Then the team who opened King Tutannkhamen’s tomb—Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender—were soon the subject of much fictional speculation. There was a curse, you see, and the story is that they all died horribly soon after. In fact, Lord Carnarvon did die within six months, from a mosquito bite precipitating pneumonia, and Cairo was blacked out at the moment of his death, and the mummified Tut had a small scar at exactly the place where the mosquito bit Carnarvon. It was all fiction writers needed—the curse of the mummy became a staple fiction horror genre of its own. Now, one by one, all the others at the site at the time apparently died unexpectedly over the next few years—which the fiction versions always reduce to a few months at most—thus confirming the curse. Never have a group of real people been so frequently and horribly murdered as were the innumerable fiction versions of Carter’s gang. Unfortunately for fiction, Howard Carter—presumably the one whom the curse would have been most pissed off with—lived 17 years after and died of natural causes at 66.  
    In fact the mummy’s curse story was age-old, but the one that really set up Carter and Co. for the bally-hoo was Bram Stoker who, after the success of Dracula, took the subject pretty seriously in his 1903 (20 years before the tomb was opened) book The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This is a beauty. At the moment British Archaeologists open the tomb of Queen Tera, far off in London the wife of the expedition leader dies giving birth to a daughter, Margaret, who grows to be the dead spit of the perfectly preserved evil Queen. As the time for Margaret’s reincarnation as Queen Tera nears, those who stand in the way of the ritual have their throats ripped out by a creeping severed hand or else the ghosts of the jackals the hand was originally thrown too. Reunite the hand to its owner and say the right words and the wicked Queen will be free to once more live up to her name. Very spooky.
    When the extraordinary studio Hammer Films made the movie, they were surprisingly faithful to Stoker’s original text in every respect except one—the title was changed to Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb! Well, that’s marketing for you. In fact the movie was one of their better efforts, despite the blindingly gorgeous but frightfully wooden actress (Valerie Leon) who played Margaret and Queen Tera.