Mummy

A less scary [1] example.

Dying is rough. All a pharaoh wants is a nice place to rest, surrounded by his millions of dollars in loot and valuable ancient artifacts, but there's always some joker that wants his stuff. So, the Mummy's gotta get out of his cozy sarcophagus and open a can of curse-ass in his shambling, arms-straight-out, wrapped-in-bandages, way.

He doesn't really care if he's attacking genuine graverobbers or archaeologists who want to put him in a museum. He just knows that they are defiling his tomb. He's not smart or powerful, but when his icy hand grips someone's shoulder, even the manliest of men will let out a girlish scream. Sometimes he can announce his entrance with "Who Dares? to disturb my sleep?!" or something similar.

The mummy is one of The Undead, and typically a Sealed Evil in a Can. When active, its behaviour is quite similar to the Zombie, but its embalmed flesh and ancient magic render it far sturdier than its rancid urban counterparts, to the extent that it is practically Implacable Man. Which is ironic, considering the opposite is true in real life; a real mummy will crumble to dust if you're not super careful with it.

The Mummy completes the classic quartet of Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Wolf Man. The four are the famous villains of the 1930s Universal monster movies.

When seen in kids' shows, brace yourself for a punnicane along the line of "I want my 'mummy'!".

See also:

Examples of Mummy include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Princess Resurrection, the mansion is one night attacked by the mummy army of Pharao. They are weak but there are so damn many of them. It Got Worse - Hime is ill and went to sleep in the middle of the battle so Hiro, Riza and Flandre have to fight the whole army by themselves.
  • In Dragon Ball, one of Uranai Baba's 5 warriors is a rather muscular and fast mummy.
  • Kekkaishi features an odd spin on the Mummy trope in major antagonist Kaguro, an Ayakashi (a variety of dangerous spirit) whose true appearance behind a human skin disguise is that of a fully burnt human wrapped in bandages. He's a Complete Monster fixed on killing "interesting" warriors without warning. Kaguro further defies Mummy conventions by stalking rather than sleeping, being the fastest character in the entire anime, materializing swords, and having chosen to become undead to gain power.
  • Rurouni Kenshin: Makoto Shishio is definitely a nod to this trope, despite being very alive. Another nod is in that he doesn't have a place in the current, peaceful era.
  • Mummymon from Digimon Adventure 02


Comic Books

  • In Little Gloomy, Mummy, an aptly named bartender, speaks in hieroglyphics. Somehow. Other characters understand him, but the reader cannot. That's apparently just how it goes down in Mummytown, which is, naturally, where he comes from.
  • The Marvel Universe gives us N'Kantu, the Living Mummy, an african tribal warrior of the "Swarili" that was mummified alive through magic means as punishment for inciting a slave rebellion in ancient Egypt. Wakes up after 3000 years, and starts fighting magic egyptian themed crime.
  • One of the Orange Lanterns, Warp-Wrap, is an alien mummy whose tomb was robbed by Larfleeze.
  • DC's Creature Commandos have occasionally had a mummy on the team.
  • King Yod in Megalex


Film


Literature

  • Many mummies rise in the Discworld book Pyramids. And they're pissed off not because people are violating their tombs, but because their tombs are actually the reason their souls can't pass on to the next life in the first place. That, and returning to your body to find your organs had been removed would make anyone crabby.
  • At least two Goosebumps books prominently feature mummies....except in both cases the mummies barely appear in the book.
    • In the recent Who's Your Mummy?, the mummies aren't even the villains, they're the victims.
  • There is an Anne Rice novel called The Mummy: or Rameses the Damned. The titular mummy, like Imhotep above, doesn't fit the trope himself, but Cleopatra kindasorta does, at least at first.
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Lot No. 249 tells the tale of ultimate nerd revenge in the form of an auction-bought mummy and an occultist student. It ends quite not so badly as the setup might lead to expect.


