What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

There are all kinds of problems with making a mummy movie GOOD. But the first one is...

DO NOT TURN IT INTO A GIGANTIC, MULTIMILLION DOLLAR ACTION MOVIE INTENDED TO JUMPSTART A SHARED UNIVERSE FRANCHISE.

What a fucking tone-deaf mistake. Did the suits not bother to watch Dracula Untold first?

The Mummy, as a horror movie concern, ONLY works on a small scale. I am not including the Brendan Fraser picture because it is a B adventure movie, not a horror movie. It does not work with the Mummy attacking cities and firing off biblical plagues. It works when you follow a very simple narrative course:

- British people, in their colonial avarice, disturb an Egyptian mortuary
- These people are smug and are assumed to be learned scions of Western civilization
- They go back to England to celebrate their Englishness
- The Mummy turns up to get revenge on them for being graverobbing, smug, colonial Englishmen

That's pretty much the entire Mummy story, with some variations possible based on setting and period. Terence Fisher's Mummy film (the one Josh mentioned) follows exactly this protocol. It's a simple movie that has Fisher's very traditional approach to horror and morality. The supernatural is a gross inconvenience to right-thinking, right-minded people.

There is also a problem that the Mummy doesn't tend to have any kind of powers or advantages. He lumbers around and strangles folks. If he gets too close to an open flame...anyway, it's kind of like a zombie movie with ONE zombie, which isn't very scary on paper. So what you need to do is to create the suspense that the Mummy is SOMEWHERE, watching and waiting patiently for his moment to choke a fool. This works really well in a 19th century setting and in a gigantic mansion. Not great in a 21st century one where the Mummy is supposed to be an apocalypse level threat.

I haven't seen the new movie but I new it was a disasterpiece from the first trailer. My thoughts were "wow, this is a movie virtually no one will want to see".

Nobody wants to make low key, refined monster movies where the big impact is seeing an actor in makeup. Those Universal movies, the Hammer stuff...they are just so far out of step culturally that I don't even think a decent writer could really make a modern update. Even Dracula, at a subtextual level, does not make sense in today's culture. You have to go period to capture those Victorian concerns about sexual morality, bodily disintegration, contamination, and the feral self. MAYBE Del Toro could do something, because he knows the material and what makes it work. Crimson Peak had a host of issues, but it was a very traditional gothic story that valued atmosphere and suspense over Nicholas Cage hollering "HOLD ON TO SOMETHING while running away from fireballs thrown by a Mummy played by Jason Statham.

I wish I had the tapes we made of it back in the 1990s, but at one point we were going to make a short film for a festival that was going to be the classic Universal monsters as a crime family. I had this hilarious footage of this actor in a cheaply made mummy outfit totally doing the gangster thing. Started writing it, then a bunch of personal shit hit and never picked it back up.

Take the movie alien, add a mummy, then you have a good mummy movie. Simple as that.

The only mummy movie id ever go to theatres to see would be if they made Throw Mummy From the Train. Undead Anne Ramsey and all

Where's the thumbs down button?

I just thought of the best non-Karloff, non-Hammer mummy thing. It's the Doctor Who serial Pyramids of Mars. It actually succeeds in taking the standard mummy story template and blowing it up into something MUCH bigger. It is also one of the best Doctor Who stories. So you CAN go big...if you do it judiciously.

Pure atmosphere is the only way to do it, that much is for sure. There's nothing about mummies that makes the fear relatable, nothing that elevates the horror aspect of it beyond a sense of, "Well, that was unpleasant," i.e. the scarab scene in the first Fraiser movie.

That idea about the movie Alien might work. I'd love to see something where the just about entire duration of the movie is someone being trapped in a tomb. Make it very claustrophobic, drench the thing in an ever increasing amount of shadows as the light sources die out, and most importantly, make the Mummy as practical as possible. I'd watch something like that in a heartbeat.

We already know shared universes are dumb because they can never resist the urge to waste running time on setting up more movies, but it was especially dumb with the Universal Monsters. They did that shit in the 40s, no one ever felt the urge to make a big deal out of it, they just did it.

It's important to note too that the "monster rally" phase of the Universal horror era was THE END of it. The cycle was dying out. By the time you get to that stuff historically, adult audiences were considered to have moved on from horror movies and they were regarded as Saturday matinee kid flicks. So it was more about inexpensively piling properties together to entertain what was regarded as an unsophisticated audience than trying to construct some kind of lore-driven "universe".

Alien is actually pretty much The Mummy, at a fundamental level. A mortuary is explored/disturbed, disturbers return, punishment is dealt out for the disturbing. It's just biological rather than supernatural.

Colorcrayons wrote: Take the movie alien, add a mummy, then you have a good mummy movie. Simple as that.

Unless it is written by Damon Lindelof, in which case you have Prometheus and not a good movie.

Wasn't there a decent Tales from the Crypt thing with a mummy at one point? I seem to recall that.

Josh Look wrote:
I'd love to see something where the just about entire duration of the movie is someone being trapped in a tomb. Make it very claustrophobic, drench the thing in an ever increasing amount of shadows as the light sources die out, and most importantly, make the Mummy as practical as possible. I'd watch something like that in a heartbeat.

I saw something like this recently which really freaked me out. Let me see if I can remember the name but it was a bunch of people exploring a pyramid and they get trapped in there. In the end I think there were only 2-3 survivors and there was some sort of jackal-god thing that was pretty spooky.

,...ah yes, it's called THE PYRAMID. Look, it's pretty terrible but it's exactly what you're describing

Marvel Comics was really pushing horror comics in the '70s and even had some success with Tomb of Dracula, which ran something like 75 issues. So of course they tried a mummy comic. Supernatural Thrillers, featuring the Living Mummy. It was told from the point of view of the mummy, and initially was fairly standard mummy fare, with a bit of commentary on Mideast politics. Other characters tended to drive the action and the mummy responded. Then it went off in a strange but more interesting direction involving a magical artifact, alternate dimensions, and a team of specialized magic wielders known as the Elementals. The writing was surprisingly mature in tone, but the run lasted less than a year.