"Mummy will make it all better": Boo-boos on Mummy Movie Sets

What can you say about Tutankhamun (King Tut to friends and fans)? He became ruler of Egypt at the age of 9, married his half-sister, erected a bunch of monuments (as Pharaohs liked to do back then), reinstated the god Amun to the top of the divine hierarchy, restored friendly relations with some nearby kingdoms, and then promptly died at the ripe old age of 19. He was buried in a relatively economy-sized tomb (probably because he inconveniently kicked off before something grander was ready) and was promptly forgotten, even by the ancient Egyptians, until he was unearthed by archaeologist Howard Carter and moneyman and English Lord George Herbert in 1922.

Tutankhamun, King of the Mummies!

Given that we live in a society where the vast majority of us don't know much about history and couldn't find Egypt on a map to save our couch potato lives, it's hard to imagine that the discovery created much of a stir... but it did. It was in all the papers (thanks Egypt, for giving us papyrus!), and artifacts from Tut's tomb have pretty much been traveling around the globe ever since. For those who think about these things, Tutankhamun's spectacular mummy mask is one of the most iconic, recognizable images of ancient Egypt in the world, and will probably stay that way. Pretty good for a skinny boy-king who was the product of incest and suffered from, among other things, Marfan syndrome, Wilson-Turner X-linked mental retardation syndrome, Fröhlich syndrome (adiposogenital dystrophy), Klinefelter syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome, aromatase excess syndrome in conjunction with sagittal craniosynostosis syndrome, Antley–Bixler syndrome or one of its variants and temporal lobe epilepsy. (Holy cow!)

But better yet, the frail boy-king is directly responsible for the classic mummy movies that horror film mavens like you and me enjoy to this very day (and no, I'm not talking about those despicable Brendon Fraser CGI abominations). It's pretty much guaranteed that when you put a Pharaonic curse on your tomb, and thousands of years later defilers of that tomb seem to drop like flies not long after raiding it, Hollywood will jump on the story faster than jackals on fresh meat.

For skeptics, here's what happened to the "flies" who defied King Tut's curse (from Wikipedia)

• Lord Carnarvon, financial backer of the excavation team who was present at the tomb's opening, died on 5 April 1923 after a mosquito bite became infected; he died 4 months and 7 days after the opening of the tomb.
• George Jay Gould I, a visitor to the tomb, died in the French Riviera on 16 May 1923 after he developed a fever following his visit.
• Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey of Egypt died 10 July 1923: shot dead by his wife.
• Colonel The Hon. Aubrey Herbert, MP, Carnarvon's half-brother, became nearly blind and died on 26 September 1923 from blood poisoning related to a dental procedure intended to restore his eyesight.
• Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid, a radiologist who x-rayed Tutankhamun's mummy, died on 15 January 1924 from a mysterious illness.
• Alexander King, an American promoter and exhibitor of some of the more valuable artifacts from the tomb, died on 18 October 1924 after being thrown down a flight of steps by a mysterious intruder.
• Sir Lee Stack, Governor-General of Sudan, died on 19 November 1924: assassinated while driving through Cairo.
• A. C. Mace, a member of Carter's excavation team, died in 1928 from arsenic poisoning
• The Hon. Mervyn Herbert, Carnarvon's half brother and the aforementioned Aubrey Herbert's full brother, died on 26 May 1929, reportedly from "malarial pneumonia".
• Captain The Hon. Richard Bethell, Carter's personal secretary, died on 15 November 1929: found smothered in his bed.
• Richard Luttrell Pilkington Bethell, 3rd Baron Westbury, father of the above, died on 20 February 1930; he supposedly threw himself off his seventh floor apartment.
• Howard Carter opened the tomb on 16 February 1923, and died well over a decade later on 2 March 1939; however, some have still attributed his death to the "curse".

Okay, so I embellished the list with a rip-off from Hammer's The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964; know which one?), but it's still impressive in an avenging-bony-spectral-hand-of-death-reaches-out-from-the-tomb kind of way. As they say, truth is often stranger than fiction. Tutankhamun's curse clearly precipitated some of the more enjoyable Universal and Hammer horrors of the 20th century's mid-section. I'm not prepared to say that it's responsible for the mummy movie mishaps listed here, but are you 100% sure it's not?

