SOURCE: “The Curse of Ancient Egypt,” in New Statesman & Society, September 1, 1989, pp. 31-2.

In the following review, Carter offers favorable assessment of The Mummy.

According to Franco Morretti (Dialectic of Fear), the tale of terror relies for its specific frisson on repression. “The repressed returns … but disguised as a monster.” The horror novels of Anne Rice comprehensively trash this theory; she lets the repressed return in splendour. When the crumbling bandages at last fall from the eponymous mummy of this, her latest novel, young Julie Stamford, the shipping heiress, reels back, but not in horror.

“Dear God, she thought, this is not merely a man gifted with beauty; this is the most beautiful man I've ever seen.”

Ramses III, former Pharoah of Egypt, is, admittedly, not so much one of the undead as an immortal. He may make his entrance in a manner characteristic of a fifties movie...