The atmosphere of "The Mummy" is so thick and vivid, the mood so enveloping, that it seems to proceed less by narrative logic than by poetic logic. There's a mumbo-jumbo plot with Boris Karloff as an ancient Egyptian priest brought back to life to discover that the princess for whose love he was put to death has been reincarnated in the person of a young Arab-British socialite (Zita Johann). "The Mummy," which was made in 1932, is far stranger and more exotic than the other horror movies made at Universal in the same period. It features no jump scenes, those sudden cuts to a monster popping out or grabbing an actor. Like Karloff's Imhotep, the movie operates by casting a spell rather than by using force (only once does Imhotep go in for the kill -- and then it's off-screen). When this ancient wants to command obedience, he simply raises his ring and fixes his subject with his hypnotic gaze. The effect is placid, the tremors of subdued unease nearly subterranean. "The Mummy" may be the most quietly seductive horror film ever made.
The beautiful unity of tone is surely thanks to the director, Karl Freund. As the greatest of all German cinematographers, Freund shot some of the greatest German silent films, F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" and Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" among them. Freund came to America in 1929, and "The Mummy" was the first of only a handful of films he got a chance to direct. Among the early and often awkward years of the talkies, "The Mummy" stands out for being one of the few films to convey the sense of immersion in a shadowy otherworld that characterized the greatest silents. The dialogue scenes are often stodgy, what with David Manners playing another in his string of ineffectual suitors and speaking lines like "In the interest of science, even if I believed in the curse, I go on with my work for the museum."
But those slight defects blow away like the dust from Imhotep's disturbed tomb. Freund uses some astonishingly delicate lighting effects, many of them having to do with eyes. There's a recurring close-up of Karloff in which his eyes appear at first in shadows, as if there were only empty sockets, and then are gradually lit until they might be glass marbles glowing from within. And when he turns those mesmerizing peepers on Johann -- whose own eyes are dark and enormous -- we see little beams of light form a nimbus around her head. Our first look at Imhotep is a long stationary shot of him in his sarcophagus, still wrapped in bandages; we discover he has come back to life by the small glistening jewels of light when his eyes open just a chink.
Freund patiently sustains entire sequences just as he does that shot. The film is only 72 minutes long, yet it seems to unfold gradually, and the deliberate pacing gives the eeriness time to sink in. We might be seeing the whole movie in the reflecting pool in which Imhotep conjures visions of the past and spies on the present. Yet there is an out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye quickness to some of the effects -- like a skull becoming visible beneath Imhotep's decaying skin -- that vanish before our minds have quite registered them. Perhaps Freund simply didn't want to disturb the mood he had so carefully achieved. Much of the movie's action is suggested, as when Imhotep's coming to life is suggested by a mummified hand reaching for an ancient scroll, and then a bandage trailing slowly out a door.
Like the somnambulistic midnight stroll Johann embarks on under her ancient lover's spell, there's an unsettling sense of eroticized compulsion deep in the core of "The Mummy." This is a tale of desire that persists even beyond the grave, and it's that persistence that makes Karloff's performance so frightening. The wildly overrated "Gods and Monsters" makes a nasty, gratuitous swipe at Karloff's talent, but the makeup and prosthetics he often donned didn't disguise that he was a masterly physical actor. In "The Mummy," every movement is economical and precise. Dressed in a fez and floor-length robes that emphasize his long frame, Karloff seems to glide more than walk. Whenever he turns, he does so with his whole body, and when he sits, it's as if he simply deliquesces inside his robe to the desired height. Karloff transmits the cunning and helpless yearning beneath Imhotep's sedate surface. The meaning of the whole movie might be contained in his dried-out skin, which looks as if his bandages had fused with it, and yet seems repellently alive. It's a horror-movie vision of our sexual desire abiding despite our physical decay. There's a satisfyingly tragic inevitability when Johann rejects Imhotep's plans for her to join him in eternity because she's still young and alive. "My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods," he tells her. But the horrific sadness of Karloff's performance is the horror of being trapped in a ruin, the body as a crumbling chapel of love.