"He nearly killed me! He took my breath away!"

Poor Creighton Tull Chaney! The son of the Man of a Thousand faces had big shoes to fill. Born into a tumultuous and fractured show business family, he spent his boyhood years living in an assortment of homes and boarding schools until his remarried (not to mention cold and distant) father could provide a stable home life. Led to believe as a child that his mother was dead, he discovered years later that she was still alive when Lon Sr. died in 1930. Quickly typecast by Universal in monster roles and dubbed Lon Chaney Jr. to take advantage of his father's mystique, Junior rode the long Hollywood slide from celebrated character and leading roles (Of Mice and Men, The Wolf Man) to such micro-budget quickies as Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) and Al Adamson's execrable Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) at the end. His legendary drinking on the set didn't help.

If in the space of a few short years you'd traded in your dapper leading man's suit and wolf's head cane for the tattered, Fuller's earth-splattered bandages of the mute, shuffling bottom-of-the-bill Mummy, you might have been driven to drink too. And you might even have taken it out on your fellow cast members:

"Okay Lon, you can stop now... Lon? Lon!!!"

"In shooting the scene where the Mummy strangles Prof. Norman, Chaney seized actor Frank Reicher's throat 'and squeezed so forcefully that Reicher nearly fainted,' [Director Reginald] LeBorg told us. 'Reicher was an old man and frail, and Chaney got carried away.' Reicher cried out, 'He nearly killed me! He took my breath away!' There is evidence of this in the film itself [The Mummy's Ghost, 1944]: In the few frames where Reicher's face is visible as Chaney chokes him, the pinched expression on the older actor's face looks uncomfortably real.

LeBorg told Greg Mank in Cinefantastique: 'Reicher very nearly was unconscious! He was moaning on the floor... Chaney had just become carried away-- he was putting everything he had into the monster. Luckily, Reicher didn't complain. ... We massaged his neck and gave him some water. But the next day, when I saw him again, I spied a look at Reicher's neck, and you could see he had spots there, from the strangling!'" [Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, 2nd. Ed., McFarland, 2007]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

"Don't worry, it won't hurt your skin..."

Does the name Virginia Christine mean anything to you? (Virginia who?) Well, I'm a big fan, because Virginia represents two of my very favorite things -- mummy movies and coffee. She not only had the privilege of being in one of the creepiest scenes in all of classic horror, but she became the patron saint of coffee drinkers everywhere during her 21 year stint as the kindly Mrs. Olson in Folgers commercials. She was a newly minted starlet in 1944 when she played the revivified Princess Ananka in The Mummy's Curse. And what a way to come back from the dead-- deep in the muck of the Louisiana bayous! I hope there was lots of coffee and other amenities on the set, because few actresses would have put up with what she had to go through:

"We shot the film, and then came the last day of shooting when I change from a mummy to a lovely Egyptian princess. All through the picture, [makeup artist] Jack [Pierce] kept coming on the set, saying, 'I'm using something new on you, Virginia. It's going to be terrific! Don't worry, it won't hurt your skin.' I was very young and 'It won't hurt your skin' began to ring in my ears. I was a basket case the night before shooting. ... I was there at four or five in the morning, and sat in the makeup chair for five-and-one-half hours. He started with pieces of cotton dipped in witch hazel to fill in all the youthful lines. Then, he lined it with an orange stick to make the wrinkles. That had to be dried. And then came the Denver mudpack, and that had to be dried. He worked a little patch at a time. Unfortunately, we made a mistake in wardrobe because we left the arms bare, which meant that the arms had to be done, too, and the hands... every place the skin was exposed. It was a tedious, long process. And, of course the natural thing happened... I had to go to the bathroom.  ...  I couldn't smile, I couldn't laugh. I couldn't talk. And I got the giggles in the john. It was so ridiculous! ...

After 3000 years, Princess Ananka is done with her
mudpack and is ready for a stone massage.

