Once again I find myself in the lonely position of defending a personal pleasure which causes me no guilt at all, for all the contumely and horse laughs it may inspire in the rest of the world.  I speak, you should have deduced by now, of the Mummy.   Arguably the least loved member of the Universal Classic Monsters stable, the Mummy is dear to me and I’ve been thinking about him a lot this Halloween.

But first a little ancient history.  Universal’s cycle of Mummy movies began, you should not be surprised to learn, with Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY (1932).  Universal had been sufficiently impressed by the 1922 opening of the tomb of boy prince Tutankhamen and an alleged consequential curse that struck down a number of those who had dared to defile the sacred site, to throw some lucre into a scenario that would capitalize on America’s fascination with/fear of mysterious Egypt.  Carl Laemmle, Jr. pressed into service Richard Schayer, head of the studio’s scenario department, and novelist Nina Wilcox Putnam, who cobbled together these elements into a story treatment: Cagliostro, the tale of an ancient Egyptian magician who has prolonged his life by science into the 20th Century, where he avenges himself on the woman who broke his heart by murdering females who have the misfortune of resembling her.  When the property was handed off to John L. Balderston (who had helped in the transition of Dracula from the stage to the screen), the title changed from The King of the Dead to Im-Ho-Tep while the scenario was repurposed from a revenge motif to love story.  One of the best of Universal’s initial monster films, THE MUMMY is crisp and fleet-of-foot, efficient yet highly atmospheric; some critics have used the word “hypnotic” and I am in full agreement.  Boris Karloff is, true to his nickname in those days, genuinely uncanny as the deathless Im-Ho-Tep, thanks in part to the pains of Universal make-up maestro Jack Pierce.  Superior to Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931), the film may even be better than James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), although I expect a fight over that notion.  THE MUMMY is an undeniable work of art, gorgeous and unearthly, and I could talk about it all day.  But not today.

Universal took its sweet time in maximizing the franchisable qualities of THE MUMMY, letting seven years elapse before giving the world THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940).  Although the studio’s Mummy vehicles would utilize footage from the Freund film, they were not direct sequels.  Karloff’s Im-Ho-Tep is gone, dust in the wind, and standing in his place is Kharis, a former prince of the royal house of King Amenophis, who was buried alive three thousand years ago for trying to restore life to the dead Princess Ananka.  Played in THE MUMMY’S HAND by former cowboy actor Tom Tyler (who brings, though he is asked to do precious little, a startling physicality to the role) and then by Lon Chaney, Jr. for the remaining three follow-ups, Kharis became the go-to Mummy for American popular culture.  As the generation who grew up with Kharis in the 40s matured, comic mummies began to turn up in nightclub acts, in burlesque shows, in novelty songs, in print cartoons and animated shorts.  In 1955, Abbott and Costello met the Mummy (whose name was the vaguely familiar Klaris).  In 1959, future serious poet Rod McKuen recorded a comic album, Songs our Mummy Taught Us, with humorist Bob McFadden.  That same year, the United Kingdom’s Hammer Studios remade Universal’s THE MUMMY to their own specifications and its success beget its own franchise.  Through the 60s and 70s, mummies were part and parcel of a number of popular entertainments, making murderous or comical guest appearances on JONNY QUEST and THE MUNSTERS and selling briskly through the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland in the form of jigsaw puzzles, model kits, comic books, posters, Halloween masks, buttons and bendable figures.

