Special Episode: Monster Movie Night: The Mummy (1999)

Monster Man, Special Episode, Monster Movie Night, The Mummy. [Music] Hello and welcome to Monster Man, a show about monsters, because monsters are great. I'm James Holloway and I'm reading my way through the gaming books of yesterday. And as I do, I'm taking a look at the monsters that I find to them, their history, their mythology, their ecology, their imagery, and how to use them in games. Today's episode is a special episode brought to you by the generosity and public spirit of my Patreon backers and in particular of Patreon back on Mari. If you'd like to be like Mari, get your own special episode, all you have to do is head on over to patreon.com/monsterman and pledge at the $5 level. And if you do that, you'll also receive the rewards for every other level, including every episode of my Patreon exclusive podcast, Patreon Deities. So Mari, thank you very much for your support and I hope that you enjoyed today's episode. Mari has asked me to follow up on my recent episode about the fifth element by covering another film from the late 1990s. Steven Summers, 1999 Adventure Film, The Mummy. In this episode, we're going to talk about the way that Summers, who also co-wrote the screenplay, uses different types of monsters and antagonists in service to a certain kind of action adventure storytelling. We're going to start by briefly covering the film itself and then go from there into how he uses its monsters and then we'll see what we can generalize from that approach and think about how we can apply it to creating scenarios that might be rooted in other mythologies or other genres. Now, unlike when we talked about Luke Bisson, I am not going to spend a lot of time rehearsing the directorial career of Steven Summers. I would say that by 1999 or I guess 98 probably when he started it, Summers was regarded as a good hand, a capable maker of low budget action movies and also kids movies, but not what you would call an otter. I will say that if you wanted to maybe read too much into it, you could argue that Summers has a few previous films that are trying and failing to capture the swashbuckling action serial feel of The Mummy, including 1998's Deep Rising, which is more of a horror film but does have treat Williams in a kind of poor man's Han Solo role that isn't a million miles from Brendan Fraser's Rico Connell. And the relative success of these two films can be judged from the fact that I didn't have to look up that Brendan Fraser's character is called Rico Connell, but I have no idea what treat Williams's character is called. He's just a poor man's Han Solo. He's Han Solo on a boat. The story of this film's creation is also very complicated. Various drafts and concepts for the film bounced around at Universal Studios throughout the 1990s, indeed even in the 1980s, and there was basically no consistent idea to it, save that there was a sort of feeling that the classic Universal Studios horror monsters were probably worth something and were about due for a revival. But there was a version of which George Romero was going to direct it. There was a version where Clive Barker was going to do it. They won a Daniel Day Lewis at one point to play like a brooding mummy. Sometimes he was set in the modern days. Sometimes it was set in the past, etc. But after a couple of false starts with different writers and directors, the studio settled on the idea of doing the film as a period piece, drawing on the idea that the original film was from the 30s, and doing it as a big budget action spectacular. I think the odds that you haven't seen the mummy are pretty slim, but just in case you haven't, here is a brief summary. In 1926, Librarian and aspiring Egyptologist Evil and Evie Carnahan, Rachel Weiss, is given a map by her brother Jonathan, which purports to lead the way to the legendary Lost City of Hominoptera. Jonathan got the box from Soldier Fortune Ricconnell, Brendan Fraser, so Evie finagles his release from jail and together with Jonathan, they set out to find the Lost City. Competing with our heroes are a rival adventuring party of American Egyptology movie stereotypes guided by Rick's former comrade from the French foreign legion Benny, Kevin J. O'Connor. They have various misadventures along the way, including a run-in with ancient Egyptian secret societies slash secret police them a jai, led by our death bay, Ode de Fair. Ignoring our death bay's warnings, both expeditions explore the ruins of Hominoptera, with a series of bits of archaeo-adventure rigmarole, culminating in inadvertently awakening the mummy, Arnold Voslo. Both expeditions flee back to Cairo, but Imhotep pursues them to kill the rival adventuring party. Oh, also by this point, Imhotep has spared Benny's life and taken him on as a kind of sidekick slash translator since Benny speaks Hebrew and thus they have a language in common. Imhotep recognizes it as, you know, like from the book of Exodus. Working together with Ardith Bay and Evelyn's mentor Terence Bay, Eric Avari, our heroes piece together that Imhotep wants to sacrifice Evie in order to reincarnate his forbidden love princess Anoxunamun, Patricia Velasquez. The only way to stop him is to go back to Hominoptera and get the golden book of Amun Ra to turn him back into a regular mummy. So, okay, now we have our objective. But, to make matters worse, Imhotep kidnaps Evie, Eric Avari is killed by Imhotep's mind-controlled servants. So Jonathan Rick and