After the full session, they put me in a cart and took me out to the back lot. Very carefully, they dug a hole, my height, right in the dirt. For any big star, they would have sifted the sand and done it on the stage, and had it cleaned. They laid me down in the thing and covered me with burnt cork which photographs like dirt. They turned the hose on so the dried cork got wet and looked like the earth around it. I laid there with this much of me exposed and thought, 'Oh God, how many creepy, crawly things are in this with me?'" [Ibid.]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

And he never played the Mummy again.

If you're a regular reader of this blog (and I hope you are), then you know that Christopher Lee's resume extends far beyond his work in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact, ol' Chris' film resume is very, very lengthy, extending all the way back to the late 1940s. This man does not know the meaning of the word 'retirement.' Discriminating film buffs are OK with that LOTR CGI-fest stuff, but really appreciate Lee's contributions as the greatest technicolor Dracula of all-time. Like Lon Chaney Jr., who played the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and Dracula for Universal, Lee was the go-to guy and master of monsters for Hammer's Universal horror reboots, playing the Frankenstein monster and the Mummy for Hammer as well as the immortal Count. Unlike poor Lon Jr., he only played the Mummy once, and that was enough, thank you very much:

Getting impaled was the least of Christopher Lee's
worries on the set of The Mummy (1959).

"In one sequence, Lee, in Mummy garb, smashes through a door which the production crew had mistakenly locked and bolted. Lee broke through the almost unforgiving door, but the impact dislocated his shoulder. This was not the end of his discomfort. Lee later broke through a window with real glass substituted for the commonly used, and relatively safe, sugar glass. The glass slivers from the collision pierced through his mummy bandages like needles. Lee also had some problems in a scene in which he carried actress Yvonne Furneaux over 80 yards at night. In a Scarlet Street (#8) interview, Lee described the incident.

'That was one of the toughest things, physically, I think I've ever had to do. I did things in that film that Mr. Schwarzenegger might have found difficult to do. I wouldn't have believed that I could literally bend down and lift somebody off the ground, but I did it when somebody said, action! Of course, I pulled all the muscles in my neck and shoulders...' " [John 'J.J.' Johnson, Cheap Tricks and Class Acts: Special Effects, Makeup and Stunts from the Films of the Fantastic Fifties, McFarland, 1996]

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

Phantom of the Sci-Fi Soap Opera

Now Playing: The Projected Man (1966)

Pros: Some suspense and pathos materialize towards the end; Relatively effective monster make-up
Cons: Lackadaisical love triangle; Villains’ motives are unclear; Intriguing aspects of teleportation are unexplored

What is life without taking risks? No life at all, for even the most staid and cautious among us have to realize that simply moving around and engaging in any sort of activity, no matter how mundane, entails some level of risk. The baby takes a chance with its first steps. The common commuter takes daily risks driving or riding to work. Even the most hidebound, obsessive-compulsive creature of habit has risked more than he or she cares to think about – after all, there had to be a first time, and an element of risk, however small, in that behavior or practice that through repetition has become an unexamined part of everyday life.

Of course there’s risk, and then there’s batsh*t crazy dangerous. I am a science fiction fan of long-standing. Heck, I was there, dagnabbit!, sitting cross-legged in front of the old black and white TV when the crew of the Enterprise went where no man has gone before for the very first time! (September 8, 1966 for those who are counting). So you know I’ve watched and read some crazy stuff over the years, and then inevitably wondered “what if?” Board a starship and zip across the universe at greater-than-light warp speed? Sign me up! Travel through time to the age of the dinosaurs or the far future? Where’s my camera? Have all the atoms that make up the unique, irreplaceable person I call me scanned, disassembled, teleported, then reassembled at a distant location? Wait, hold up, don’t even think about touching that lever!

Pizza delivery of the future:
"Get it in 30 milliseconds or less or it's free!" ®

Demonstrate this technology to me using a rock, or bottle, or maybe a model of the starship Enterprise, and I’ll be very, very impressed. But I have to think that a living organism, especially a human being, is more than just the sum of its parts. Dammit, we’re not furniture kits from IKEA to be hauled off and reassembled somewhere! No matter how quick and efficient, teleportation is the ultimate risky form of travel. You can buy a toothbrush if you lose it in transit, but what about your soul (or your unique consciousness for those of a less religious persuasion)?

