by Matt Cardin
Some Notable Mummy Fictions
Literary:
1890
“The Ring of Thoth” by Arthur Conan Doyle
1894
“Lot No. 249” by Arthur Conan Doyle
1903
The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker
1918
Brood of the Witch Queen by Sax Rohmer
1938
“Beetles” by Robert Bloch
1947
“The Next in Line” by Ray Bradbury
1989
The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned by Anne Rice
1998
The Sleeper in the Sands by Tom Holland
Cinematic:
1932
The Mummy (the original mummy movies, from Universal Studios, launching a series)
1940
The Mummy’s Hand
1942
The Mummy’s Tomb
1944
The Mummy’s Ghost
1959
The Mummy (first in Hammer Horror series)
1964
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
1966
The Mummy’s Shroud
1971
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
1999
The Mummy (Universal Studios reboot of classic series)
Matt Cardin
Two aspects of Egyptomania are important to the development of the mummy as a figure of horror. The first was the craze for mummy unwrapping, which led to the second, the development of mummy fiction. In Europe and the United States, a popular upper-class diversion was an “unwrapping party,” in which a host who had purchased a mummy would invite friends for the “unwrapping.” Writers soon turned this pastime into fiction.
One of the earliest mummy stories is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), in which an unwrapped mummy is brought back to life through galvanism (electricity). Although Poe’s story is comic, horror would follow. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote two mummy short stories, “The Ring of Thoth” (1890) and “Lot No. 249” (1894). In the former Conan Doyle introduces a magician/priest character into the narrative, thus establishing a figure that would become standard in later mummy horror stories. In the latter he creates the first monstrous mummy. Conan Doyle’s friend Bram Stoker, best known as the creator of Dracula, published an influential mummy novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), in which Margaret, who is both the daughter of an Egyptologist and a reincarnated Egyptian princess, must reattach her lost mummified hand to the mummy of her former self in order to ensure immortality. In the original novel she fails, but in the 1912 edition she succeeds and marries the narrator, after which the mummy disappears.
Fact merged with fiction in 1922 when archaeologist John Carter opened the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, popularly known as King Tut. The publicity surrounding this event, along with a now discredited story of a mummy’s curse, reignited worldwide Egyptomania. Hollywood did not wait long before cashing in on the excitement. Universal Studios released The Mummy in 1932, and the success of that film established the mummy as one of horror’s essential characters.
Universal Pictures producer Carl Laemmle, who also produced Universal’s Dracula, commissioned screenwriter John Balderston, who in a former career as a journalist had reported on the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, to create a screenplay for the film. The resulting narrative combines elements of “The Ring of Thoth,” The Jewel of Seven Stars, and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It proved both a financial and critical success, and it also established the conventions adopted by most mummy films and novels that followed its release: the discovery of a mummy’s tomb, the use of ancient scrolls to bring it to life, a curse on the tomb’s discoverers, the mummy’s revenge, the mummy’s discovery of a lost reincarnated love, the invocation of ancient wisdom to combat the mummy, and the eventual destruction of the mummy and the reimposition of Western rationality and order.
Mummy movies rapidly became a thriving subgenre in the burgeoning world of horror and monster cinema. Between 1940 and 1955 Universal released a slew of additional mummy movies: The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). In England, Hammer Films, which, like Universal, focused on the creation of horror films, released The Mummy (1959), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971). In 1999, after a hiatus of nearly half a century, Universal retuned to making mummy movies with The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, which adapted the basic elements of the 1932 film for a modern audience, and which was followed by the sequels The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), as well as the spin-off The Scorpion King (2008), which is not a horror film but rather an adventure comedy employing the conventions of the earlier films.
The mummy has also reappeared in contemporary fiction, most notably in Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989). Rice employed many of the conventions established by the mummy film tradition, but she also made major changes. Her protagonist is not the priest Imhotep, but rather the pharaoh Ramses II, who discovered the secret elixir of eternal life from a Hittite priest and passed that secret on to Cleopatra, who chose death after the suicide of Mark Antony. Ramses falls in love with an Egyptologist’s daughter, but when he discovers the mummy of Cleopatra, he attempts to bring her back to life. He succeeds, but Cleopatra is missing parts of her hands and face. The novel ends with her swearing eternal revenge on Ramses. In many ways the character of Ramses is closer to Rice’s vampire Lestat from The Vampire Chronicles (1976–) than he is to earlier fictive or film vampires, as both creatures are larger than life and caught in immortality.
