Tag: Stephen Sommers

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Call for Chapters: The Mummy Edited Collection

Editors, Michele Brittany and Sean Woodard

Contact Email: mummybookproject@mcbrittany

Abstract Deadline: December 15, 2023

Chapter Drafts Deadline: June 15, 2024

The 1999 Universal reboot of The Mummy, starring the indelible duo of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, remains a tentpole of ’90s popular culture and cinema. Not only did The Mummy launch two sequels, a spin-off series, and a reboot, but it has lived on as a cult film, loved by fans for its mixture of horror, action/adventure, and humor. The film has also developed a strong meme culture on social media — one of the most viral examples contains a photo of a car bumper sticker proclaiming: “Honk if you’d rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece ‘The Mummy’ starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.”

While academic research has been focused on various releases of The Mummy (1932, 1959, 1999, and 2017), there has not been a singular scholarly text devoted to the film franchise. The recent “Brenaissance” in Fraser’s film career and the film’s anticipated 25th anniversary in 2024 make it an appropriate time to celebrate and re-evaluate the film.

The purpose of this edited collection is to place The Mummy into a cultural and theoretical context, as well as critically analyze the franchise, its connections to other genre films, and its continued influence.

We seek proposals for chapters that approach the subject matter with theoretical concepts that will appropriately meet the rigorous expectations of an academic work, but through a prose style that shall be accessible for both an academic audience and a general readership.  

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Resurgent interest in Brendan Fraser/”Brenaissance”
  • Stephen Sommers as an auteur
  • Representation of Egypt in popular culture and early filmic representation
  • Eastern mythology/culture/religion
  • Exoticism of non-western cultures
  • Post/De-colonialism
  • Heroic representation
  • Body horror
  • Eco-horror/Ecocriticism
  • Gender representation
  • Toxic depictions in film
  • Queer/LGBTQ+ representation
  • Meme/GIF culture
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Generational nostalgia
  • Element of music/film scoring
  • Genre hybridity
  • Film cycles/reboots/retcons (such as The Scorpion King, The Mummy animated series, Universal Classic Monsters, Hammer Studios, Dark Universe, etc.) and related adventure/archaeological-driven films (such as Ark of the Sun God, The Sphinx, The Librarian franchise, etc.)

Please send abstracts of 300 – 500 words with a working title and five (5) keywords, accompanied by a short third-person author bio (100 words max), to mummybookproject@gmail.com as a Word document. Final essays should be 6,000 – 8,000 words in length, including endnotes and bibliography, and be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. The collection is being considered by a leading academic press.

Proposed Timeline

  • October 1, 2023 through December 15, 2023 — Call for Papers
  • January 15, 2024 — Notification of abstract acceptances sent to authors
  • January 15, 2024 through June 15, 2024 — Book chapters drafting period
  • June 15, 2024 through July 15, 2024 — Initial editorial review of submitted chapter drafts
  • August 1, 2024 through October 1, 2024 — Double-blind peer review period
  • October 1, 2024 through November 15, 2024 — Contributor revision period
  • December 1, 2024 — Final editorial acceptance decisions
  • December 1, 2024 through January 15, 2025 — Layout design, indexing, and proofing stage
  • January 16, 2025 through February 15, 2025 — Copies of chapter proofs sent to contributors for copyediting review
  • March 1, 2025 — Final manuscript submitted in hard copy and digital formats to publisher

Editor bios:

Michele Brittany is a writer, editor, podcaster, and artist. She edited James Bond and Popular Cultureand the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Horror in Space: Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre. She co-edited Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays and co-hosts H. P. Lovecast podcast with Nicholas Diak. She lives in Glendale, Arizona.

Sean Woodard (MA | MFA) is a PhD candidate in English at University of Texas at Arlington. He also serves as the Assistant Editor for Global Insight: A Journal of Critical Human Science and Cultureand the Film Editor for Drunk Monkeys. He has contributed chapters to the edited collections Journeys Into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horrorand Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad. His research interests include horror cinema, the American West, psychoanalysis, fairy tales, and film scoring.

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It’s a Wrap: Week Ending 03/21/2021

Mummies in News and Pop Culture

Nihal Samir with the Daily News Egypt reported that the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that 22 royal mummies will be transferred from Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to Fustat’s National Museum of Egyptian Civilization on April 3 in a magnificent parade.  

Kahel El-Anani, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, said of the upcoming event, “We want the world to see the beauty of Egypt’s civilization, with the procession set to be dazzling, different from any other celebration, and among the most beautiful celebrations that the people of the world will see.” 

Each Pharaoh and Queen will be transported in specially constructed cars, each bearing the royal’s name in Arabic, hieroglyphs, and English.  The parade will take approximately 90 minutes and will be televised. 

The royal mummies mentioned in the article are a who’s who from ancient Egypt: Ramses II, Seti I, Amenhotep I, Seqenenre, Thutmose III, Hatshepsut, Meritamun, and Ahmose Nefertari, among others.

