A 3,700-year-old Egyptian priest is reanimated during an excavation and, disguised as an Egyptologist, searches for the reincarnation of his beloved, who was murdered long ago. Boris Karloff appears as a bandaged mummy only in the opening scene; for the rest of the film, he wears the elaborate aging makeup developed by Jack Pierce, which took hours to apply. Director Karl Freund, who previously served as cinematographer on Dracula and in Weimar-era cinema (The Last Man, Metropolis), brings expressionist visual language and a calm, hypnotic style to a story that was largely inspired by the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the resulting “Curse of the Pharaohs” myth.