By the 23rd century of the Star Trek universe, we’re asked to believe that no one gave the metaphysics of “beam me up” a second thought. Like elevators, transporters were just another ho-hum daily means of transportation, a device to quickly get those red-shirted crewmen down on the surface of a new planet where they could be eaten, mangled or otherwise abused by the local fauna. Sure accidents happened, just like the occasional elevator accident, but who’s going to let an astronomically small chance of being reassembled inside-out get in the way of such convenience?

Come to think of it, my all-time favorite Star Trek character, Leonard “Bones” McCoy, was famously leery of transporters (but then he was grumpy about a lot of things, thus my identification with the character). Perhaps by the time he got to Star Fleet Academy, McCoy had done the mental calisthenics around the whole concept and come to some horrifying conclusions – like the character Badger on Breaking Bad, whose weed-fueled monologue on the perverse risks of transporters (and misuse in pie-eating contests) attracted a lot of attention when it was aired.

While George Langelaan’s 1957 short story “The Fly” was not the first to feature scientific teleportation, the first movie it inspired, The Fly (1958, directed by Kurt Neumann and starring David Hedison and Vincent Price) certainly helped to move the concept front and center into popular consciousness. (Supposedly the original film and its teleportation concept were brought to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s attention as a cost effective way to move his characters around fictional worlds.) David Cronenberg’s thought-provoking 1986 remake further highlighted the technological risks in a very intense and graphic way (while also suggesting the dangers of relying too much on computer programs and artificial “intelligence”).

The Projected Man is no The Fly, or even on par with an average episode of the original Star Trek series. But it does feature a couple of fairly suspenseful moments and at least tries to leave the monster that emerges from the botched teleportation attempt with a little bit of its humanity intact.

Dr. Steiner (Bryant Haliday, left) is under the gun from the
weaselly foundation director to produce results or else.

The plot: Genius physicist Dr. Paul Steiner (Bryant Haliday) and his assistant Dr. Chris Mitchel (Ronald Allen) are on the verge of perfecting a laser-based system for turning matter into pure energy, storing it in a receiving cell, then projecting it wherever they want. At first they’re elated when they successfully project a live guinea pig. Elation turns to disappointment when Steiner touches it and it promptly dies, giving him a shock in the process. Inexplicably, the imperious director of the foundation that they work for, Dr. Blanchard (Norman Wooland) threatens to pull the project's funding if they don’t make more progress, and fast (like teleporting inanimate matter is just routine—no, nothing to see here folks, can’t think of any lucrative applications for that! There’s some speculation between Steiner and Mitchel that Blanchard is jealous of Steiner’s success, but that doesn’t explain at all why the director would sit on the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time.)

Steiner brings in a former colleague, pathologist Patricia Hill (Mary Peach), to help sort out the issues with projecting living organisms. At first the young, attractive doctor doesn’t seem to be too impressed as Steiner explains the technology. But when the team disintegrates her watch and brings it back again, she finally gets excited and deems the whole thing “incredible!” All three seem dumbfounded when they see the hands of the rematerialized watch spinning around the dial. When Hill touches it and gets a shock, the hands spin even faster.

"What part of 'Danger! High Voltage'
did you not understand?"

A lot of jargon gets thrown around about “changes in the direction and polarity” of the transporter chamber’s magnetic field and needing a “time phase adjustment,” but the scientists seem to think they’re on to something. Applying what they’ve learned, they try to project another living animal, this time a monkey. After it materializes seemingly fit and healthy (and shock-free), Patricia gives it the most cursory of examinations and declares success. Meanwhile, Blanchard meets with a shadowy but apparently well-connected co-conspirator to work out a nefarious scheme to discredit Steiner. Blanchard arranges for world-renowned physicist and Steiner’s mentor Prof. Lembach (Gerard Heinz) to attend a teleportation demonstration – one that they will conveniently sabotage. Steiner protests that he’s not ready, but goes along to keep his funding. To add to his distraction, Patricia and Mitchel seem to be getting along quite well. He brushes off suggestions that he has feelings for the attractive pathologist, but the budding romance obviously bothers him. Of course, the demonstration for Lembach goes disastrously wrong in a shower of sparks and flame. Mitchel notices that a vital piece of equipment has been purposely corroded with acid and alerts the disconsolate senior scientist. They work feverishly to get the equipment back up and running.

