The Passion of the Mummy: An interview with author Frank Dello Stritto

 

I am holding in my hands a gem of a gem of a book entitled "The Passion of the Mummy," by Frank Dello Stritto, published this year from Cult Movies Press. Frank has written cult/classic horror genre books. This is his third work that examines an iconic figure from vintage film and creates a decades-long history of the personality. He previously did it with Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man, and Carl Denham, the man who brought King Kong to New York City.

To write these books (I am honored to have helped proof them) is an amazing work of research and talent. He must watch scores of genre-related films, command a knowledge of literature and lore in the subjects, accurately describe global and national history of the times he writes about, and craft a tale that hooks a reader early and satisfaction that grows through the reading process. 

A short review: I likely will pen a longer one in the future:

The "Passion of the Mummy" (Amazon link) describes a narrator who very early in his life feels a deep connection while viewing the remains of the mummy, Kharis, in a Manhattan museum. As he grows older, well into adulthood, the connection deepens, and grasps the attentions of supernaturally inclined groups and individuals around the world; some willing to help our narrator, others seeking his destruction.

I have yet to meet a film scholar with both the ability to absorb so much legion of information from scores of films, and then take the knowledge accumulated, with the settings, events and characters, and weave a vastly entertaining, suspenseful narrative that flows as smoothly as whatever your favorite novelist writes. Genre fans must read this book (and the others). It's a crime to miss out on them.

--- Doug Gibson

HERE IS OUR PLAN9CRUNCH INTERVIEW WITH FRANK: 

1) Tell me about the research that goes into creating this tale of Kharis. You explain a lot in the Postscript but I'd like to know how many movies and books, and historical lore, is researched and either included or cast aside. I guess I am asking, what kind of plot characters and ideas do you consider and then decide not to use?

I don’t know which comes first: the monsters or the theme. The theme of my first novel, A WEREWOLF REMEMBERS, is an individual’s struggle with a difficult family history. In CARL DENHAM’S GIANT MONSTERS, an elderly man knows his time is limited, but still hopes for one last adventure and for redemption. Behind the tale of Kharis is the quest for immortality. Would you choose to live forever—in this world—if you could? The characters in THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY ask that. Kharis never asked for it, and his immortality is a living hell.

Mummy movies have immortal beings and mortals seeking immortality. Those movies—the five from Universal (The Mummy, The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse) and the five from Hammer (The Mummy, Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Shroud, and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb,  plus She, which is not a mummy movie)—form the core of the story. I brought in other movies, like Pharaoh’s Curse, as they help the narrative.

Except for time frame—I try to stay in the classical period of horror movies—I don’t decide what can’t get into my story. Around the core movies, I tend to cram in all that I can. Readers seem to love it when characters from movies and television shows that have nothing to do with the main plot pop up.

 

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2) I love the use of characters outside The Mummy genre. Explain why Tarneverro of The Black Camel is a great choice for the early mentor of sorts to our narrator. What about Theodora of The Haunting makes her a strong choice to enter the narrative. I love that you even used a character from The Hunger, a more contemporary, mostly forgotten film, and used material from a Twilight Zone episode. That to me spells tremendous research.

My “historical novels” seek to marry two universes: the real world in which we live and the world inside the plots of the movies and television. Imagine that what we watch on the screen is only a window to an alternate world. What we don’t see in that window is the characters’ lives before and after the plots of the movies. Outside of our view, characters from different movies meet and interact. Now, for me, that does not require a great deal of research. As a child I always thought of the world inside my TV shows and movies that way. So, I guess, that leg of the research has been going on my head for my whole life. So, did Kharis and Im-ho-tep know each other—why not?  Ananka and Ankh-es-en-amon were sisters—the movies tell us that both were daughters of Pharaoh Amenophis—so they knew each other. And so on.

As I develop my plots, whenever I need characters, I don’t invent them. I pluck them from somewhere in the movies, and they bring their personalities and personal histories with them.

For THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY, I needed someone who could read minds. Well, Theodora from The Haunting fit that just right. She is a strong, modern woman who could stand up to any man and that’s what I needed

I needed a character to guide the narrator into the strange world of the supernatural. I needed a sage, someone fascinated by the modern world but not really part of it. Bela Lugosi’s screen persona fit that well, and Tarneverro—a mystic, a rather obscure Lugosi portrayal—was what I needed.

The research in the alternate world is studying the movies. There’s a lot of detail in them—place names, dates, incidental data—that is easily overlooked. I note that all and get it into my plots.

For THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY, the hard research was learning about Egypt and Egyptology. All during the two years or so that I wrote the book, I was reading books on those subjects. I think layering that knowledge into the plot gives the book a lot more depth.   

 

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3) Women are far stronger and more viciously evil characters in The Passion of the Mummy saga. Did their contrast with men who were weak, or stoic sufferers, provide interest to you? 

I did not realize how little I knew about horror movies based on ancient Egypt—mummy movies and others—until I started developing the plot for my book. When I collected all the plots together, I saw that the immortal men—living mummies—are tragic and to be pitied. The immortal women are much more dangerous. Pamela Mason in The Twilight Zone episode “Queen of the Nile,” Marian Blaylock in The Hunger, Queen Tera in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, Simira in Pharaoh’s Curse, Ayesha in She—you don’t want to tangle with them. They are not mummies. They’re living among us and in some cases feeding on us.

Add to the male mummies, the priests of the cults that tend to them. In the Universal movies, these men are dreaming of immortality. In three of the movies, they betray their vows to unsuccessfully attempt it. They all come to bad ends.

So, the priests are grasping at immortality, the mummies—all male—suffer under it, while what I call in the book “the demon women” are laughing at them through the centuries.

And then there are the princesses of the Universal movies, Ankh-es-en-amon and her sister Ananka. We can’t judge from the movies whether they are evil or not, but their spirits are trying to get back into this world. That become an element of the plot.

 

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4) Did you ever consider making Im-ho-tep the central character? Or was the much larger material on Kharis through so many films make him a deeper, more interesting subject?

Kharis appears in four movies, and Im-ho-tep in only one. So, I certainly had a lot more to work with for Kharis. The problem with using Im-ho-tep is that at the end of his sole movie, The Mummy, he is reduced to rubble by the goddess Isis. Most of my story is set in the modern day. So unless I wanted to bring Im-ho-tep back from the hereafter, I could not use him except in flashbacks.

Kharis—when last seen at the end of The Mummy’s Curse—has fallen into a dormant state and is carted off to the Scripps Museum of Manhattan. My book begins with a grammar school class trip to the Scripps, where something odd kicks off the plot.

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5) What are some the films you really enjoyed mixing into the plot of this book? I sense your affection for Abbott & Costello and I personally enjoyed the club scene.

There’s always room for Abbott & Costello in my books. So far, they have appeared in all my novels. They make it easy since they made so many movies with monsters. ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY provided the setting for the finale of my book.

Theodora—Claire Bloom’s character in The Haunting (1963)—proved a particularly good fit. Her character almost wrote itself when I introduced her. Her back-and-forth with Tarneverro was fun to write. They really match each other.

I get a kick out of bringing in characters from The Twilight Zone. There are so many of them that finding ones that fit my needs is easy. Pamela Mason—the undead succubus from the “Queen of the Nile” episode—was exactly the character I needed for my story.

To fill in the narrative and give some dimension to the story, I looked for non-mummy movies set in Egypt. I was glad to get Five Graves to Cairo into the story since it is a favorite film of mine. Think of what we see on movie screens as a window into an alternate world—then Indiana Jones adventure in Egypt to find the lost Ark, and the excavations mentioned in Five Graves to Cairo are happening at the same time.

Actor Eduardo Ciannelli played the aged high priest in The Mummy’s Hand, and I wanted to bring him into the book. Not an easy task since the plot takes place in America in the modern day. But I finagled that a bit by using a Ciannelli character from another movie. Perhaps not the best fit, but I think I pulled it off. No complaints, so far.