Ardith piling to an airplane piloted by Winston and old friend of Rick's and they head back to Hominoptera, but Imhotep creates a magical sandstorm that destroys the planet Kills Winston. They make their way to the city, there's a bit where they think Ardith Bay has died, they fight some more animated mummy guys, they find the book rescue Evie, defeat Imhotep and flee when Benny greedy as ever accidentally activates a booby trap and like destroys the city. Oh, and Rick and Evie fall in love, which you were assuming because it's that kind of movie and you were right. So, there's a lot and a lot of this will seem pretty familiar to you. This is very kind of stock action adventure movie stuff, chases, fight scenes, puzzles, ruins, all that sort of thing. Anyway, the mummy was an absolutely massive success, making over $400 million against its budget of around $80 million. It came out just ahead of Fanta Menace and thus into a field that was basically empty of this kind of genre film, because no one releasing that kind of movie in the summer of 1999 wanted to get steamrolled by Star Wars. Okay, so in terms of monsters, we can say that there were a few distinct types of monster in this movie. We have the flesh eating scarab swarms that devour the unwary in the lost city. That is something that I think originates in this film. In fact, it's from an earlier draft, and was kept because it's a cool gimmick. We have the mummy himself in his more or less human guises, plus various lesser mummies like some mummy warriors and an oxunamun. We have the mind controlled humans who serve Imhotep in Cairo. They kind of wander around in a big mob chanting Imhotep, they're basically zombies. And we have the magic sandstorm, which I guess we could consider a monster. It has a big face anyway. Finally, in terms of antagonists, we have, they're not monsters per se, but we also have the rival American adventuring party, including one guy who is so clearly pound land-curred Russell that like they focus on his face a lot, I think just to kind of make that point. Interestingly, the correct response to most of these monsters is not a stand-up fight. The only ones that really get fought are the mummies in the last act. There are a lot of monsters where the correct response is to flee or sneak. The sandstorm is a travel hazard and a way to show off a special effect. So I think it's really interesting to consider, and I'm not 100% sure of the answer, outside of like broadly having conflict resolution rather than task resolution systems, how you would do this at least on the fly in most RPGs. These are monster encounters that are targeted toward action in general rather than combat. Chases, escapes, that kind of thing, you know, stunts. And I think that there's a lot of that in the adventure fiction that both the mummy and early D&D are largely derived from, and actually not all that much of it in contemporary D&D, which I think is a little bit of a missed opportunity. Now whether it is specifically combat or not, each monster in the mummy poses a different kind of threat. The film isn't quite coherent enough to have this correspond to like each member of the party, so we basically have O'Connell, the fighter, Evie, the sort of wizard, I guess, the scholar character. Jonathan is sort of a rogue. He's nominally a cleric and that he's like a clergyman, but apart from quoting the Bible a few times, he's mainly a rogue. I would say the clerical role or the paladin role is more appropriate for our death bay, right, the sort of motivated warrior against evil. I mean, you wouldn't have to stretch it far to make it work. And honestly, it's not a bad principle to bear in mind when populating a dungeon. A mix of puzzles, chases, combat, and if you count Imhotep himself and the rival adventuring party as if not monsters that we stand antagonists or fulfilling some of the same role, diplomacy as well. Note to self, design elaborate traps that change the layout of the game space rather than just call for a single hit role or saving throw. Maybe a miniature war games as well. I'm very gradually working on a pulp adventure miniatures campaign, sort of based on Stargrave. So this is right up my alley at the moment, but it is taking a back burner to all of the things that are supposed to be finished now now now. Now apart from the mind controlled ordinary humans who basically provide a way to do the writing native mob without being too racist. Hmm, I don't know, it's still a little like this film makes a little bit more of an effort to avoid some of the orientalist tropes to permeate so many horror movies, but like a little bit more of an effort, not much more of an effort. The monsters are all basically first draft ideas based on what if there were monsters and they were Egyptian. Quick, think of Egyptian stuff, uh mummies, scarabs, sand, okay great. It's genuinely astonishing that there isn't a pyramid in this movie or like consider if you will the name Anak-Suna moon, which is how they pronounce it in the film. They kind of stick an extra syllable into the first part of the name, Ank. Presumably well so originally I thought this was because they were following the pronunciation in the 1932 film, which I don't think I've ever actually seen. I've seen the hammer one, but I looked it up and they're not. They're not copying the pronunciation, although I also don't think it's quite right in the 1932 one. Obviously, I think pronunciation of ancient Egyptian names is, you