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I recently visited Queen Hatshepsut, the model for the mummy in The Awakening and the novel it’s based on: Bram Stoker’s wild horror/fantasy The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker was with me in spirit in Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum, wearing a wrinkled black frock coat as we studied the ghostly gray CT scans of the pharaoh queen’s insides (her nostrils stuffed with spices) and generally perused the shrunken bone-and-meat sticks that still somehow exude power. In 1903, riding a wave of Egyptomania that set Victorian imaginations on fire, Dracula’s creator brought forth a new hunter from the undead: a mummified Egyptian queen in need not of blood but of a body, her restless life force preserved among the stars, waiting for the needed alignment of constellations to make herself flesh again. The book has morphed into at least four films.
Mike Newell’s feature debut—Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter still worlds away—is uneven but generates moments of true horror, especially in the first act, shot on location in the Egyptian desert. Archeologist Matthew Corbeck (an ever-sweaty, giddy Charlton Heston) has been after the queen for years, scouring the martianscape for her burial complex: “It’s got to be here somewhere!” He spends every day in the field with his perky blonde assistant, Jane (Susannah York in a pixie haircut—it’s 1961—and somewhat culturally insensitive short shorts), while his afterthought pregnant wife, Anne (Jill Townsend), kills time at base camp flipping through fashion mags and being jealous.
A mysteriously falling rock leads Corbeck and Jane to a sand-swept stone bearing an inscription begging to be ignored: “Beware the man who comes from under northern skies and shall let loose that evil once more upon the world.” The local robed lumpen are called up, pickaxes at the ready, chanting and clapping, and the excavation begins. Here’s where the Stoker-esque—the predatory lust for life beyond its bounds, the physiological detail, the irresistible force of the alpha personality—blossoms. Newell cuts away from the tomb to a wide shot of Anne back in the empty, dusty camp, standing all alone with a parasol among the workers’ tents—a Paul Bowles vision of alienation. A sound suddenly rings out like a shot, and she doubles over in pain as if taking a bullet to the stomach, parasol bouncing away in the wind. Now we go back to Corbeck in the desert and understand that the noise is his frenzied pounding with a sledgehammer on the stone door of the tomb. Each blow is crosscut with a violent contraction in Anne’s gut: she’s going into premature labor. Newell is far from the novel’s plotline here but right on Stoker’s wavelength: the husband is somehow smashing into his wife’s womb as well as the tomb.
That night, she’s rushed off to a Cairo hospital in the bed of a truck, her face locked in a trance. To the doctor’s shock, Corbeck leaves his wife and returns to the dig. We see her from high above, about to give birth, legs spread and hung in the stirrups, surrounded by foreigners in white coats. As the doctor approaches and extends the forceps, the film cuts back to Corbeck and Jane descending the long, dark stairwell into the queen’s crypt. Then to the hospital: “Where’s my baby?” Anne cries. But it’s a stillborn, lying dead on a metal tray in drying blood and foam. Cut to the crypt: Corbeck and Jane are in the inner sanctum now, and Corbeck lifts the lid of the sarcophagus. We hear the baby start to cry. A wonderful close-up shows it licking its lips like an animal. Something has indeed been let loose, just as the inscription warned, through the portal of the forgotten wife’s uterus. As a little kid who somehow got into the theater in 1980, I was pretty much done at this point.
The film jumps forward, and daughter Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist) is now turning 18, the age at which the pharaoh queen died. Though pretty and sweet, something is a little off with Margaret: she spooks animals and shows signs of schizophrenia. When she asks her father about the life of the ancient queen, Corbeck says, “She was a very bad little lady”—and we get the sense that Margaret is also going to be a very bad little lady very soon: the last of the 31 solar eclipses needed for the mummy queen’s resurrection is about to occur (the film was released on October 31). Only the rest of the story never regains the sick magic of the beginning. Newell himself later said the movie was “utterly terrible,” but the first act belies that judgment.
Back in the Cairo museum, my imaginary Stoker points with his walking stick to Hatshepsut’s left hand, raised just above her chest, its leathery fingers looking just soft enough to move. The pharaoh queen’s hand becomes almost a minor character in its own right in The Jewel of Seven Stars after being severed from her body by grave robbers—a detail possibly born of a story Stoker’s mother used to tell of having to hack off the hand of an intruder with an ax during a cholera epidemic. The Awakening passes over the hand—except for one shocker moment—but a different film based on Stoker’s tale takes the hand theme and runs with it. The cosmic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), which feels like a lost Star Trek episode set in groovy ’70s London, is also worth a watch. 
is a freelance writer and director who lived in Moscow for many years. He directed the documentary feature Stalin Thought of You.
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