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6) Who are some of the characters through these any films you go through that you particularly admire. Were you able to show that admiration in your writing? What did you think of the Bannings, their expedition, Babe? I often thought Babe was the only courageous one in the second Kharis film.

Here’s the problem: to write a decent novel based on mummy movies, I had to learn a lot about Egyptology. Then, it becomes hard to watch most movie Egyptologists without laughing or crying. Steve Banning and Babe are fortune hunters. They use dynamite and pick axes to open the tomb. Then they blithely ship their loot off to New York without a peep from Egyptian authorities. None of that would happen in real life.

I like Steve and Babe better in the second film, when they are far away from Egypt and their blasphemies.

The only movie Egyptologists that I really admire are the ones in 1932’s The Mummy. There are the only ones that come close to what really goes on at actual digs.

I must say that I did develop an odd admiration for Alexander King, Fred Clark’s character in 1964’s Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Yes, he’s a showman and out for what he can get. But he does so with charm and honesty and is quite a contrast to the stuffy characters that are often seen in mummy movies. 

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7) Please offer any insights you want readers to know about. And what may be your next subject? Any ideas? Finally, that may be the best cover I have seen on a genre book. Three cheers to the artist.

Some readers have told me that THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY is the most romantic of my novels to date. I certainly didn’t plan it that way. Since Kharis’ curse is linked to his love for Ananka, I guess a romantic element had to bubble through the narrative. I’m glad that I didn’t think too much about it, and just let any romance simply follow from Kharis’ story.

The artist is George Chastain, who has done a lot of excellent work. He had done the dust jackets book cover and end page art for my three “historical novels” based on 1930s and 1940s horror movies. I owe him a lot. Something in George’s dust jacket cover art that I should point out. Two actors played Kharis in the Universal movies, Tom Tyler and Lon Chaney. The cover illustration of Kharis combines their features of their two faces. That was George’s concept and he pulled it off brilliantly.

I have started what may become my fourth novel. It is about zombie movies and will be titled Patron Saints of the Living Dead. This will be a challenge because there are no recurring characters in zombie movies, no multi-film sagas as used in my previous novels. Only a handful of individual films. Most horror movie fans can rattle off the zombie movies of the 1930s through the 1950s. When you bring in “voodoo movies”—that is, movies with voodoo but no zombies, the number almost doubles. And—to my surprise—it turns out that a lot of television series had zombie or voodoo-oriented episodes and I want to bring them in.

The challenge may be bringing in Abbott & Costello, who never met a zombie.

Thanks Frank. We appreciate your insights. Here is a link to Frank Dello Stritto on Plan9Crunch blog.

The Manster a horror tale of a split personality

By Steve D. Stones

The Manster (1958) is also known as The Split. On the surface, it is a retelling or homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.  The difference here is that Larry, played by Peter Dyneley, is experimented on without his consent or knowledge, which unleashes his evil, Mr. Hyde side.

Larry is an American journalist working in Japan who travels to a mountain top laboratory near a volcano to conduct an interview with Dr. Robert Suzuki, played by Satoshi Nakamura. Larry's newspaper is looking for an exciting news story to increase sales and make the newspaper more interesting. He conducts an interview with Suzuki about his lab experiments, all of which have gone terribly wrong. Larry's real motivation is to get back home to his wife in New York.

After the interview, Larry falls asleep in Suzuki's mountain cabin. Suzuki injects him in the right shoulder with a serum he uses on other lab subjects. He tells his beautiful assistant Tara that his choice to inject Larry is for science and human knowledge, despite her objections.

When Larry returns to Tokyo, his personality starts to change. He begins to drink heavily, mingle with Geisha girls, argue with his boss and cavort with Tara.  An eye starts to grow on his right shoulder and thick hair on his arm, which foreshadows the beast that soon develops in his body.

