-- The Mummy, 1932

People have been making the same mistake as Ralph Norton since the movies' earliest days.

They just never seem to learn that you ignore a mummy's curse at your own peril.

And for that you can blame Howard Carter, the Englishman who uncovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922 and unleashed Egypto-mania on the world. It seems he also unleashed the legend of the Curse of King Tut, which evolved as some of the archeologists who entered the famous tomb started dropping dead.

It really took off in 1923 when Carter's sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, died as the result of a mosquito bite that became infected. Legend has it that at the moment of his death, all the lights in Cairo went out.

But they also went on in the minds of movie producers who have been grinding out mummy movies ever since. The string continues this week with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the third in the popular film franchise starring Brendan Fraser.

Boris Karloff had a dual role in the original 1932 movie, as the mummy and wealthy Egyptian Ardath Bey.

It is also being played out with the recent video re-release of the 1932 classic The Mummy starring Hamilton's own Boris Karloff.

Well, he wasn't really Hamilton's own but he did work on a farm in Caledonia for six months in 1909 and later told The Spectator that he remembered coming into Hamilton every Saturday night for "a blowout."

Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in London, England, in 1887 and after six months in Caledonia headed west to Vancouver where he changed his name and started acting in local theatre troupes.

He trod the boards for 10 years before settling in Hollywood.

He appeared in about 70 movies during the next decade and in 1931 he became a 43-year-old sensation as The Monster in Frankenstein in 1931.

When Universal Pictures decided to make The Mummy the next year, Karloff was the natural choice to star based on his raging popularity.

His name was as big as the movie title in The Mummy theatre posters, which billed him as Karloff the Uncanny.

Karloff's wasn't the first mummy movie. The Internet Movie Database lists a dozen titles going back to a 1909 French short, The Mummy of King Rameses.

Little information is available on those titles other than that most were listed as shorts and comedies.

Karloff's The Mummy was the first major studio production to play off the sensation stirred up 10 years earlier by Tut's discovery.

The boy king's influence went way beyond archeology and ancient history into fashion, style and architecture. The styles of ancient Egypt are often cited as influences on the development of Art Deco.

It certainly inspired Hollywood and The Mummy soon joined Frankenstein and Dracula as the third member of Universal Pictures Unholy Horror Trinity in the early '30s. The Wolf Man (being remade with Benicio Del Toro for release in April) joined the team in 1941.

Taking on another major horror role all but sealed Karloff's movie future path in movies as a heavy.

In real life he was by all accounts a proper English gentleman/actor and in his younger days bore resemblance to current proper English gentleman/actor Jeremy Irons.

But good looks couldn't keep him from becoming an icon of American horror films, especially with Frankenstein and The Mummy being released one year apart.

Karloff had a long career from 1919 until his death at 81 in 1969. Unfortunately, he never found a role as good as either of his biggies.

But he never considered himself the victim of the mummy's curse.

"When I was nine I played the demon king in Cinderella and it launched me on a long and happy life of being a monster," he once told an interviewer. "The monster was the best friend I ever had."

Baby boomers might best know Karloff for his narration of the 1966 TV presentation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. He also appeared in many of Roger Corman's cheapie Edgar Allan Poe horror flicks, a couple of Beach Party movies and hosted Thriller, a weekly TV anthology of suspense tales in the early '60s.

In The Mummy, Karloff played an Egyptian priest, Imhotep, who was buried alive for falling in love with a princess. His mummy is discovered in a King Tut-like dig and brought back to life by the reading of an ancient scroll.

The revitalized Imhotep assumes the guise of wealthy Egyptian Ardath Bey, who is convinced his long-lost love has been reincarnated as a modern girl named Helen Grosvenor and he sets out to make her immortal so they can live together for eternity.

Unfortunately for Ms Grosvenor, and much to the chagrin of her fiance, Imhotep's plan requires that she must die in order to live forever.

That storyline made The Mummy much more of a romance tale than a horror film.

And Karloff spent far more time as Ardath Bey than the long-dead and dried-out mummy Hollywood has come to know and love.

But he introduced that popular image when the mummy comes back to life and the camera shows strips of wrappings dragging across the tomb floor.

It is that foot-dragging, mouldy-bandage-wrapped, living-dead creature that has survived in movie mummy lore.

It cemented itself in popular culture through films of increasingly diminishing value in the 1940s such as The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost and The Mummy's Curse.

The genre continued a downward spiral and entered spoof stage with Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy and The Three Stooges in Mummy's Dummies.

Britain's Hammer Films got its hooks into the mummy line in the late 1950s starting with Christopher Lee as The Mummy.

A Mexican film company brought the legend closer to home with a series of films featuring an Aztec mummy.

The first two Brendan Fraser mummy films have been the most successful of the genre, grossing almost $850 million worldwide and pumping more life into one of Hollywood's great horror heroes.

Which is good because we should always be nice to our mummies.

dfoley@thespec.com

905-526-3264