A Film Canon

 

 

The Mummy plays out certain anxieties about British imperialism, but it's hard to tell where its sympathies ultimately lie. Freund's most striking gesture is to translate the return of the repressed into distinctly racial terms, such that the titular Prince Im-Ho-Tep's (Boris Karloff) identity is less compelling than that of his main victim, Helen Grosvenor, a member of the Cairo haute bourgeoisie. Despite her mixed parentage, Grosvenor is insistently introduced as a British citizen - and Im-Ho-Tep's conviction that she is a reincarnation of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon may in fact be nothing more than a recognition of the Egyptian heritage everybody else seems so keen to deny. From this perspective, Grosvenor stands as a kind of personified artefact, allowing Freund to maximise the latter's collision with British values, and explaining the transference of uncanniness from pyramid and tomb to museum. At the same time, however, Im-Ho-Tep is himself cast as a disruption of Egyptian orthodoxy. Having been mummified alive for committing grave robbery, he continues to perform present day sacrileges more heinous than those of his archaeological discoverers. This decreases the sense of British culpability and, ultimately, agency, reducing their presence to the demonstrative (and slightly camp) discursions characteristic of the B-film.