Eventually, a grotesque head grows out of Larry's right shoulder. He murders a priest at a Buddhist temple. His boss sends a psychiatrist to examine Larry, which he refuses to see. The Tokyo police suspect Larry of many recent murders.

The best scene is saved for the end when Larry returns to Suzuki's mountaintop laboratory to confront him for what he's done.  Suzuki injects him with another serum just before he literally splits in half, releasing his evil self from his good self.  He throws Tara into a volcano before the split.

Not only are there similarities to Stevenson's classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but another obvious similarity is The Wolf Man (1941). In fact, the Wolf Man's real life name is also Larry. Both Larrys are everyday, ordinary men who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and later pay a price by becoming evil.  Neither men wants to be evil, but become victims of circumstance. Happy viewing. Watch the infamous eyeball scene below. The entire film is here.

Lon Chaney Jr. biography has worth but there's room for improvement

By Doug Gibson

Lon Chaney Jr. is an interesting subject for a biography. Most of his career he appeared a tortured man, prematurely aged by severe alcoholism. A good biography, that would ferret out secrets of his personal life, the conflicts that turned an attractive star-to-be to an aging, almost grotesque, physical hulk in only 20 years, would be compelling reading. Unfortunately, we didn't get that type of biography from Don G. Smith, who 17 years ago authored Lon Chaney Jr., Horror Film Star, 1906-1973. (McFarland). (Amazon link here)

Smith's biography reads at times like the longest magazine feature article ever written. It covers Chaney's career in great detail. In fact, at times the reader will grow tired of painstaking precise, in-depth recaps and author analysis of Chaney's many films. While this affects the flow of the biography, Smith does include as much information as he felt necessary about Chaney's career. In fact, the endless details underscore that Chaney had the most diverse screen career of the three most iconic horror film actors, Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. This may tick off the legion of genre writers who like to poke fun at Chaney, but the sheer volume of his resume makes him the most versatile actor of the trio, and maybe the best. Cheney's better films were not horror films. They include "Of Mice and Men," "High Noon" and "The Defiant Ones," films in which Chaney provided a bulky screen presence that included inner turmoil within his character.

Unlike Lugosi, who literally had to beg for screen work in his last years, or Karloff, who had the luxury of picking and choosing fat-fee assignments at the end, Lon Chaney Jr. constantly worked on films, staying active, and I presume appropriately paid, throughout his career. He was in many westerns, sometimes cast as an Indian. He played oafs, good-natured or otherwise, in films as diverse as "The Cyclops" and a string of the last B-movie, second-feature westerns produced in the mid 1960s. He worked for directors as diverse as Stanley Kramer and Al Adamson.

Although best known for his tenure as Universal's horror star for a few years in the 1940s, Chaney was, as Smith relates, a reluctant entrant into the acting business. He learned his trade slowly, appearing in a long string of low-budget, mostly forgettable films in the 1930. Playing Lennie in "Of Mice and Men" gained him accolades, but I'd argue that the most critical film of Chaney's early career was his "monster film tryout" with Universal in 1940, a 59-minute programmer called "Man Made Monster," reviewed here.

In this lean, low-budget film, Chaney effectively played a large, easy-going man turned into a reluctant killer, an electronic monster, by a mad scientist, well portrayed by Lionel Atwill. His performance was good enough, and contained enough pathos, to convince Universal to make him the star of "The Wolf Man." And, with that, an iconic horror star was born.

Smith does a capable job of recounting the ups and downs of Chaney's career in films. I particularly like the attention paid to -- as early as 1996 -- to his early 60s film, "Spider Baby," that has turned into a genuine cult classic two generations-plus after it was barely released. That film proves that even a battered, ugly Chaney still contained magic enough to make a film great when he was so motivated. And Lon sings the title song! (Listen)

Where his biography fails, as mentioned, is providing anything above the bare details, or shaky speculation, about the demons that tormented Chaney Jr. and turned him into a textbook, lifetime alcoholic that essentially frittered away a decent star turn with Universal through his alcoholic antics and boorish behavior on the sets. Incredibly, Chaney's early life, his parents' troubled marriage and separation, his being raised by deaf grandparents, and his ambiguity at taking on his late dad's career and becoming an actor, is recapped in roughly 10 pages! That's ridiculous.

