Empire Down: The Mummy/The Man Who Could Cheat Death

The Mummy is a challenge for Hammer. It doesn’t give them a classic novel to fall back on, even a messy one like Dracula. The Universal movie lacks the powerful iconography of Frankenstein or Bela Lugosi’s deliciously campy performance in Dracula (or for that matter, The Bride of Frankenstein’s brilliant queer revisionism). Indeed, Universal’s The Mummy is the clear weak link of the “trilogy” of horror classics Hammer is adapting, dominated by outrageous Orientalism and not much else.

It keeps the most interesting part of the original movie, which Francis Ford Coppola stole for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (although it lacks a killer line like “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you.”) But unlike Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the woman doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. She is simply there to get leared at and menaced. Lacking emotional grounding in the plot isn’t exactly a criticism I’m going to start making of Hammer at this point (I’ve said nice things about The Revenge of Frankenstein), but in lieu of a love story, we’re left with some Hammer antics and a plot that exclusively centers around the horror of Egyptian things creeping into pastoral English life.

Peter Cushing sells this as always. Terence Fisher and co. produce as many memorable sequences as ever. But it’s hard to get invested in a movie this racist when the things it does well are done better elsewhere.

So far, Hammer’s films have fucked around with death, telling stories about repressed things returning, or things that should be dead failing to be dead. With The Man Who Could Cheat Death, we’re faced with a man who’s only slightly over the usual mortal limit, at slightly over a century. It’s gothic more in plot than aesthetics.

So we get a proper mad scientist plot from Hammer (Frankenstein clearly isn’t mad, he’s just a dick), and The Man Who Could Cheat Death handles it quite well. Flashes of Doctor Who are visible in this — I thought of The Ark in Space while writing about this. Not a forgotten masterpiece of Hammer, but a solid piece of horror.