So specialized – or perhaps even peculiar – am I in my thinking at this moment that I even want to pass over THE MUMMY’S HAND in my defense of Kharis.  I like the movie a lot, mind you; it works a charm as intended by Universal, as a peppy B-movie, a popcorn muncher cranked out at modest cost ($80,000, compared to BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN’s nearly $300,000 budget) with contract actors (Dick Foran, Wallace Ford, George Zucco) and available resources (the integral temple set is left over from James Whale’s GREEN HELL).  My reasons for excluding it from this discussion have partly to do with tone – it’s less of a horror movie than a pre-Indiana Jones-style adventure with an Egyptian backbeat and a Mummy pop-up for added chills.  It’s closer in spirit to the 1999 Stephen Sommers remake and its sequels, taking the mystical/fantastical elements of Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY for granted and layering on comic relief, fisticuffs and shoot-outs to jazz up the material.  Again, I like THE MUMMY’S HAND, I’ve bought it on both VHS and DVD (I’ve also owned a few of the sequels on Super 8mm film!), but it’s the Chaney Kharis movies of which I’ve been thinking this Halloween season.  They have a strange power over me – perhaps only me – and comprise one of the most unique movie franchises in cinema history.  Reliant on formula the way Kharis the Mummy was dependent on tea brewed from the strength and immortality-bestowing tana leaves, these films are otherwise incredibly cynical, downbeat, and even anarchic in their disregard for audience expectations.

In THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1942), the action shifts from Egypt to the United States – specifically Massachusetts, where the protagonists of THE MUMMY’S HAND have retired.  Peggy Moran’s character from the earlier film is explained to have died of natural causes, while widower Dick Forgan regales his adult son (John Hubbard) and prospective daughter-in-law (Elyse Knox) with the tale of his infamous face-off with the Mummy many years before.  Meanwhile back in Egypt, the High Priest of Karnak (George Zucco, wearing old age make-up and sporting a withered arm) who had resurrected Kharis in the previous film, sends the slightly singed but nevertheless highly functional Mummy off with an acolyte (Turhan Bey) to exact a terrible revenge.  And terrible it is!  With Bey’s oily, Machiavellian Mehmet Bey ensconced as a cemetery caretaker in the leafy New England hamlet of Mapleton… the perfect base of operations for sending his monster on on nightly missions.

Spoilers are at this point unavoidable, so let me get right to the nub of it – damn your eyes if you’d rather not know.  Well short of the conclusion of its brisk 60 minute running time, THE MUMMY’S TOMB kills off every surviving character from THE MUMMY’S HAND – all of whom are, by this point, darling elderly folk – and throws in a character’s spinster sister to boot!  If you thought BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) or FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 2 (1981) had the stones for killing off major characters in their first sequels , THE MUMMY’S TOMB did all that thirty to forty years earlier.  Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not crushing on the tack of killing off major characters in a sort of postmodern, Psychotronic haze… I hate that these characters get killed (BABE HANSON MURDERED crows Mapleton’s local fishwrap… despite the fact that the character was named Babe Jensen in THE MUMMY’S HAND) but I love that the Mummy sequels, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Kharis, don’t care how I feel.

It’s worth point out at this juncture that it was in production of THE MUMMY’S TOMB that Universal decided that Lon Chaney, Jr. should be billed as Lon Chaney, forcing the association with his late father, “the Man of a Thousand Faces” in a bid to make him the studio’s “Master of Menace.”  Chaney fils had already changed his Christian name from Creighton to Lon (short for Leonidas) in honor of his dad, who died in 1930.  Chaney, Jr. already had little love for the Mummy movies and this studio mandate was yet another irritation.  Chaney’s baby was the character he helped to create in Universal’s THE WOLF MAN (1941) and fleshed out in the sequels FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1942), HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945), bowing out in the role with the satiric ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948).  Chaney had his own series of INNER SANCTUM thrillers at Universal and got to play the Count in SON OF DRACULA (1943).  The actor had ambitions and dreams for himself even within the pinched confines of the horror genre but playing the mute Frankenstein monster in GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942) and the shambling Kharis in THE MUMMY’S TOMB, THE MUMMY’S GHOST (1944) and THE MUMMY’S CURSE (1944) was just a means to an end – a pay check, with a side order of headache.  And yet… and yet… I love these movies.

