I’m including this
category only for the sake of completeness; otherwise, it would have looked conspicuous
by its absence. Mummies are my least favorite movie monster. I mean, I still
like them and will watch them, but I’m always disappointed in the execution; I
don’t think we’ve yet seen the Citizen Kane of Mummy
movies.
The problem with mummies is that
we’ve moved past their cultural relevance. During the heyday, when Orientalism
and Egyptology were in vogue, and new grave robbing—excuse me, archeological
expeditions—yielded weekly finds in the newspapers, at a time when Egypt might
as well have been Mars for all the common man knew, and these British
plunderers were all too happy to ignore the warnings about disturbing the dead
and cracking open tombs, well, sure, mummies were the shit.
Think about it: Empirical Britain,
with its indulgent, institutionalized Colonialism, with its foot still on the
neck of the British Raj in India, and now encroaching into Egypt to show the
turban-wearing desert folk a thing or two about their five thousand year old
culture. All too eager to overwrite Egyptian history through a British lens.
What better way to punish these stiff-upper-lip-having, upper crust professors
and their landed gentry friends than by having something from another culture’s
history throttle the life out of them? The thing you pooh-poohed as being a
silly superstition isn’t so silly when it’s crashing through your door, now, is
it?