Certainly, the relationship that Chaney had with his famous father, Lon Chaney, must have had an impact on his future. Smith acknowledges this, and tries to analyze dad's effect on junior, but he simply doesn't have the sources to have his conclusions taken seriously. In fact, often the main source for the author's many muses is Curt Siodmark, the Universal writer of "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" and director of Chaney's film "Bride of the Gorilla." It's nice that Smith had an opportunity to chat with Siodmark before he died, but he shouldn't be a major source for Chaney's private life. This leads to conclusions from Smith, such as that Chaney was a latent homosexual, that may be interesting but certainly lack sufficient sources. At one point, Smith ludicrously attempts to link Chaney's calling Bela Lugosi "Pops," as evidence of Chaney's deep need to connect with a father figure that was supposedly denied him by his dad. Again, this may be proven true if explored in greater detail, but it had nothing to do with Lugosi being called "Pops."

One interesting part of Smith's biography is his dissection of the film, "Son of Dracula," which he describes as Chaney's greatest acting job as a horror star. I had previously thought Chaney's portrayal of "Count Alucard" was weak, agreeing with dismissive reviews that called Chaney's Count a "kept man." However, after reading Smith, I watched the film again, and I have re-evaluated my opinion some. Chaney does effect menace and strength in the film. My mistake is comparing him to Lugosi, my favorite horror actor, and projecting the Lugosi persona in a film where Lugosi's Count would have been miscast.

In "Son of Dracula," Chaney's cultivated menace, that can quickly turn brutish when he feels threatened, fits in with an environment, the 1940s rural South, that would have greeted his appearance with deep suspicion and hostility. There's a touch of desperation to Chaney's Alucard, forced to rely on a local undead confederate, Louise Allbritton (who is brilliant) who, unknown to him, plans to betray him. There must have been something lacking, or falling apart, in his native Hungary, to force Alucard so far away from home. And he reacts accordingly, with intimidation, mixed with a requisite courtliness, to assert himself.

Smith recounts already related tales of Chaney's alcoholism, his feuds with actresses who found him boorish, his uneven "Inner Sanctum" films, his many shenanigans that cost him his esteem with Universal, carousing with like-minded drinking and hunting buddies, and more unpleasant details, such as his domestic abuse and his attempt at suicide when his second marriage, to Patsy Cheney, almost failed. What's infuriating, though, is we don't have any in-depth reporting from Smith that uncovers why Chaney behaved why he did. There are no serious attempts to query the people close to Chaney's life to strip bare his past life and uncover and interpret the problems that wrecked him physically and at times emotionally.

Smith's book is worth a read. It provides information, mostly of his career, that can't obtained as easily and compactly elsewhere. Its main worth is that it exists as a biography of a major cult film star. Hopefully, one day a superior biography, one along the lines of "The Count ...," Arthur Lennig's superb book on Bela Lugosi, will be written about Chaney Jr.

Dracula: Was the Count resigned to his eventual destruction?

 

By Doug Gibson

I absolutely love Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Count Dracula in the 1931 classic. He is pure aristocratic evil, able to put on a facade of gallantry yet betray it in mere seconds with a deadly glare at Van Helsing. Also, even in fine attire, in his own domain, in a dungeon, with rats, bugs, whey-faced brides or a cringing, spider-eating Renfield, he conveys malicious evil deeper than the filth around him. In that deepest part of his existence, his dead heart rots darker.

Why, though, did Lugosi’s Count Dracula ditch his Romanian, Hungarian playfields, where he had his pick of the scared villagers, and easy escape to his coffins filled with native soil, and go to alien England, with a mere few coffins and shovelfuls of native soil? Why choose such a conflicted, weak minion as the anonymous, unloved Renfield as his companion? And why set up shop, in Carfax Abbey, so close to such a deadly rival as Dr. Van Helsing? Why seek the virginal, well-protected Mina, the intended of the feckless Jonathan Harker, but whose back is closely watched by Van Helsing?