"Hold still, you've got something on your face."

At a dinner party Blanchard is holding for Lembach at his townhouse, Steiner protests that his equipment’s been sabotaged, but the smug director declares that the project is dead nonetheless. Steiner verifies that the dinner guests will be sticking around the townhouse for the next couple of hours and storms out. He rushes back to the lab and grabs bubble-headed receptionist Sheila (Tracy Crisp) to help project him in dramatic fashion right into Blanchard’s dining room (there’s no time to round up Mitchel and Hill and do things by the book). Naturally, the projection doesn’t go quite as planned, and Steiner ends up in a dark alley outside of Blanchard’s place, one side of his face and a hand horribly burned. And, he’s a walking power generator who can kill with a mere touch. Not to mention, he’s mightily pissed off (I guess I’d be upset too). The Projected Man fritters away a lot of suspense in its first two-thirds with duplicative lab scenes, a desultory, oddly dispassionate love triangle, and an unconvincing Snidely-Whiplash villain (Blanchard) whose motivations are obscure to say the least. (Is he trying to steal Steiner’s work? Is he working for a foreign government? Is he just jealous? Get a grip man! You don’t sabotage something that can make you world-famous and a billionaire!)

In the last third the film gets dark (literally and figuratively) and becomes more horror than sci-fi film. When I watched the projected Steiner, a cloth covering the ruined part of his face, confronting lovebirds Mitchel and Hill in the assistant scientist’s apartment, an image of Herbert Lom in Hammer’s version of The Phantom of the Opera (1962) beamed into my brain. Like Lom’s Phantom (and Claude Rains’ in Universal’s 1943 version), Steiner is a genius whose work has been stolen by an unscrupulous higher-up, and in trying to get it back (along with his dignity), he’s inadvertently turned himself into a monster. There’s a moment of pathos in the apartment scene when Steiner, his burned face turned toward a darkened window, listens for a moment to Mitchel and Hill pleading to let them help him. But Steiner won’t have it—he’s literally got bigger fish to fry. As Steiner stalks off, Mitchel tries to console Patricia and himself: “Think of him as the projected man who has nothing in common with Paul Steiner.” It's an interesting concept — are you still you after your atoms have been scrambled and reassembled? – that is left largely unexplored in the rush to get to the B movie climax.

The Phantom of the Projection Lab
shows up at Mitchel's apartment.

Projected Man Bryant Haliday made only a handful of films, most of them horror/sci-fi for UK B producer Richard Gordon (as the Great Vorelli in Devil Doll, 1964; Voodoo Blood Death, aka Curse of the Voodoo, 1965; and Horror on Snape Island, aka Tower of Evil, 1972). Unlike many B movie actors who saw these films as just a paycheck and preferred to forget about them, Haliday was a big horror movie fan.

In Tom Weaver’s The Horror Hits of Richard Gordon (BearManor Media, 2011), Gordon (who didn’t produce the film himself but put together the deal for the double-bill of The Projected Man and Island of Terror with Peter Cushing) paid Haliday a great compliment:

"I thought Bryant was very effective and handled his role extremely well. Towards the end, he was actually able to arouse the sympathy of the audience and did not come across as just a monster on a killing spree. It reminded me of so many films in which Boris Karloff had played a scientist who becomes a monster through no fault of his own, as opposed to Bela Lugosi who was usually an outright villain. In fact, you might say that Bryant paid tribute to the memory of Bela in Devil Doll and Karloff in The Projected Man! As for the female lead, Mary Peach, she became Mrs. Jimmy Sangster in the 1990s, and the last time I saw her was with Sangster at one of the FANEX conventions in Baltimore [July 1997]. When I mentioned The Projected Man, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about that film!’ – I think she didn’t want to appear to have been a horror film leading lady and become a part of that ‘clan’..."

Somewhat like the mutated results of a covered-up top secret experiment, The Projected Man is only whispered about in dark alleyways by hard-core sci-fi fans. It’s no The Fly, but it hardly deserves the obscurity into which it’s been teleported.

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Where to find it:

Sinister Cinema


"Science runs amok when human beings tamper with unknown forces!"