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This past week Elizabeth Rayne at SyFy Wire wrote about the discovery of an ancient Roman Period pet cemetery in the once port city of Berenice.  Cats, dogs, and monkeys found revealed that they had been carefully buried, but had not been mummified or sacrificed.  Rather, the animals had died naturally.  Archezoologist Marta Osypinska explained the significance of the find: this cemetery supports that the concept of “pets” and an emotional bond that went beyond utilitarian/economic use in society.   

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And, in pop culture history….

March 15, 1945, Henry Victor passed away at the age of 52.  He has an interesting connection to The Mummy (1932, dir. Karl Freud) because he was cast as the Saxon Warrior in one of the past life flashbacks, but his scene was ultimately deleted from the film.  His credit however remains. 

March 15, 1967 saw the U.S. release of The Mummy’s Shroud directed by Englishman John Gilling and produced by Hammer Film Productions.  This was the third of the four mummy films Hammer produced.  

March 20, 1962, marks the birth of Stephen Sommers, director/writer of The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001).  He wrote and produced The Scorpion King (2002, dir. Chuck Russell).  Although he stepped from directing in The Mummy and The Scorpion King IP, Sommers has kept involved behind the scenes as a producer for a number of the subsequent films and The Mummy television series. 

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News

It’s a Wrap: Week Ending 03/07/2021

Mummies in News and Pop Culture

University of Copenhagen: Ancient Egyptian Manual Reveals Details About Mummification

There were several articles spotlighting the discovery of new details about the mummification process practiced by ancient Egyptians, and I selected India Education Diary’s post as the most comprehensive one to share.  University of Copenhagen PhD student, Sofie Schiodt, has been studying the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manuscript, an herbalist treatise that includes mummification details not known before.  It is known that the process takes 70 days, however, it wasn’t known that the process was divided into intervals of four days and finishing on the 68th day.  The manuscript also revealed the procedure for embalming the person’s face with red linen soaked in “plant-based aromatic substances and binders” and then applied to the face.  This process encased the face “in a protective cocoon of fragrant and antibacterial matter.” 

This manuscript dates back to 1450 BC and predates the two other embalming texts in existence by over 1,000 years. 

Mummy Reveals How Egyptian Pharaoh was Brutally Killed in Ancient War Caused by Snoring Hippos

In a Syfy article written by Elizabeth Rayne, radiologist Sahar Salem and Dr. Zahi Hawass conducted a non-invasive CT scan on the body of Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa II, who ruled during the 17th Dynasty.  “The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre” tale documents Apophis, the Hyksos king, demanding Seqenenre to destroy the Theban hippopotamus pool, located hundreds of miles from Apophis, because their snoring kept him awake.  Of course, the hippo was a sacred animal to the Egyptians, so naturally, this insult by Apophis was likely answered with a military skirmish.  

The scan revealed the embalmers had meticulously reconstructed his face and were able to hide some of his injuries well.  Because of the severe damage to Seqenenre’s face, the Hyksos may have been trying to disfigure his body in his physical death as well as his Afterlife, similarly to erasing or striking out a person’s image and name from temple reliefs and such. 

Seqenenre’s mummy was part of the cache found at Dier el-Bahri in 1881 and identified when his mummy was unbandaged in 1886.  

And, in pop culture history….

March 6,1964, Edward Van Sloan, who played Dr. Muller in Karl Freud’s The Mummy (1932), passed away in San Francisco, CA at the age of 81.  Van Sloan was born in 1882 made his film debut in Slander (1916, dir. Will S. Davis) as Joseph Tremaine.  He has the distinction of having a role in the top three Universal monster films in the early 1930s: Dr. Van Helsing in Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning), Doctor Waldman in Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale), and Doctor Muller in The Mummy.  According to IMDB, Van Sloan’s last role was in The Underworld Story (1950, dir. Cy Endfield) in an uncredited role as a minister at a funeral.  In all, he had 90 actor credits. 

March 7, 1970, Rachel Weisz was born in London, England. She began modeling at the age of 14 and made her first on-screen appearance in 1992 on Advocates II, a television film.  She appeared in her first major role in Chain Reaction (1996, dir. Andrew Davis), but it wasn’t until 1999 as Evelyn Carnahan, the librarian turned Egyptologist in The Mummy (1999, dir. Stephen Sommers) that Weisz became renown internationally.  She returned to the franchise in 2001 with The Mummy Returns (dir. Stephen Sommers), but opted out of the third installment due to issues with the script.  She moved on to other projects and Maria Bello was cast as Evelyn.  While The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor yield a healthy profit, it was the franchise’s lowest grossing film.  If Weisz had stayed on for a third film, perhaps with a closer timeline to the first and second films, one wonders if the franchise would have continued with more installments?