Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is a 1971 British horror film starring Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon and James Villiers.

[2] It was director Seth Holt's final film, and was loosely adapted by Christopher Wicking from Bram Stoker's 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars.

Fuchs is obsessed with Tera and takes her mummy and sarcophagus back to England, where he secretly recreates her tomb under his house.

Four days "before her birthday", his daughter Margaret – who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tera and was born at the instant they recited her name - has recurring nightmares.

The bandaged woman slowly opens her eyes and struggles to speak, leaving the film scene ambiguous as to whether she is Margaret Fuchs or Queen Tera.

He also says he and Holt wanted to cast Amy Grant in the lead but Sir James Carreras insisted on Valerie Leon.

[8] The R1 DVD of the film released in the United States by Anchor Bay Entertainment contains still photographs of Cushing's day on the production.

Holt, however, was apparently revising his script day-by-day, and the stylistic consistency of the completed film cannot mask a number of unresolved themes and ideas.

For all that, Blood from the Mummy's Tomb is Holt's most distinctive work, and effortlessly the best of Hammer's recent attempts to 'develop' the classic horror themes.

The explanatory background that conventionally emerges in a few garbled words during or after the climax in horror movies, here becomes the substance of the whole first half of the film: a mythic, amoral deity is built up, and an entire attendant cosmogony suggested, through astrological references and other choice details.

Several of the film's scenes occur in a lunatic asylum (where George Coulouris is victim to two of the most gleefully sadistic warders since Lost Weekend); other characters are frequently seen alone in moments of private mania.

And in a breathtaking reversal, Holt saves his all-too-human 'mummy' for his final shot: where she is Margaret, swathed in hospital bandages after the catastrophe.

It’s not completely well realised, but there is so much to admire: the professionalism of Andrew Keir, the splendid villainy of James Villiers and James Cossins (who plays a sadistic nurse), the bewitching Valerie Leon (who genuinely seems like she stepped out of the Ancient past), Tristram Carey’s superbly eerie musical score, Scott MacGregor’s enjoyable production design.