Let’s be honest. When most people hear the word “mummy,” they picture some shuffling, bandage-wrapped Egyptian stumbling out of a sarcophagus with his arms stretched out, moaning. Which, when you think about it, is also basically how Mom looks before she has her first cup of coffee in the morning.
But here’s why mummies were a BIG deal in the 60s and 70s.
If you were a kid back then, chances are your parents or grandparents grew up terrified of them. It started all the way back in 1932 when Universal Studios unleashed Boris Karloff as Imhotep in *The Mummy* — an ancient Egyptian high priest accidentally brought back to life by a team of archaeologists who apparently never learned to leave well enough alone. Karloff played Im-Ho-Tep, who had been embalmed alive for trying to revive a woman he loved after she had been sacrificed, and once awake, set out to find her again. Creepy? Yes. Also weirdly romantic in that ancient-Egyptian-curse kind of way.
Then came the British studio Hammer Films, which dominated horror from the mid-50s all the way through the 70s. They reintroduced classic monsters to audiences by filming them in vivid color (not black and white), and the mummy was high on their list.
Christopher Lee played the mummified Kharis in 1959, and even under swathes of bandages, managed to convey the torment of being the walking dead. Hammer kept the mummy bandwagon rolling with “The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb” (1964), “The Mummy’s Shroud” (1967), and “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb” (1971). Parents who took their kids to Saturday afternoon double features in those years saw plenty of wrapped-up undead things shambling across the screen.
Now here’s how all this impacted me: Pop, my grandfather, collected and built monster models. The Mummy was one of them.
A BIG DISTINCTION!!! Mummies are NOT Zombies
Zombies eat flesh. They’re basically the world’s worst dinner guests. Mummies, on the other hand, rise from their tombs — wrapped in burial clothes — and walk among the living. They’re specifically tied to the idea of someone dead and buried… coming back out. Which is like a zombie, but not the same.
And here’s what I find genuinely fascinating: that concept of the dead walking from a tomb didn’t start in Hollywood.
Mummies in the Bible
It started in the Bible. A long time before any filmmaker thought to wrap a guy in linen bandages and call it a monster, there were accounts of real people — wrapped in burial cloths — walking out of their graves.
The Old Testament records three of these. In 1 Kings 17, Elijah raised a widow’s son from the dead. Elisha, his successor, raised the Shunammite’s son in 2 Kings 4. And then there’s the wildest one — in 2 Kings 13, a dead man was hastily thrown into Elisha’s tomb to hide him from raiders, and the moment the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man revived and stood up on his feet. Imagine being that guy. One minute you’re dead. Next, you’re standing in a tomb, wondering where everyone went.
The New Testament raises the stakes considerably. Jesus raised the son of a widow in Nain, Jairus’ daughter, and most famously, Lazarus — a man who had been sealed in a tomb for four days. Lazarus is probably the best-known real mummy example we have.
Jesus called Lazarus to come out, and Lazarus did so, still wrapped in his grave-cloths. Lazarus had his hands and feet bound with burial wrappings and his face covered, and Jesus then told the crowd to unwrap him and let him go.
A dead man. Wrapped in burial clothes. Walking out of a sealed tomb. If you showed that scene to a Hollywood producer in 1960 and said, “Make a monster movie about this,” they’d hand you a contract on the spot.
And then there’s the moment that tops them all: when Jesus died on the cross, tombs cracked open across Jerusalem, and the bodies of many holy people who had been buried came to life and appeared to people in the city. Multiple mummies, if you want to be blunt about it. All at once.
Hollywood Didn’t Invent Mummies
My point — and I do have one — is this: Hollywood didn’t invent the idea of the dead walking out of graves wrapped in burial clothes. They borrowed it. Maybe without knowing it. The scariest thing filmmakers could imagine turned out to be something that actually happened, recorded by eyewitnesses, for a reason far greater than entertainment value.
The Bible doesn’t present these moments as horror. It presents them as proof that God holds authority over death itself. Every single resurrection in Scripture points forward to one thing: the resurrection of Jesus, and the promise that everyone who believes in Him will one day walk out of their own grave, too.
Not in bandages, shambling around, scaring people.
But alive. Really alive. Forever.
That’s a plot twist even Hollywood hasn’t topped.
Nick Caden, reporter for the Cool Ghoul Gazette.