Jim Holte
See also: Ancestral Curse; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Lansdale, Joe R.; “Lot No. 249”; Monsters; Quinn, Seabury; Rice, Anne; Rohmer, Sax; She; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Curl, James Stevens. 1994. Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press.
Freeman, Richard. 2009. “The Mummy in Context.” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring). https://ejas.revues.org/7566.
Frost, Brian J. 2008. The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN”
In his letters, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) wrote that of all his tales, his two favorites remained “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Music of Erich Zann.” Written in late 1921 and first published in National Amateur in March 1922, “The Music of Erich Zann” was an early favorite for others as well. It quickly became one of Lovecraft’s most popular works, republished twice in Weird Tales (May 1925; November 1934), anthologized in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931), and becoming the first Lovecraft tale printed in a literature textbook for use in schools: The Short Story (1956). More significant than its popularity is that “Zann” represents the seeds of Lovecraft’s most enduring themes. It introduces the dream narrative, the forbidden knowledge narrative, and the narrative of cosmic horror—all major themes that would establish Lovecraft’s unique contribution to horror literature in later works.
“Zann’s” narrator, a once “impoverished student of metaphysics,” provides a frame for the story by describing an experience that happened in his past, in an apartment and on a street that he can no longer find: the “Rue d’Auseil” (the name is a poor French construction loosely translatable as “street at the threshold”). The narrator emphasizes that, after an extensive search, he “cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality” (Lovecraft 2005, 15). Dislodging the setting from any verifiable external reality prefigures several of Lovecraft’s dream narratives, including the early “Celephaïs” (1922), “
The Silver Key” (1926), and “The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath” (1926), in which settings become removed from physical reality and are difficult to reach or regain.
Elusive, forbidden knowledge plays an equally important role in the narrative. Curious about the “haunting” music of Erich Zann—an elderly viol player living in another apartment at the boardinghouse—the narrator slowly befriends Zann, finally convincing him to explain his unique music and his fear of allowing others to hear it. Unwilling to speak of it, Zann frantically scribbles his story in his native German, but as he is committing it to paper, the source of his horror returns. The narrator reports, “suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard,” and moments later, “A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window” (Lovecraft 2005, 20). The papers are swallowed up by the horror outside the window, all explanation (and proof) lost forever. This theme of lost documents and forbidden and obscure knowledge would become a major theme of Lovecraft’s work, most notably in the many stories referencing the dreaded Necronomicon.
The most powerful theme concerns the source of the horror itself, glimpsed by the narrator as he looks out the open window in Zann’s apartment. He relates: “I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth” (Lovecraft 2005, 22). Confronting this dark and alien infinite, the narrator bolts from the apartment. While no physical embodiment of an alien other presents itself (as in later Lovecraft tales), the horror of the cosmic void—Lovecraft’s most profound contribution to the genre—is presented starkly and memorably here.
Mark Wegley
See also: “The Colour out of Space”; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Airaksinen, Timo. 1999. “Fighting Nothingness: ‘The Music of Erich Zann.’” In The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror, 7–15. New York: Peter Lang.
Burleson, Donald R. 1983. “Early Years: Beginnings and Foreshadowings (1920–1923).” In H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study: 39–96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Burleson, D. R. 1990. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Cannon, P. 1989. H. P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne.
Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ligotti, Thomas. 2003. “The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 78–84. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. 2005. “The Music of Erich Zann.” In H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, 15–23. New York: Library of America.
THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO
Published in 1794 by Ann Radcliffe in four volumes, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance is considered by many scholars to be the greatest Gothic novel of the eighteenth century. Already an established writer at the time of The Mysteries of Udolpho’s publication, Radcliffe was paid £500 to write The Mysteries of Udolpho, making her the most well-paid novelist at the time. The Mysteries of Udolpho proved an immediate success—it had a direct influence on the Gothic novels of the 1790s and subsequent decades, and is directly referenced in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. A lengthy text that is filled with intellectual themes and a melodramatic plot, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the progenitor of female Gothic fiction (sometimes called Radcliffean Gothic) and has been an influential text on horror writers for more than two hundred years.