I’ve watched Lugosi play Dracula many times. I can knock away the silly claims that Dracula is a stagy film, or slow. Every frame is necessary — with the possible exception of the asylum employees played for laughs — to establish and maintain Lugosi’s Count’s sinister, evil, egotistical persona. But recently, I’ve added this interpretation. Did Count Dracula move to London, with its unknown attractions and more dangerous temptations, with the intention of ending his long, endless existence?

Dracula is a slave to his passion, his thirst for blood. It cannot be satiated, whether the victim is a mere flower girl or society belle Lucy. He knows well he cannot resist tasting his pretty neighbor Mina. He cannot even haul up stakes and flee after Van Helsing exposes him with the mirror parlor trick. In fact, Dracula, although nearly claiming Mina’s life due to his blunt force of personality, is merely pitiable at his end. He lies in his coffin, chased into the bowels of Carfax Abbey after being betrayed by the ill-fated Renfield, and submits to an anticlimactic, off-screen death at the hands of the vampire hunter Van Helsing.

Was the Count so vain as to think that no harm could come to him in his coffin filled with native soil in the basement of a rotting abbey? Van Helsing didn’t even have to break a lock to stab the Count in the heart. I think not. I hypothesize that Dracula himself was tired of living for centuries, that he chose his trip to London, a land of new blood and unseen dangers, as a deliberate step to the end of his existence. Although the script allows no confirmation, I think Lugosi’s Dracula must have known that he was to be the neighbor of his most feared enemy, Van Helsing.

Of course Dracula tried to prevent his death. His natural greed and cold evil did not dissipate in his last adventure, and he nearly succeeded — for a brief moment — in vanquishing Van Helsing. He allowed nature, his generations-old greed and lust for blood, to be his undoing.

The strongest evidence for Dracula’s death wish is found early in Dracula’s journey to London when he encounters Mina, her dad, Lucy, and Jonathan at the opera house. He says, wistfully, “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!” Mina Seward replies, “Why, Count Dracula!” and Dracula adds, “There are far worse things awaiting man than death.”

Dracula fights, he makes an effort to save himself, but he will not move from his final home. As a result, he is vanquished, but it is an honorable end for the old fiend.

Horror movie expert Frank J. Dello Stritto, who along with other experts have mulled over Dracula’s motives in his final days, opines that the slow, thousands year-plus lives of Dracula is conveyed by Lugosi’s mannerisms. Dello Stritto says, “He (Lugosi) put into his performance a lot of subtle touches to make Dracula seem from another world: the odd pace of his speech, the use of his cape, his very slow movements compared to the other cast members’ … A lot of actors who play Dracula are ordinary men trying to appear extraordinary, and not quite succeeding. Lugosi’s character is like Dracula himself — an extraordinary being trying to appear ordinary, and again not quite succeeding.”

I once wrote this of Dracula, and I stand by it. “I have seen “Dracula” scores of times, and Lugosi is the key to the film. He is a tall, courtly, menacing figure who promises a fate worse than death. And that is the appeal of these early horror films compared to the sadistic gore-fests of today — a fate worse than death awaits the vampire’s victims. That fate is conveyed to perfection in the scene where Lugosi’s vampire murders actor Dwight Frye’s cringing, pathetic, mad disciple Renfield. Dracula’s exterior is charming. But his filthy interior attracts darkness, fog, storm, chill winds, rodents, flies, spiders, blood and undeath.”

Dracula was a slave of his filthy existence. Pleasure had long been usurped by bloodlust. It was a tremendous feat for the Count to keep it up for centuries. But he was tired, and chose London for his grand finale. He became, finally, really dead.

If you have not seen Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, do yourself a favor and watch it. It can be accessed at Amazon Prime, for a price. Or buy Universal Dracula Collection on Blu Ray.

(This essay originally appeared at StandardBlogs)