The Mummy's Hand

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

The tomb of a thousand terrors!

A couple of young, out-of-work archaeologists in Egypt discover evidence of the burial place of the ancient Egyptian princess Ananka. After receiving funding from an eccentric magician and his beautiful daughter, they set out into the desert only to be terrorized by a sinister high priest and the living mummy Kharis who are the guardians of Ananka’s tomb.

Date of release
1940-09-20
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (104)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Horror, Fantasy
Director
Christy Cabanne
Collection
The Mummy (Universal) Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $84K

The Mummy's Hand is a 1940 American horror film directed by Christy Cabanne and produced by Ben Pivar for Universal Studios. Shot in black-and-white, the film is about the ancient Egyptian mummy of Kharis, who is kept alive with a brew of tana leaves by The High Priest and his successor Andoheb. Meanwhile, archeologists Steve Banning and Babe Jenson persuade magician Solvani to finance an expedition in search of the tomb of Princess Ananka. They are joined by Solvani's daughter Marta, and followed by Andoheb who is also the professor of Egyptology at the Cairo Museum. Kharis is ordered to kill off expedition members Dr.

Production

Following the financial success of the revival of the Frankenstein series with Son of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man series with The Invisible Man Returns, Universal Pictures decided to revive their The Mummy series with The Mummy's Hand. The film's budget was set at $80,000 and began filming towards the end of May 1940.

The authors of the book Universal Horrors described the budget as "modest" and noted that cost-cutting for the film involved using stock shots taken from The Mummy, leftover sets from James Whale's film Green Hell, and musical scores almost entirely lifted from Son of Frankenstein.

The Mummy's Hand's production continued into mid-June, which led director Christy Cabanne and his crew to film into overtime hours. According to Peggy Moran, she had to be on set at 6am to do hair and makeup and filming began at 8am and would occasionally work as late as 4am the next day.

Moran commented that "they could do that with people like me because we were under contract. The law requires that outside talent only work for X-number of hours, but me they could work all the time!" When asked about her fellow cast, she spoke positively about Dick Foran ("very nice and friendly") and Wallace Ford ("very funny always").

The film went over budget and slightly over schedule, costing an extra $4,000. Editing of the film was finished before the end of June.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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