know, I don't think it's a language that we know very much about how it was pronounced, but I defer to the experts on this subject. The name, "Ank, ANCK-SU-NAMU-N" is a garbling of the name, "Ankessa namun," which was I assume the name of the only Egyptian queen not named Nefertiti that the screenwriters had ever heard of. And I say she wasn't named Nefertiti, which is true, but she was Nefertiti's daughter, the sister and also wife of the most famous of all Egyptians, Tutankhamun. So you can put that in your first thing you think about list of Egyptian things, right? Egypt go, "A mummy scarabs, cats, the plagues from the Bible, or let's be real the plagues from the Ten Commandments," King Tut. Like, that's what the French foreign legion is doing in this movie, right? Why would the French army be in Egypt? Because the French foreign legion are in the desert in Bojeste, right? Okay, that's Algeria, but whatever, it's all vibes, man. And it combines with other outside influences, so consider if you will, the flesh eating scarabs. As I mentioned earlier, those first appeared in a much earlier draft of the script. I would say this movie went through a lot of different iterations, but they're so different from each other that I really just mean the idea for how mummy revival went through a lot of different iterations. And the scarabs survived into this one because they're a fun gimmick, but kind of independently of what the movie's supposed to be about, they're a fun gimmick. Fun, but they don't make a lot of sense, because scarabs are, of course, dung beetles, and they were considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians, but not, like, dangerous. It was believed that the scarab beetle, like, all scarabs were male, and yet they were able to reproduce through a complicated thing to do with the big dung balls that they roll around. And I think it's in herodotus. Anyway, it doesn't matter, but this belief mirrored miracles reported about the god Capri, the idea of, like, self-creation was a divine quality. The details aren't really important, and that's good because I don't really know them. But the thing is that the scarab was considered to be like a wholesome sacred creature, not some kind of flesh eating monster. I mentioned that I'm surprised there's not a pyramid in this movie. I'm surprised there's not a cobra in this movie. Was there a cobra and I forgot about it? Or did they think it would be too like Indiana Jones? Now in previous episodes, talking about the mummy and talking about Cybermen as D&D monsters, we've talked about the idea of the archaeological horror story, the thing that is best left buried, the thing that is brought up to terrorize the world, but that represents, like, other things that are buried, right? Hidden sins, hidden secrets, you know, forbidden truths. That's not really the case here. This has some of the elements of an archaeological horror story, but it's ultimately not really a horror movie, even though it has a monster in it. It's action-adventure, it's filtered through action-adventure series, and it takes away all the stuff about death or guilt or colonialism or anything like that. I guess there was a little bit of the more traditional mummy character in Arnold Voslu's performance, but he behaves more like a sort of charismatic cult leader than anything else. It's got all the trappings of the classic mummy horror story, but it is something quite different. Now, when I say that, it sounds like I'm being critical, but I actually don't mean to be. The mummy has flaws for sure, but they are the flaws broadly of the pulp action-adventure genre. And is it a pastiche? It definitely has elements of pastiche in it. It exists at removes from all of its inspirations. Indiana Jones is inspired by Republic Syrials, and the mummy is inspired by Indiana Jones. The 1932 mummy is inspired by, well, honestly, inspired by the 19th century fiction about mummies and the curse of King Tut or whatever, which in turn are inspired by ancient Egypt, and in the 1999 mummy is inspired by the 1932 mummy. This sort of shouldn't work. It's combining multiple things that have superficial elements of similarity, like Indiana Jones and the mummy in 1932. They're both set in the interwar period, and they both have archaeologists, but they are thematically and conceptually very different. But it works anyway for reasons that I've talked about before, right? This is the strad principle. This is why horror movie monsters work fine in Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy action-adventure game, because they bring their spooky genre trappings with them, and the structure is actually not as important. Like the monster design in the mummy actually works better, in my view, for role-playing game purposes, at least for more conventional action-adventure role-playing game purposes, and a more serious or grounded version of the same concept would. The mummy represents well how a lot of fantasy games handle the inclusion of horror elements. These are action-adventure elements. They're just spooky action-adventure elements. And the spookiness, to some extent, comes from the associations that we have with them. I've mentioned this idea many times before, just now I call it the strad principle, and it's true. Strad von Zartovitch works as D&D's one of the flagship villains, because he brings with him our associations with his two main influences, which are hammer horror Dracula and Marvel Comics Dracula. And