What Could Have Been: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb

Sometimes a movie is born under a bad sign, and sometimes it just so happens to be a horror movie (ironic, as this one also has to do with the astronomical alignment of the stars – specifically the big dipper). In 1971, Hammer released Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb... which, during its production, lost icon Peter Cushing to his wife getting very ill, its director Seth Holt dying before completion, while Holt was also planning on editing the picture – meaning when he passed, he never left any idea of how the whole thing was going to be put together to create a finished product. After Holt’s passing, Michael Carreras stepped right into the project to finish the directing with Peter Weatherley tasked with editing it all together. All rewrites which were still being done while Holt was directing were cancelled upon his death, which also couldn’t have helped.

Not talked about nearly as much as influential horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974), and Halloween (1978), in 1976 Alfred Sole co-wrote and directed Alice, Sweet Alice... very early on known as Communion and later on as Holy Terror, another pre-cursor to the slasher craze that would soon thrive during the early 1980s. With seeming touches of a gialli influence, funnily enough, Sole claims to have never seen a giallo before making the film... instead, pulling from the ever influential Alfred Hitchcock, and more precisely, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) – which can clearly be seen here.

The third and final movie in The Creature from the Black Lagoon franchise, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) was released just a year after the sequel and two after the original – clearly aiming to capitalize on the popularity of their horror creation... but sadly, it is better known as the last classic monster movie filmed by Universal. Directed by longtime assistant director John Sherwood (for the first time in the head chair thanks to some good words from Jack Arnold who directed the previous two), the story this time straddles the line between the original feature and a nature versus nurture premise that makes for a very different monster movie.

After Roger Corman’s major success with House of Usher (1960), he promptly turned to adapting another Edgar Allan Poe story to start a franchise of sorts, with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) being an even bigger win... with it making over two million dollars on a modest budget of only three hundred thousand. Getting Vincent Price (House of Wax; Laura) back after House of Usher’s critical and commercial winnings, this time he plays Nicholas Medina, a tortured soul living in a tomb of a castle with his servants after his gorgeous wife Elizabeth (Barbara Steele – Black Sunday; The Horrible Dr. Hichcock) has seemingly died of a massive heart attack brought on by fright. Feeling as if he is truly cursed, he resides in the same place that his sadistic Spanish Inquisition father once tortured his victims, where his mother and uncle died, and now where his wife has met her untimely end. It has become so bad that even Nicholas’ sister Catherine (Luana Anders) has returned home to try and ease his sorrows.

Today’s feature really had me divided as to where it should be placed on my site – in a ‘Missed the Bloody Cut’ feature, a ‘What Could Have Been’ analysis, or as a typical ‘review’... I decided to go with the final option. Falling within the burgeoning slasher horror genre of the early 1980s, Jeff Lieberman co-writes the screenplay and directs Just Before Dawn (1981). Finding a group of friends heading into the Oregon mountains to investigate a plot of land Warren (a young Gregg Henry – Femme Fatale; Guardians of the Galaxy) has inherited, he is joined by his girlfriend Constance (Deborah Benson), another couple in Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and Megan (Jamie Rose), as well as Jonathan’s brother Daniel (Ralph Seymour) – who has notoriously bad eyesight.

In 1942, RKO set up Val Newton as the head of their new horror division to produce low budget B movies... he promptly released Cat People with Jacques Tourneur directing. A massive critical and financial success, the very next year he reunited his team to release I Walked with a Zombie (1943). This time bringing in the successful Universal The Wolf Man (1941) writer Curt Siodmak to come up with the premise (asked to loosely base it upon Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Inez Wallace’s original source material article), it was then reworked a bit by Newton and Ardel Wray into the finished product.