Live Action TV

  • The Doctor Who story "Pyramids of Mars" features robots disguised as mummies.
  • One Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode featured a mummy that was accidentally awakened during transport to a museum. After running away from it in the museum for most of the show, they eventually discover that it only wants a magical ring one of the characters got from its tomb (which, of course, the bad guy tries to use himself and ends up with a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style Karmic Death). When the mummy puts it on, it comes back to life as a pretty girl.
  • Amazing Stories did an episode called "Mummy Daddy", where an actor in a highly-restricting mummy-suit tries to get to the hospital for the birth of his child, ending up in various slapstick adventures with a bloodthirsty band of southern hicks and a real mummy.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Inca Mummy Girl" (which is about Exactly What It Says on the Tin) is about a Meso-American mummy who absorbs Life Energy in order to look like a teenage girl.
  • Used by the Leverage team in "The Second David Job". Sophie, pretending to be an Egyptologist, nonchalantly tells a museum curator with a newly acquired mummy that she's glad he doesn't believe all those silly rumors about a curse. He goes online and finds out that all the previous owners have mysteriously died... and, thanks to a little switcheroo with his allergy medication, he's not feeling so well either. The kicker, though, is when he goes to Nate's ex-wife Maggie, who's in on the con:

Curator: Hey, Maggie, you don't believe in curses, do you? You know, mummies, curses, unexplained deaths around sarcophaguses...
Maggie: Don't be silly. Everyone knows it's a fungus.
Curator: ...What?
Maggie: Aspegillus flavus. Found on Egyptian artifacts. Gets in the eyes and nose, the infection spreads, and the next thing you know, another death from the curse.

  • There was an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys where Herc takes a trip to Egypt and, naturally, has to deal with a mummy. It was tough enough to trade blows with him.
  • One episode of Tales from the Crypt recounted how the Cryptkeeper's parents—a living male carnival freak and a female mummy—got together. No, she wasn't animate when Crypty's dad got locked in a closet with her overnight.


Music

  • Amen [dead link] of the Finnish metal band Lordi is a mummy. In the moving Dark Floors, he also seems to have the power to create sandstorms out of thin air.
    • According to his backstory, he was an Egyptian Pharaoh who moonlighted as an assassin, killing his political rivals when they caused trouble, but one of them fought back and gave him a disfiguring scar that drove him to insanity. He had all his palace staff likewise disfigured and ate the hearts of all who resisted. Eventually he was entombed alive, and when he was dug up in the 1920s, he was really hungry.


Newspaper Comics

  • Mummies frequently popped up in The Far Side. One comic has a man suffer the mummy's wrath in a bathroom for mistaking funereal wrappings for toilet paper.
  • A memorable Gahan Wilson cartoon in Playboy had Egyptian priests in a modern day hospital putting a patient in a full body cast into a sarcophogus while he says "I think you guys are making a mistake."