Set in France, The Mysteries of Udolpho focuses on the long plight of Emily St. Aubert. Emily is an only child and resides with her parents at their country estate. While the family is trying to cope with difficult economic times, Emily’s mother suddenly passes away. This event results in father and daughter deciding to travel the countryside to reflect on the natural beauty of Europe, studying the sublime landscape of the mountains and forests in order to expand their appreciation of the natural world. The two meet a young man named Valancourt, who falls in love with Emily, before returning to their estate in France. Emily’s father becomes sick and eventually dies. His sister, the superficial Madame Cheron, takes control of his estates and Emily, forcing the young girl to relocate to Italy, where Cheron marries a sinister Italian named Montoni. An authoritarian tyrant who only weds Cheron because he desires to take control of her estates, Montoni moves himself, his wife, and Emily to the castle Udolpho. There he abuses and threatens his wife and Emily until he gets what he wants: Cheron eventually passes away, yet Emily is subjected to various horrors at Udolpho until she eventually escapes Montoni with the help of friends. Emily later finds herself in the company of a French count and his family. She and her friends have an adventure at a nearby chateau that is believed to be haunted. She is soon after reunited with Valancourt, who had fallen on hard times, but marries Emily at the conclusion of the narrative.
In describing Emily’s first sight of Castle Udolpho, Radcliffe wrings every last bit of the sublime from the scene, in a descriptive passage that is arguably the most famous paragraph in the whole novel:
“There,” said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, “is Udolpho.”
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. (Radcliffe 1794, 438)
Matt Cardin
Source: Radcliffe, Ann. June 1794. “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” The London Review. London: J. Sewell.
At the center of Radcliffe’s text is a conservative concern of balance between human emotions and eighteenth-century rational thought. Very much a young woman who has been taught to engage and explore her emotions, Emily is nonetheless prone to too much sentimentality, something her father openly discusses with his daughter on his deathbed. Emily’s singular flaw, which is persistent throughout the majority of the text, is that she never develops the rational self-control embodied by her father. She thus lacks a balance between her emotional side and her rational mind, which manifests in an unrestrained imagination that terrifies her more than it should. To be certain, Emily’s experiences throughout the text are terrifying, but her unrestrained imagination exacerbates it all, making her prone to superstitious sightings of ghosts that are not there and believing the worst even when the situation might not be as grave as she perceives. It is not until the text nears its conclusion, in the last hundred or so pages, that Emily finally develops controllable rationality when she subdues the powerful feelings that she has for Valancourt, whom she has come to believe has engaged in questionable moral behavior. By the text’s conclusion, Emily is a woman mentally balanced by the emotional aspects of sentimentality and eighteenth-century rational thought.
One unintended consequence of The Mysteries of Udolpho was the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in 1796. Although the only novel ever published by Lewis, The Monk was a direct challenge to the form of Gothic fiction envisioned by Radcliffe. Where Radcliffe made constant use of the explained supernatural throughout her novel, in accordance with her eighteenth-century beliefs against superstition, Lewis made his supernatural occurrences unquestionably real, with the use of sorcery, ghosts, and demons all present throughout. He likewise put more
emphasis on his Gothic villain, the monk Ambrosio, over his pursued protagonist, a reversal of Radcliffe’s focus on Emily over Montoni. More horrifying than terrifying, The Monk likewise utilizes different effects than The Mysteries of Udolpho in order to produce fear in its reader. Within two years of the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gothic fiction was divided into two subtypes, one represented by Radcliffe, the other by Lewis, showing the genre was open to experimentation and innovation that previously had not really been present.
The Mysteries of Udolpho stands as one of the greatest Gothic novels ever written. While it is not free from flaws within its narrative (many find the explained supernatural incredibly forced, and others have noted problems with the fourth volume involving the haunted chateau), Radcliffe’s novel has nonetheless had a lasting impact upon the horror genre. Its publication marks a high point in the history of Gothic fiction, and it continues to hold strong cultural relevancy as evident in the many works that have come to reference it in some way. While the explained supernatural has not exactly fared well in the horror genre, Radcliffe’s ability to create atmosphere, suspense, and terror set a standard that very few have been able to surpass.
Joel T. Terranova