Neil Gray
By 1964, Hammer’s Gothic machinery was running on instinct, guided less by inspired vision and more by the relentless momentum of commercial demand. The studio had resurrected monsters, seduced the dead, and given Technicolor blood a moral weight it hadn’t known before. Yet as The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb emerged from the venerable, dust-shrouded gates of Bray Studios, there was a strange fatigue in the air—the scent of repetition masked by incense, ancient embalming resins, and cheap celluloid dust.
This was Hammer’s second, and commercially necessary, foray into the sands of Egypt, following The Mummy (1959)—that exquisite collision of the sacred and the profane under Terence Fisher’s meticulous, theological direction. But this sequel, though visually lush and solidly crafted, conspicuously lacks Fisher’s soul, his ability to treat the monstrous as a matter of divine trespass. Instead, it stands as a curious, somewhat troubled echo—not quite outright parody, not quite genuine homage—a film haunted less by ancient, authentic curses than by the vast, looming shadow of Hammer’s own successful past.
It’s a story of cultural desecration, supernatural revenge, and the slow, inevitable death of wonder—a tragic collapse playing out both within the film’s narrative tomb and, metaphorically, within the heart of Hammer Films itself. The miracle had become a mandate.
The Tomb Reopened: From Sacrament to Spectacle
The story begins in achingly familiar territory: Egypt, 1900. The setting is instantly recognizable as the foundation of Gothic adventure: Archaeologists, self-styled imperial adventurers, and shameless opportunists descend on an ancient burial site—a sacred tomb immediately turned into a bustling theatre for academic ego and sheer capitalist greed.
The chief players are all proxies for colonial attitudes: Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim), the meticulous British academic; his daughter Annette (Jeanne Roland), the beautiful but secondary figure; and her fiancée John Bray (Ronald Howard), the competent, bland adventurer. They uncover the resting place of Ra-Antef, the cursed son of a Pharaoh betrayed in his youth—the perfect catalyst for a slow-burn supernatural vendetta.
Their dedicated work, however, is soon and violently disrupted by Alexander King (Fred Clark), a loud, cigar-chomping American showman who plans to exhibit the priceless, sacred artifacts across Europe like carnival attractions.
From its opening scenes, the film positions itself in an uncomfortable thematic tension between reverence and exploitation—an uneasy, unavoidable metaphor for Hammer itself in 1964. The sacred artifact and the commercial ticket are bound in the same dusty tomb. The Mummy isn’t the only thing desecrated here; so too is the Gothic ideal that, under Fisher, once treated such relics and curses with genuine spiritual awe.
King’s transatlantic swagger turns the entire expedition into a travelling freak show, complete with banners, ticket booths, and lurid, over-the-top promises of ancient terror. It is hard not to read this character and his actions as self-parody—Hammer, too, was now exporting its nightmares to America and the global market, packaging profound horror as disposable spectacle. The film is essentially punishing the character who most resembles the cynical end of the horror filmmaking business.
The Curse in Motion: Resurrection as Reincarnation
The narrative rhythm of the film feels less like an organic story and more like a ritual repetition—as if the plot must move because the old, reliable machinery of the Hammer brand demands it. The Mummy rises, vengeance stirs, and soon the expedition’s members begin to fall, one by one, to a wrath as predictable as it is inevitable. The victims are killed in an order determined more by who was most culpable in the desecration than by dramatic tension.
The true dramatic pivot rests on Terence Morgan as Adam Beauchamp, a suave, wealthy patron whose motives are shrouded in mystery. His performance—reserved, almost reptilian, yet possessing a deep, tragic gaze—becomes the film’s hidden, melancholic pulse. For while The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb dresses itself plainly as a tale of supernatural revenge, it gradually reveals itself as a more complex story of identity, betrayal, and reincarnation.
Adam is not merely an observer of the curse—he is its living, breathing continuation. In a twist that feels both mythic and tragic, he is revealed as the reincarnated spirit of Ra-Antef himself, reborn into the modern age yet burdened by the ancient memory of betrayal. His desperate desire to reclaim Annette as his long-lost princess (the one who betrayed Ra-Antef in his original life) transforms the film from mere body-count horror into a ghostly, fatalistic romance, directly echoing the doomed, fatal obsessions of The Mummy (1959) but with a more subdued, exhausted melancholy.