Tabletop Games

  • Most, if not all, of the Dungeons & Dragons desktop or computer games will include a mummy, or lots of mummies, as enemies to be killed. If the campaign happens to be set in pseudo-ancient Egypt, the mummy may be the final boss monster.
    • It's also an exception to the "nearly mindless" rule-a cleric (usually an evil one, but not always) can opt to become a "mummy lord" which, as the name might suggest, combine the powers of normal mummies with all of their living intelligence and Functional Magic.
    • Like the majority of spooky monsters, mummies got the upgrade-and-customization treatment for the Ravenloft setting. They were described in Van Richten's Guide to the Ancient Dead, in which their name was changed on the grounds that "mummy" automatically calls to mind ancient Egypt, and not every such undead has to be from that style of culture. (Just ask the Dragon Emperor, above.)
  • Believe it or not, this was actually the theme for an Old World of Darkness RPG, Mummy: The Resurrection. Players were mummies, and didn't seek eternal life except in as much as it assisted them in perfecting their souls/humanity. The corebook had Egyptian-themed mummies as characters, with the player's guide adding South American mummies and Chinese immortals. Considering nearly every supernatural (and there were a lot of supernaturals in that world) would just as soon kill humans as look at them, they were as close as the setting got to depicting non-humans as good.
    • It's also worth noting that OWOD mummies aren't bandage-wrapped zombies. Rather, the embalming process is part of the Spell of Life, which can fully resurrect the recently dead.
    • Mummies show up in two ways in the New World of Darkness (with a third upcoming):
      • Firstly, the Osirans from Promethean: The Created borrow a lot of the elements without all the gauze. Inspired by the myth of Osiris? Check. Ritualistically dismembered before being reconstituted? Check. Of lordly bearing? Check. Able to come back from the dead again and again and again? Check.
      • Secondly, there are the Purified from the Immortals sourcebook. They're more Chinese than Egyptian (complete with using Chi as a power source), but attain immortality through ritualistic preparation and spend the rest of their lives as a part-spirit entity.
      • White Wolf have announced their 2012 NWOD game will be about mummies. What this version's going to look like we don't yet know, but Word of God says it's going to be more of an "occult horror and dark pulp-fantasy" take on the concept.
  • In Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the "Tomb Kings of Khemri" are an Egyptian-styled undead army, taking additional inspiration from The Mummy Trilogy, and even a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Most of them are skeletal but the Tomb Kings themselves are mummified. While they will attack people who steal from them, some of them also want to restore their old kingdoms, and several of their necropolises have living populations under the protection of their mummy rulers.
  • The mummy template from GURPS: Magic is actually worth negative points because they're easy to kill and incapable of any real thought. The Whight template is similar and far more intimidating.
  • The Pharon from VOR: The Maelstrom are an entire Exclusively Evil species of mummies, complete with zombie slaves from all manner of organic species...


Video Games

  • The Gibdos in The Legend of Zelda series look like mummies. In the N64 titles they're pretty much identical to the Redead zombie enemies; in the 2D games, Kill It with Fire.
  • The Metal Slug mummy's (and dog mummy's) purple breath turns the player himself into a mummy, instead of killing him. Ground speed, shooting speed, and grenade throwing speed is reduced, plus a mummified player can't pick up any weapons. If the player gets gassed a second time, he dies, but can return back to human by picking up a -literal- Magic Antidote.
  • The mummies of Castlevania get to inhabit, not the tomb of an Egyptian pyramid, but a European castle. And they walk back and forth sending out flying bandages, not really paying much attention to where Simon is.
    • Except in Portrait of Ruin, where they inhabit two pyramids within the portrait worlds, and one mummy is a late-game boss.
