Night #123 - Box Office Archaeology

Or, Mummies in the Movie Theatre.

Let's face it, the mummy is interwoven deeply and irrevocably with the Night at the Museum franchise, not to mention The Mummy, Tale of the Mummy, and popular consciousness in general. But how much does Hollywood get right?

Not much, to be honest. Hollywood loves the (fictional) stories of curses and cruel emperors, slavery and pyramid power. I've touched on this before, but it's worth reiterating here: as much as ancient Egyptians believed in magic, magic didn't exist, at least not in the way special effects artists get paid to make it look the way they do.

But by far the most popular object of Hollywood's Egyptomania is the mummy. Long-ish time readers of my blog are familiar with Mummypocalypse, I should hope, and so should know that I spilled a lot of beans over the exact nature of the mummy, but the mummy's portrayal in Hollywood deserves a mention here, as well, being both relevant to the subject at hand (Night at the Museum) and the culture that makes a concept like Night at the Museum's possible.

Mummies are on par with zombies when it comes to movie monsters: more often than not, they're resurrected dead people, and by necessity they are resurrected long-dead people. It's usually a curse or other form of magic which brings these mummies to life in the modern world, and the mummy may become obsessed with obtaining everlasting life here in this realm rather than the hereafter. Of course, sometimes the mummy is not evil (for example, Ahkmenrah), but this is a very rare instance. After all, dead things coming back to life is seen (at least in Western culture) as the Devil's work, especially taking into consideration the magic element, which Western religion has a long and colorful history of demonizing. And of course, once it's alive again, it wants to stay that way (Imhotep, who also wants to use dark magic to resurrect his dead girlfriend; also, Talos of Tale of the Mummy). Therefore, mummies have a great tendency to cause problems in the movie-verse, especially for the select few protagonists who actually know about their power and the power that created them and can actually do anything about stopping them.

Mummies, and other reanimate dead things, are vastly underrepresented and receive such a bad rap from past movies that it truly is unbelievable.

Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": Surprise! Again.

Countdown: 250 Days to NATM 3.