he comes preloaded with all of those associations in the same way that Imhotep comes loaded with the way we feel about Imhotep in the 1932 mummy, or about Christopher Lee, as guess the hammer horror mummy, about ancient Egypt generally that we regard it as a land of power and mystery, but only a tiny percentage of us really know anything at all about ancient Egyptian history. And then it mixes in all these other things that we have associations with them. The Bible, and Bojeste, and Lawrence of Arabia, and above all, Indiana Jones, even though those don't all specifically have anything to do with Egypt. But this is the strength of the pastiche, and again, I know that pastiche is a bit of a judgmental term, but in this context, I don't necessarily mean it that way, it's just that this story functions by reminding you of other things. So that being the case, can we take this principle and apply it to other kinds of storytelling, to things that are not mummy stories and ancient Egyptian stories, but just other fantasy action adventure stories. Like let's say we were doing something similar with Norse mythology or the Viking sagas, let's start with our 30 second association test, right? Norse myth creatures go. Okay, well, avalcaries. So immortal warriors would go with them. Wolves, ravens, a guy that turns into a bear, and a sea serpent. And then having picked these out, we can start to think about where they would fit into the different types of monsters that we've observed in films like the mummy. So the sea serpent, that's obviously going to be our escape monster, right? We're not the mighty Thor, so we can't fight a sea serpent. So this feels like a boat chase. Is this a period piece? Is it Vikings, escaping the serpent and a Viking ship? Like, I don't know, maybe, maybe the pre-credits sequence for our main villain, let's have the Valkyrie because that's like an immortal being with magical power. So that's a bit like a mummy thing. And then also because she just looks like a person, she can do a 1932 mummy and go like incognito. So we can meet this mysterious stranger and not know who she is and then find out that she's the Valkyrie. We can do the doomed love thing like with Bernhilda where she's supposed to take someone to Valhalla but she falls in love with them for their heroism. So the gods in prison are, but now she's been released by, you know, archaeologists opening up her burial mound or something. So we've got our master villain monster, the Valkyrie. And she's, you know, hunting a PC who's the reincarnated Norse hero that she was in love with her, whatever. We've got the ravens as our nuisance monster so they can act as spies. They could try to steal whatever enchanted due days the archaeologist dug up from the burial mound and then we need some guard monsters that our heroes have to like trick their way around to get into the villain's base. That obviously seems like it would be the wolves kind of patrolling, hunting by scent and maybe they have to like put on some wolf skins to confuse their noses or whatever. And if we want someone from the end of the fight, well, we've got guy that turns into a bear. So this is, you know, some other ancient Norse warrior that was buried alongside her or whatever. Or like, she awakens the curse of berserkers in some modern day person. You know, maybe that's the big fight for when the PC who's the reincarnation of the ancient Norse hero learns how to use the ancient sword they found or maybe that's the secondary antagonist that the less magically reincarnated PCs can take on while the reincarnated one fights the Valkyrie or doesn't fight her probably. Actually, maybe one of them is the archaeologist, but if this is a the mummy deal, we want more of like a rough and tough action hero soldier a fortune kind of character rather than like a nerd. We can have a nerd just one archaeologist. So maybe like, uh, okay, it's World War II and they are Norwegian resistance fighters hiding out in remote areas of the Norwegian countryside, which is how they find this like undisturbed Viking grave or whatever. So if we need to have a shootout at the beginning to show how tough they are, they can like ambush the Germans or something like that. And maybe we can have like a bad German archaeologist who's going to dig up the burial mound even though the locals are like, oh, and we should never dig it up, you know, the Norwegian culture ministry like new enough to maybe just leave it alone. This setup probably lends itself to the Valkyrie being a little more sympathetic than emo-tep. Like at the very end, she realizes that the courage she had might have so much as being used to resist her and so she passes away. Maybe she like watches the heroes fighting the Germans and learns that they are worthy inheritors, Yada Yada, or like she's being manipulated by the evil archaeologist because he thinks he can give her the reincarnated soul if he catches the good guy who's reincarnated something like that. Right. And you know what? That sounds like a pretty decent sort of pulp adventure scenario. And I think that this idea is a fun challenge, right? Pick a mythology, pick a monster, choose the first three or four and silly monsters and challenges that come to mind and you got yourself an adventure movie and it can be pretty episodic because adventure movies like The Serials and Diamond Novels and pulp magazines that inspired them are pretty episodic in the main. While I was going over this, it occurred