  • Anakaris of the Darkstalkers series is a slight subversion. While he moves slowly, this is due to his tremendous size, and he is one of the most powerful characters in the series. Which makes sense, as he was practically a god in life...
  • The video game Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy is a Zelda-style adventure game, when you're playing as Sphinx. The Mummy's segments are puzzle-based platformer areas. The solutions to the puzzles almost always involve slapstick humor relating to the fact that the Mummy's already dead, and therefore can be, say, squished flat or lit on fire with no ill effects. There're also a few monsters who were mummified such as the Mummy Worm, Chihuahua, and Bird, among others.
  • Diablo II features mummies, who can be produced in infinite numbers from sarcophagi and "die" in a burst of poisonous gases (from the chemicals used to preserve their ancient bodies escaping, of course), and greater mummies, the remains of Horadric mages who, to honor them, had animal parts grafted onto their bodies in death. They could raise other kinds of undead (but not each other) and threw black "Unholy Bolts".
  • Mummies in Boktai cannot see, but have a very good hearing. They throw bombs and bite if they find you. Catch them in a fire hazard or nail one with a Flame shot, however, and they run around like headless chickens - and if they die from the fire, they explode!
  • Parodied in Kingdom of Loathing. "Ooooh, no! I'll have to walk slightly faster if I want to escape!"
  • In The King of Dragons, mummies attack the player in Level 10 (and maybe 15). They move slowly, use a grappling attack to sap the players' life and take a fair amount of damage before they die.
  • Mummy Cats are encountered inside the Pyramid in Secret of Evermore, and attack by hopping around.
  • Mother 3 also has Mummy Cats as a minor enemy, with groovy music. Name? Cleocatra.
  • Dungeon Crawl has mummies as a player species. Their main gimmick is that they do not need to eat, but they also suffer various offsetting disadvantages, and early game survivability in the hands of a non-expert is low. As for enemies, the game has mummies, guardian mummies, mummy priests and greater mummies, as well as a few derived unique monsters. All of these are notable for having nasty death curses; i.e. they do bad things to you (and your inventory) when you kill them - you can avoid this by having your summons kill them instead. Mummy priests and greater mummies are also quite dangerous spellcasters - their summons can and will kill unwary players.
  • Mummies appear as stronger undead enemies in ..VideoGame/MediEvil.
    • Medi Evil 2 introduced Princess Kiya, a mummy who becomes Sir Dan's love interest.
  • In Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, mummies are recurring enemies. They are extremely slow, but tend to crop up in confined areas, which can make evading them somewhat difficult, and there is no point in shooting at them, as they are indestructible.
  • Amumu, the Sad Mummy, in League of Legends.
  • The ghost-type Pokémon Dusclops is designed with a Mummy in mind. As if being a ghostly cyclops isn't enough...
    • White/Black version introduces Yamask, a ghost type Pokémon that looks like a shadow-like thing with a golden mask attached to its tail and its evolution, Cofagrigus, a living sarcophagus with a evil face and shadowy hands. Both have the ability Mummy, which means that contact with that Pokémon will cause who ever touches it to gain the Mummy ability as well, leaving the opponent without its original ability and pretty much acting as a contagious "Mummy's Curse".
  • Magic Sword includes mummies among its variety of Mooks, who are quite sturdy for a minor enemy and have a tendency to suddenly fall from the ceiling just above The Brave One/Alan's head.
  • Breath of Fire II is the only one in the Breath of Fire series to include mummy enemies.
  • Jennety/Mack the Knife from Captain Commando is an alien crime-fighting Mummy Commando. His bandages are actually a life-sustaining suit which allows him to survive on Earth.
  • Valkyrie Profile: These are the standard adversaries in the Tombs of Amenti dungeon.
  • The Draugr in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are essentially Nordic mummies. You can even find their embalming equipment lying around as you raid their tombs. They come in both as brainless monster and powerful lich-like varieties.


