Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 107

The M u m m y

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creative failure as well. Boggs and Petrie note, ‘‘...the better the original, the higher
are the expectations of the audience for the remake or sequel, which almost always
fails to meet those expectations” (428). In particular, they go on to state, . .remakes
and sequels generally lack the freshness and creative dynamics of the original”
(429). Such films often end up, according to Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal,
constituting “ ...a particular territory existing somewhere between unabashed
larceny and subtle originality” (4).
Despite the scorn critics often visit upon such titles, they continue to pop
up with regularity. Part of the reason is probably related to the difficulty in creating
original material in a world in which written stories of every ilk have been available
to the masses for centuries. The over-the-air, cable, and satellite-delivered forms
of television which cram screens 24 hours a day also make it difficult to dream up
creative and compelling scenarios for the mass audience. If one accepts the tenets
of the ancient playwrights that all plotlines derive from one great story, or that
there is only a small number of basic narratives available, there is no wonder the
public will respond with attention whenever a writer or director come up with an
original spin on their tale.
Originating from the same studio, one recent example of the remake
process in action is Stephen Sommers’ 1999 version of Karl Freund’s 1932 Universal
Studios horror standard. The Mummy. The Mummy did not originate from a specific
literary predecessor as did Frankenstein’s creature and Count Dracula. Rather, most
film historians place the film’s foundation with the world-wide publicity surrounding
the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 and the associated “'"curse” that seemed
to follow members of the archeological team. According to Brunas, Brunas, and
Weaver’s Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 7Pi/-7P4d, the discovery
of the “boy king’s” burial tomb struck a chord with Universal’s Junior Laemmle in
early 1932.
This is not to say that no stories about mummies existed in the literature
prior to this time. Leslie Halliwell tells us that mummy stories stretched back at
least one hundred years before Tutankhamun’s tomb was breeched, including one
by Edgar Allan Poe (193). Tales penned by Theophile Gautier (‘T he Mummy’s
Foot”) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (“Lot No. 249” and “The Ring of Toth”) also
predate Junior Laemmle’s fervor for the subject. Indeed, Halliwell claims the Conan
Doyle story, “The Ring of Toth”, “...bears such a strong relationship to the 1932
film that its lack of a credit is quite shameful” (203). Nonetheless, it appears
questionable that anyone at Universal was familiar with these literary sources, for
it was not until forty years later that the studio began its own creation of what was
felt to be an original terror.
This began when Laemmle assigned the author Nina Wilcox Putnam and