The Mummy

One of the horror films of the British studio Hammer. The year is 1895. A British excavation team finds a princess's tomb in Egypt. A local man warns them: the tomb must not be opened. They do not listen. The man leading the dig enters the burial chamber and sees something there; when he comes out he cannot speak and is committed to an asylum. Years later things begin in England. Those who took part in the excavation are killed one by one. The killer is a figure moving in a mass of bandages, and behind it stands someone directing it. The best scenes are in the flashback: the death of the princess, the crime committed by the priest and the embalming are shot in colour and in detail. Christopher Lee plays the mummy. The part has no dialogue; he builds the whole performance from movement and shows that the character was once a man. Peter Cushing plays the archaeologist. Terence Fisher directed. It belongs to the run in which Hammer remade the classic monsters; the colour and the direct violence were new at the time. Exactly right for anyone who likes classic horror and the Hammer style. For a viewer expecting the measures of horror today, the film is slow and builds its tension through its sets.