There’s a strange, palpable sadness in the way Adam moves through the film—less a definitive villain than a profoundly lost soul, eternally caught between the cycles of time and the relentless demands of fate. His personal tragedy mirrors Hammer’s own predicament: the eternal, lucrative resurrection of the same story, stripped a little more of its original thematic magic each time it is told. Adam is a man forced to repeat history, and Hammer was a studio forced to repeat its hits.
The Colonial Shadow: Retribution and Imperial Guilt
If The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb falters occasionally as pure horror—lacking the sustained psychological dread of its predecessors—it succeeds surprisingly well as an imperial allegory. Beneath its lurid pulp exterior lies a quiet, persistent unease about empire, plunder, and cultural desecration that speaks to the anxieties of the mid-60s.
The archaeologists—all white Europeans—treat the tomb not as a sacred resting place but as property, a thing to be claimed, documented, and displayed for the profit of the West. The local Egyptian characters, tellingly relegated to background roles or simple, prophetic warnings, serve as the film’s silent conscience, embodying a spirituality that the Westerners neither understand nor respect, preferring to replace it with scientific measurement and commercial valuation.
The Mummy’s vengeance, then, is not simply supernatural; it operates on a deeper, historical level. Each crushing, methodical blow of the creature’s hand feels less like a monster attacking and more like the earth itself retaliating against centuries of colonial greed and trespass. The desecrators are punished by the very gods they deny, struck down by the history they sought to exhume for profit.
There’s poetry in this inversion. Hammer’s first Mummy framed its story primarily as a tragic love across centuries; this sequel fundamentally reframes it as retribution. The dead no longer long exclusively for lost love—they demand justice for their violated land and resting places. This gives the Mummy’s path of destruction a quiet, methodical dignity that transcends the plot mechanics.
The Mummy Himself: The Executioner of History
The creature—portrayed by stuntman Dickie Owen—is an imposing physical presence, but he crucially lacks the sorrowful gravitas of Christopher Lee’s Kharis. Owen’s Mummy possesses a brute physicality that serves the film’s shift in tone. His bandaged form is heavier, his movements more deliberate, like a relentless avalanche in human shape, incapable of turning aside.
Owen’s Mummy feels less like a cursed lover and more like an executioner—the blind, unfeeling hand of fate made flesh. There is a terrifying purity to his violence, an inevitability that turns each death into a necessary ritual cleansing.
Yet, despite his menace, the film never quite captures the tragic, spiritual pulse of its predecessor. The Mummy’s wrath is largely impersonal, mechanical—another echo in a series of echoes. Without the existential anguish that defined Lee’s performance, the creature becomes a terrifying function, not a complex symbol.
Still, the sheer image of him lumbering through the misty streets of Victorian London, a relic of empire walking among its complacent descendants, carries a profound, strange power—a corpse arriving to collect history’s immense debt. The most chilling scenes are those that yank the ancient horror into the perceived safety of modern Europe.
The Blood of Showmanship: King and the Commercial Guilt
Fred Clark’s Alexander King is arguably the film’s most memorable and enduringly unsettling creation—a grotesque caricature of the American showman, part P.T. Barnum, part snake oil salesman, embodying the cynical excess of mid-century entertainment. He represents everything Hammer perhaps internally feared becoming: commercial, crass, cynical, and shamelessly loud.
King’s aggressive exploitation of the tomb—selling tickets to the public, reducing ancient wonders to sideshow thrills, literally displaying the Mummy’s sarcophagus in a gaudy European hall—becomes the film’s central act of secular blasphemy. The character is entirely devoid of reverence or even basic scholarly curiosity. When the Mummy rises and King meets his inevitable, violent end, it feels almost like a studio performing a necessary exorcism of its own commercial guilt.
There’s a bitter, self-aware irony here. Hammer, too, had become a circus, its precious Gothic treasures paraded across the Atlantic and beyond, repackaged for mass appeal. The line between true art and mere exhibition had blurred into invisibility. The horror was no longer sacred; it was definitively product.
In that sense, King’s death is a necessary symbolic act—the violent destruction of the showman, the purging of spectacle, a momentary, futile attempt to reclaim the dignity of the myth before the next picture.