Webcomics


Web Original

Western Animation

  • The Venture Brothers episode "Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II", is partially a send-up of this trope; in it, the family meets a 'good mummy,' but pretty much all of the shambling corpses, and the 'Cult of Osiris' that resurrected them, are profoundly ineffective.
    • In the pilot, a mummy falls out of their jet. Brock kicks its ass, kills it, and the urinates on it for good measure (you have to defile a mummy completely, or else it'll just get back up). Upon closer inspection, Rusty finds the mummy to be a fake. It's unknown who that guy really was, or why he dressed up as a mummy and climbed into the Venture jet.
  • The mummy in the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Throw Mummy From The Train" is actually portrayed as a good character, guarding a ring that, when plugged into the Sphinx, summons a demon into it, not diamonds as the legitimate archaeologist mistranslated it, so he and the titular Rescue Rangers try to stop the other archaeologist, who's only in it for the loot and hates the responsible bits like cataloguing the treasures, from doing that with the ring.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog features the Mummy of King Ramses, who seems to be based on a cross between Tutankhamen and Moses - he looks like a greenish vampire and instead of acting like a zombie, he chooses to stand from afar and curse the house with floods, locusts and terrible music ("the man in gauze, the man in gauze. KING RAAAAMSES!"). He also has the power of possession.
    • There was another episode with a more traditional mummy, this one being a unfairly punished baker.
  • In one episode of Road Rovers ("Dawn of the Groomer") a villainess tries to resurrect three anthropomorphic dog mummies.
  • The animated series Mummies Alive may be the only group of superheroic mummies on record.
  • Ben 10 features an alien mummy, amongst a group that also includes an alien werewolf and an alien Frankenstein's Monster. And an alien ghost. Leave it to Ben10 to create a Monster Mash of aliens!
  • Tutenstein features the undead child-pharaoh Tutankhensetamun awoken in the modern day.
  • The classic Big Bad of Thundercats and ThunderCats (2011). "Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!" Ironically, in all but aesthetics, Mumm-Ra is more of a Lich.
  • Mummies were among Scooby Doo's most common adversaries, perhaps because it's such an easy Monster Suit Of The Week to whip up in a pinch.
    • One of the Scooby-Doo movies is called Where's My Mummy, and features Velma herself as the mind behind the Scooby-Doo Hoax. The only reason she didn't tell the rest of the gang was because she was afraid they'd get mixed up in the plan.
  • Not only is there a mummy in an episode of the original Jonny Quest series, it is featured in the opening credits.
  • Naturally, one of these shows up in Monster Force. This version of the mummy, while appearing like a more human version of the typical bandage-wrapped shambler (separate fingers, visible facial fingers), is almost identical to the first movie version, being intelligent and a powerful sorcerer.
  • In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a mummy is discovered to be living in the team's basement. This is why, as Carl explains, their rent was so cheap. The mummy continuously bullies Frylock into buying him expensive gifts and meals, threatening him with "CURSE!" if he refuses. After a visit to the local library, Frylock learns that plagues are just an "Old Wives' Tale," and that a mummy's true curse is that it is a selfish, spoiled brat devoid of any social skills. With no prospect of magical retribution, they toss him to the curb for the trash pick-up.
  • In the Tale Spin episode "In Search of Ancient Blunders", Baloo, Wildcat, and Adventurer Archaeologist Myra encounter a mummy who guards the upside-down pyramid of King Utmost. The mummy is revealed to be the foreman who was responsible for the pyramid being built upside down; King Utmost cursed him in retaliation. However, the mummy undoes the curse by preventing Don Karnage's Air Pirates from stealing the pyramid, which indirectly results in its being reinstalled on the original site rightside up.
  • In the Swat Kats episode "The Deadly Pyramid", the Pastmaster takes control of an army of monster mummies (each is the size of a small building!) and goes on a rampage.
  • The Centurions fight an army of the creatures in "The Mummy's Curse"—until their pharoah revives and tells them to go back to sleep (in perfect, unaccented English).
  • The Adventures of Super Mario Bros 3 episode "Mind Your Mummy Mommy, Mario" had Bowser sending his twin Koopalings to kidnap the mummified Prince Mushroomkhamen for a reason that is never given. In the process, they end up waking up his mother, who mistakes Mario for her son (and later Luigi for her husband) because they look exactly alike.
  • During the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog 4-parter about the Chaos Emeralds, Robotnik visited a pyramid in which he encountered mummified ancestors of both himself and Sonic.
  • In the short lived Hanna-Barbera series Drac Pack, The Brute of the bad guys was the mumbling Mummy-Man who besides being strong and tough also could shoot away his bandages (but not losing any of them - he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them) to bind his opponent, create grapple lines or tie things together, as a very weird variant of Spiderman's webshooters.
  • The Simpsons
    • Thought to be the culprit in a Treehouse of Horror IV story.

Kent Brockman: Another local peasant has been found dead -- drained of his blood with two teeth marks on his throat. This black cape was found on the scene. [Cape has "DRACULA" written on it] Police are baffled.
Chief Wiggum: We think we're dealing with a supernatural being, most likely a mummy. As a precaution, I've ordered the Egyptian wing of the Springfield museum destroyed.

Dick: Yes, Irwin's mom is actually a mummy. Nobody can tell you who to fall in love with, but we've managed to make it work all these years. Leaving a whole lot of questions that don't need to be answered.
Mandy: Eh, works for me.
Grim: Me too.
Billy: ...Yeeeeeaaah, but how did you and Irwin's mom...
Dick: (in the exact same tone of voice) Leaving a whole lot of questions that don't need to be answered.

  • Mary Shelley's Frankenhole had one in "Robert Louis Stevenson's Belushi!" whose entire schtick is making 'wrapped up' puns.
  • The Smurfs had The Moon-Eyed Mummy in the Season 9 episode "Mummy Dearest".
  1. ↑ or rather sexier
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