for shining a spotlight on history. “Even if, let’s say, this is not the most intellectual way to go about it,” she said, “it’s the most immediate way to make people curious.”