to to me that one thing that's very interesting about the mummy and the wolf man, and I guess the creature from the Black Lagoon, is that unlike some of the other universal movie monsters, they are not derived from any kind of original source text. So like Dracula and Frankenstein, Zmonster, they come from novels, and I guess so does the invisible man. But others like the wolf man and the mummy and the creatures of the Black Lagoon, they're not based on any one text. They're based on like a monster tradition. So new adaptations or reimagining don't feel any drive to go back to any kind of or text, which is why when you look at different versions of the mummy, we really just have the one recurring concept, which is the reincarnated pre-stess, princess, whatever bit, and not any like reoccurring narrative elements because they're not based on a single coherent narrative. Like there's a character called Ardeth Bay in the 1999 mummy, and there's a character called Ardeth Bay in the 1932 mummy, but they have nothing to do with each other. They don't have anything to call them except for the name. Ardeth Bay in the 1932 mummy is the alias that Imhotep uses when he's pretending to be an Egyptologist, which is maybe like for all you carloft heads, calling the character played by Odette Fair, Ardeth Bay in the 1999 mummy might have been a way of signaling, hey, this is a bad guy, so that it's like a little switch when he turns out to be good. By contrast, the gimmick of Imhotep's mummification and his doomed passion for Anoksunamun is pretty much the same in both stories. To the point where the idea of the reincarnated princess breaks containment and appears in mummy stories that are not part of the universal movie monster kind of world, although having said that, if you wanted to tell me that this reincarnation motif appears in 19th or early 20th century mummy stories which are often a bit mystical and usually like the curse element 'cause that's really like a thing from the 20s, I would believe you. I have talked about these in more detail, I think of the other mummy episodes and maybe even recommended, you know, some people's writing on them. I honestly don't remember, but I have, I did at one point know a lot more about pre-King Tut mummy fiction and I've got my notes on it around here somewhere. A good example of this is the mummy film directed by Russell Mulcai, director of Highlander. Sometimes you'll see it under the title Talos, the mummy, sometimes as tale of the mummy or even just Russell Mulcai's the mummy and it has a fun twist. It's much more of a horror movie. I otherwise don't remember anything about it. It probably has some melodramatic use of light and shadow but I did already say Russell Mulcai. The key point here is that this element is now part of the core identity of the monster but so much of the rest of it is in flux. Like if you come up with a new the mummy movie, there's this new one coming out and I know nothing about it, I haven't seen it, et cetera. If you come up with a new mummy movie, you're not even doing like a take on the mummy. You're just doing an entry in the tradition in the set of stories about this monster because it's not Frankenstein where everything's a take on the original because there is, I mean, the original has no more weight or validity to it than anything else. The Boris Karloff mummy doesn't know anything about mummies or Egypt that you don't and indeed it doesn't know a great many things that you do. So this was a bit of a grab bag of thoughts inspired by 1999 to the mummy but I hope it's been interesting to have thought provoking and I hope you try out that little exercise of creating action adventure monster sets. I'm thinking about this in particular in terms of designing scenarios for my like pulp grave project where I need small groups of antagonists that each fulfill different roles. It doesn't mean no good to have like fight monster and then bigger fight monster. Each one needs to be unique in its like game play role and so it was very interesting for me to see that that's kind of how monsters work and Steven Summers is 1999 the mummy. All right, that's about all the time that we have to talk about the mummy today. So Mari, thank you very much as always for your continued support and I hope that you enjoyed today's episode. Everyone else, if you'd like to be like Marry and get your own special episode, don't forget that all you have to do is head on down to patreon.com/monsterman and pledge at the five dollar level. In our next episode, we will be returning to the world of crin and looking at a long awaited monster from the Dragon Lance Monsters Companion Appendix. I'm speaking of course of the Kender. Can I really say that the Kender are monsters? Yes, yes I can. So I hope that you will join me then right here on Monster Man. Show about monsters because monsters are great. Thank you for listening. If you've got a favorite monster or something you'd like me to talk about, why not get in touch? I'm on Twitter as @ganzohistory on mastodon as [email protected] or you can find me on Instagram at monstermanganzo or drop me an email at [email protected]. Our theme music is an extract from "Solve the Damned Mystery" by Jesse Spalain from the album "Decent of the Gubber Monster" and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Our cover art is by Ray Otis. Thanks for listening and please join me next time for Monster Man. I show about monsters because monsters are great.