There’s an anything goes vibe to the Universal Mummy cycle, telegraphed in THE MUMMY’S TOMB with the whole slaughter of all the good guys from THE MUMMY’S HAND.  In THE MUMMY’S GHOST, Kharis is back, with a new handler… duly-sworn High Priest of Arkam John Carradine.  (For some reason, between the last installment and this, the name of the temple spewing out High Priests like Gal Fridays was changed from Karnak to Arkam.)  Whereas Turhan Bey had played his villainous Mehmet Bey as an oily son-of-a-bitch, smug and dissembling, Carradine etches Yousef Bey as a popeyed true believer… albeit with an ultimately fatal eye for beauty.  And true to the series’ depraved disregard for established characters, one of Bey’s first orders of business is to kill off a character (Frank Reicher) established in THE MUMM Y’S TOMB as the local expert on all things Egyptian.  See what I’m saying – you just can’t get used to anybody in these movies!  With all those who have wronged Kharis dead and buried, the screenwriters here rejigger the Mummy’s raison d’etre, shifting the emphasis from vengeance to love everlasting.    Identifying local college girl Amina Mansouri (Ramsay Ames, who replaced Aquanetta after the first day of shooting) as the reincarnation of his beloved Princess Ananka, Kharis and Yousef make various attempts to tap that, resulting in various deaths and assorted mayhem.  There’s some atmospheric stalking and slaying on the Southern California locations and sets made to stand in for Massachusetts and the whole shebang ends on a surprisingly downbeat note that I don’t want to spoil, except to say I suspect it was inspired by a shocking reveal in Frank Capra’s LOST HORIZON (1937).

The series ends on an even wackier note in THE MUMMY’S CURSE, as Kharis and Ananka turn up in… Louisiana!  Ananka is played this time out by Virginia Christine, who would enjoy a measure of immortality herself as the neighborly “Mrs. Olsen” in a 21-year run of TV spots for Folgers Coffee.  Lacking the seductive, smokey allure of Ramsay Ames, the Iowa-born Christine brings to the role a beguiling oddness, a foreign-ness that suits her character, displaced as Ananka is by geography and three millennia.  The actresses’ first scene, in which Ananka is unearthed by construction vehicles in the bayou and rises painfully to claw herself out of the mud, is eerily matter-of-fact, a strangely poetic image of self-birthing.  She shuffles stiff-legged, like a Romero zombie, to the edge of a swampy tarn, steps into the water and is renewed, emerging from the drink with a pert Bettie Page hair-do.  Ananka isn’t given all that much to do in the script, unfortunately, with all the heavy lifting falling on the shoulders of villain Peter Coe (as yet another High Priest of Arkam) and his wormy helpmeet Martin Kosleck.  This time out, it’s Kosleck who falls for the heroine, murdering his master and in so doing bringing upon himself the wrath of Kharis, whose anger may not be able to shatter the world but it is hell to pay on stone and concrete.

If you’re so inclined, you could nitpick the Universal Mummy sequels into so much pillow ticking.  They’re cheap (THE MUMMY’S TOMB avails itself of stock footage from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN and look at that dummy mummy head above!) and repetitive and maybe not so well thought-out.  Burned to a crisp at the end of THE MUMMY’S HAND, Kharis returns in THE MUMMY’S TOMB with one working arm and yet he is able to climb up a trellis to the second floor of a plantation house to commit murder and carry the dead weight of an unconscious Ananka up the ladder of an elevated mine shack in THE MUMMY’S GHOST.  You’ll just have to work out for yourself how he got from Massachusetts to Louisiana for THE MUMMY’S CURSE – I’m guessing continental shift or plate tectonics but don’t quote me.  Yet despite all the warts on this pig, I dig it, the whole crumbly run.  Kharis is a deliberate, silent predator – strictly business – which is a refreshing change of pace in this day and age of fiends who try much too hard and talk way too much (I’m looking at you, Jigsaw).  Film to film, the series offers the horror hound a Gothic smorgasbord: graveyards and shadows, full moons and monsters on the loose, brave men in swell suits, imperiled farmers with shotguns, beautiful girls who scream big and scream loud, undying love, forbidden passions, ancient grudges  and maledictions aplenty… Universal’s Mummy movies really do have it all.  Treat yourself this Halloween to some old school spookery and call on Kharis… once he gets you in his moldy grasp he never lets you down.