In the film, Karloff stars as Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian mummy who was killed for attempting to resurrect his dead lover, Anck-es-en-Amon.

While less profitable than its predecessors Dracula and Frankenstein, The Mummy was still a commercial and critical success, becoming culturally influential and spawning several sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and reimaginings.

[5] In 1921, an archaeological expedition led by Sir Joseph Whemple finds the mummy of an ancient Egyptian high priest named Imhotep.

Ten years later, Imhotep has assimilated into modern society, taking the identity of an eccentric Egyptian historian named Ardath Bey.

He calls upon Sir Joseph's son Frank and Professor Pearson and shows them where to dig to find the tomb of the princess Ankh-es-en-Amon.

Bey soon encounters Helen Grosvenor, a half-Egyptian woman bearing a striking resemblance to the princess, who stays with Muller.

After the servant does so, he hypnotizes Helen to come to his place and there, reveals to her that his horrific death was punishment for sacrilege, as he attempted to resurrect his lover, Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.

Inspired by the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 and the alleged "curse of the pharaohs",[7] producer Carl Laemmle Jr. commissioned story editor Richard Schayer to find a novel to form a basis for an Egyptian-themed horror film, just as the novels Dracula and Frankenstein inspired their 1931 films Dracula and Frankenstein.

[8] Schayer found none, although the plot bears a strong resemblance to a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle entitled "The Ring of Thoth".

Thoth was the wisest of the Egyptian gods who, when Osiris died, helped Isis bring her love back from the dead.

This sequence showed the various forms Anck-es-en-Amon was reincarnated in over the centuries:[16] Henry Victor is credited in the film as "Saxon Warrior", despite his performance having been deleted.

[17] Stills exist of those sequences, but the footage (save for Karloff's appearance and the sacrilegious events leading up to his mummification in ancient Egypt) are lost.

The film also makes reference to the Egyptian myth of the goddess Isis resurrecting Osiris after his murder by his brother Set.

Papyrus trial transcripts reveal that the conspirators were prescribed 'great punishments of death', and archaeological evidence led to the suggestion that at least one of them may have been buried alive.

Mummification was a sacred process meant to prepare a dead body to carry the soul through the afterlife, not for being reincarnated and living again on Earth.

The Los Angeles Times was positive, although the film otherwise gained mixed critical reviews despite being a modest box office success.

In the second Im-Ho-Tep is embalmed alive, and that moment when the tape is drawn across the man's mouth and nose, leaving only his wild eyes staring out of the coffin, is one of decided horror.

The site's consensus states: "Relying more on mood and atmosphere than the thrills typical of modern horror fare, Universal's The Mummy sets a masterful template for mummy-themed films to follow".

While he commended the archaeological wisdom espoused by Sir Joseph Whemple in the film, he writes that "much more is learned from studying bits of broken pottery than from all the sensational finds" and that archaeologists' job is to "increase the sum of human knowledge of the past", and mentions that the archaeological element was only used as a foil for the supernatural elements.

[24] As a result, per Hall, what it and similar films offered was a "depiction of archaeology as a colonial imposition by which cultural inheritance is appropriated".

In common with most postmodern remakes of classic horror and science-fiction films, it may be considered as such in that it is produced-distributed by the same studio, its titular character is again named Imhotep, resurrected by the Book of the Dead, and out to find the present-day embodiment of the soul of his beloved Anck-su-namun, and features an Egyptian named Ardeth Bay (in this case, a guard of the city and of Imhotep's tomb).

It received negative reviews and is considered a box office bomb, scrapping the plans for the upcoming films of the Dark Universe.

[44] Later in October, The Mummy was included as part of a limited edition Best Buy-exclusive Blu-ray set titled Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection, which features artwork by Alex Ross.