The Sands of Repetition: The Director and the Score
Director Michael Carreras (Hammer’s own producer-turned-filmmaker) crafts a film of competent visual grace but limited spiritual vision. Carreras’s direction is undeniably workmanlike—functional, efficient, but seldom inspired. The pacing drifts, the psychological tension dissolves before it can truly ignite, often giving way to standard exposition or drawn-out detective work.
What Carreras lacks in Fisher’s visceral, psychological atmosphere, he compensates for with color and texture. The desert exteriors are luminous, the tomb interiors claustrophobic and richly detailed with shadow, and the Victorian sets are suitably lush. But despite the careful staging, the film never feels truly alive; it’s embalmed in its own commercial competence.
James Bernard’s score, however, injects life where the script cannot. His music throbs with that familiar Hammer grandeur—brass and crashing percussion echoing like the insistent heartbeat of the tomb itself. In those moments where the film threatens to collapse under the weight of its own predictability, Bernard’s score reminds us that this is still Gothic ritual, still solemn ceremony. The music maintains the faith even when the camera lens cannot.
And yet, for all its technical craftsmanship and magnificent score, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb ultimately feels like a replica—a relic without the necessary fire of faith. The deepest horror is not found in what happens on screen, but in the realization of what has been irrevocably lost from the original vision.
The Shadow of Fisher: Theology vs. Adventure
Watching this film immediately after the luminous, theologically charged tragedies of Fisher’s Gothic cycle is to see how truly vital his touch was to the Hammer brand. Fisher treated horror as theology—a direct inquiry into man’s hubris and divine punishment; Carreras treats it as simple adventure—a plot to be solved and executed.
Where Fisher’s camera lingered with the intensity of a priest in meditation, allowing the dread to steep, Carreras’s moves briskly, almost impatiently, eager to reach the next predetermined plot point. The result is technically sound but spiritually hollowed out.
Still, moments of genuine beauty survive: the flicker of torchlight on ancient, untouched walls, the solemn, tragic gaze of the resurrected Adam, the Mummy’s shadow stretching across pristine Victorian cobblestones. These potent fragments hint at the profound, complex film The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb could have been in the right hands—a deep meditation on empire, time, and the eternal, desperate hunger for the sacred.
Instead, it settles for competence, a safe return on investment.
The Death of Wonder: The Cost of Pragmatism
By 1964, Hammer was caught uncomfortably between two worlds. Its original Gothic faith—the trembling awe of The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula—was decisively fading, replaced by a colder, more pragmatic commercialism. The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb reflects that shift perfectly.
The film is still haunted by belief, but it no longer truly believes in the efficacy of its own rituals. The ceremony is performed, the necessary words are spoken, but the gods of terror do not answer with the same fervent power.
And that, in itself, is the most haunting realization the film offers. There’s a peculiar, enduring sadness to Hammer’s mid-period horrors—a tangible sense of artists and craftsmen going through the practiced motions of devotion after losing their core faith. The tomb is still opened, the curse still spoken, but the genuine miracle, the shock of invention, has definitively fled.
Final Thought: Embalmed, But Breathing
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is not, by the high standards of Hammer, a great film—but it is an profoundly honest one. It reveals a studio in transition, a mythology in exhaustion, a genre that has, for the moment, turned inward to consume its own history.
Its lasting power lies not in cheap frights, but in quiet reflection. It shows Hammer at the threshold of change—still bound to its lush, Technicolor Gothic past, yet already staring toward the lurid, commercial modernity that would define its later, more cynical output in the late 1960s.
The Mummy’s curse here is symbolic: the eternal return of the same, the inability to evolve without desecrating or destroying what once was artistically holy. It is, like The Evil of Frankenstein before it, the cost of commercial predictability.
And yet, even in its formulaic predictability, there is a core of defiant beauty. The image of the creature, shrouded in dust and historical vengeance, stalking through the fog like history itself, carries a faint but persistent grandeur.
Because even embalmed, even buried beneath formula and the dust of repetition, Hammer’s Gothic still breathes. The pulse may slow, the conviction may fade, but it never completely stops.
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is that faint, echoing pulse—still there. Still haunting the world it once triumphantly ruled.
