The Mummy (1932)

The Mummy owes a great deal to Willy Pogany, artist, illustrator, and mural painter, who designed its sets.

As in Frankenstein, Karloff's ability to communicate through his makeup is vital to establishing his character, even in human form, it's clearly pain and not incarnate evil that dictates his actions.

The most meditative of classic frights is an unanswerable drift of obsession, laid out by Karl Freund as a fugue of stillness and movement, indelibly embodied by Karloff as a decrepit vessel pulled onward by a wandering spirit's erotic torment.

An eerie, weirdly moving film about loneliness and the persistence of history.

Boris Karloff's disguise of living death is astounding. In the hands of a lesser artist the representation would be grotesque; Karloff's mummy is sinister and uncomfortably lifelike. The story is equally remarkable.