The Awakening (1980)

[Calenture]

Magnum Books, 1980.

1658: Van Hoorn and Abdul discover an ancient tomb - that of Queen Kara, the Evil One. But the Curse of the Pharoes falls upon them and both are killed in a terrible storm which reseals the tomb.

1961: Sir Matthew Corbeck and Jane Howell, after a long search using Van Hoorns' notes, rediscover the tomb and bring out the mummy of Queen Kara.

Kara's Spirit is determined to live again. Having waited thousands of years, her time is nearly right. When Sir Matthew 's daughter is 18, Kara makes her move. And with Sir Matthew's help to reincarnate her, her evil powers grow again. Too late, he realises the danger to his daughter...and there is nothing he can do to stop it...

Charlton Heston as Sir Matthew, Susanna York as Jane. Professor Corbeck has another daughter, Margaret, played by Stephanie Zimbalist - and she's the one who gets reincarnated as Kara, it seems; daughter Jane gets snuffed out. I haven't seen the film, I'm going by the captions for the 8 black and white photo pages.

RCH's novelisation is from a screenplay by Allan Scott, Chris Bryant and Clive Exton. An EMI film. The script was based on Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars.

[Gloomy Sundae]

Thanks Rog! When the film was released, Arrow reissued Stoker's original as a tie-in/ spoiler for the RCH book - I'll scan up the cover in the not-too-distant. Chetwynd-Hayes knocked his out in a fortnight:

"It was marvellous, I got £2,000 for that. I read the script and pinched a bit from H. Rider-Haggard, some from the Arabian Nights, and I got a story out of it somehow. I found it was ridiculously easy. I also saw the film all by myself and thought it was stupid - why didn't they find an original idea? Anyway, it flopped, so I think I was right. I only found out afterwards it was based on Stoker's book because Arrow's original edition was selling better than my version. However, my book sold 15,000 copies, so Magnum was pleased."

Skeleton Crew, Sept. 1990

[Calenture]

Today's been sort of unfocused (nothing new there) but I was looking around for Mummy sites and found the lengthy synopsis of The Awakening below at Mummy Movies. Unfortunately the page didn't have any photos of the film - they seem very scarce.

A British film directed by Mike Newell. Written by Allan Scott, Chris Bryant and Clive Exton. The film opens with an argument between archaeologist Matthew Corbeck (Charleton Heston) and his pregnant wife Annie (Jill Townsend). Matthew is trying to discover a nameless lost queen of Egypt and Annie feels that he’s spending too much time on his job, and particularly with his assistant Jane (Susannah York).

Corbeck and Jane find a tomb and read a curse (or prophecy) in hieroglyphics: “Beware the man who comes from northern skies,” as “the nameless one” must not be allowed to live again. As they bash into the tomb, Annie has pains in her womb and lapses into a coma. Corbeck visits her briefly, then returns to the dig. She awakens with a scream as they enter the tomb, and gives birth. At first the baby appears to be stillborn, but it comes alive when Corbeck opens the sarcophagus of “the nameless one,” who turns out to be named Kara. The mummy's hand is disturbingly supple, and in fact the whole mummy turns out to be inexplicably well-preserved. An Egyptian antiquities official confronts Corbeck about irregularities in his dig, but the official loses his life when a rope catches him and he falls to his death.

Eighteen years later a visitor arrives from Egypt to inform Corbeck (who has grown a beard) that following an eclipse, the perfectly preserved items he discovered have begun to decay. Corbeck makes plans to return to Egypt to see why. Meanwhile, his ex-wife Annie is living in the U.S. with daughter Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist). Annie is still angry about Corbeck deserting them for Jane, whom he has married, but Margaret announces her intention to go to England and meet him.

Matthew goes to Egypt, and makes plans for transporting the remains to Britain to study the reasons for the decay. A local bacteriologist wants to take a sample of Kara’s flesh, but is killed in a car accident. Kara’s body is shipped to England.

Margaret appears during one of her father’s lectures and a happy reunion ensues. He takes her to see Kara’s mummy, saying, “it's time you two met.” They go out to dinner and he tells her the story of Kara.

Kara died when she was only 18, Margaret’s age. Her father the pharaoh killed Kara’s lover and married her himself. She sought revenge by crushing him under a stone block, then set about eradicating all knowledge of him not only by defacing his inscriptions but by killing everyone who had ever known him. The people rose up against her and entombed her, eradicating all knowledge of her, as she had done to her father. But they do know that Kara was a witch who could reincarnate herself through a ritual involving the canopic jars that held her viscera and a magical jewel with seven stars.

The next day Margaret visits her father at the Egyptology Department of the university, and hears that the mummy's canopic jars were never found. Corbeck’s colleague Paul (Patrick Drury) meets Margaret, and later calls her for a date. Paul is a microbiologist and he discovers a strange virus in Kara’s body, which he says should be immediately shipped back to Egypt. Corbeck asks Margaret to accompany him back to Egypt, since she has never “seen it, tasted the place.” Jane expresses concern about Corbeck’s “infatuation” with his daughter.

In the tomb, Margaret goes into a trance and talks strangely about marrying and hating her father. An assistant, Yussef (Ahmed Osman), is killed in a booby-trapped room, but the accident uncovers the canopic jars. When Corbeck smuggles these back to Egypt, his wife Jane realizes that he intends to attempt to enact the ritual that will restore Kara. But Corbeck is ambivalent about what he is doing, full of secret fears. When a mathematician he consults calculates that the astral signs are exactly as they were in 1800 BC, Matthew calls Jane and tells her to get a secret key to the safe and destroy the jars. She tries, but light bulbs blow out, and a wind begins to blow through the house. In hysteria, she falls off a balcony and is killed by a shard that falls and cuts her throat.

Margaret and Corbeck become increasingly aberrant in their behaviors. Eventually, Margaret ends up comatose in a hospital bed. Paul blames Matthew's obsession for Margaret's mental state, and Matthew replies that Kara is forcing his hand.

Margaret awakens when her father begins the ritual. Matthew invokes Anubis and Osiris and pours his own wrist blood into fires. Margaret joins him as he cuts open the bandages to reveal Kara's skeleton. “May Anubis take away my eyes. Open thine,” he recites, but he begins to doubt. “There's nothing there.”

Suddenly it dawns on him that the ritual is not really intended to raise the body of Kara but restore her in the body of Margaret, who is her reincarnation. He batters and tears at the mummy. Margaret hisses at him. Her father looks at her in horror as he is killed by a collapse of stone blocks. His last sight is the eyes of Kara looking at him from Margaret’s face.