Eighteen years ago, archaeologist Fuchs (Andrew Keir) and his associates apparently found the grave of the Egyptian queen Tera (Valerie Leon), killed and mutilated by priests for their fear of the huge magical powers she had developed, and perhaps her evil. Let’s not get into what “evil” might have meant to an ancient Egyptian priest. Since her hacked-off hands murdered a bunch of jackals who were trying to eat them, they can’t have been too wrong about her having powers, at least.
In any case, when Fuchs and company found Tera’s tomb, they made the startling discovery that her body was untouched by any kind of decay. Something the film never makes quite clear happened in the tomb, and eventually, Keir and associates scattered to the winds, each one taking one artefact belonging to Tera with them to protect it for – or perhaps against – her, while Fuchs secretly built a replica of the tomb in the cellar of his mansion, also taking Tera’s body there.
Now, nearly eighteen years later, the powers connected with Tera seem to awaken. This shouldn’t be too surprising to Fuchs, either, for his daughter Margaret looks exactly like Tera (and is obviously also played by Valerie Leon). In fact, Margaret was born dead and suddenly came back to live the very same moment the expedition found Tera’s body, so there’s a connection that’s pretty difficult to deny, try as Fuchs might. Though, really, Fuchs doesn’t seem to know his on mind on the situation, if he believes in any mystical connection between Tera and Margaret at all, or if he wants Tera to use Margaret for her own goals, whatever those may be exactly or if he wants to protect his daughter from Tera’s influence. He does not become more decisive now that Margaret begins to display strange powers and curious personality shifts.
Corbeck (James Villiers), one of Fuchs’s former colleagues, on the other hand, has very much made up his mind about things: he wants to shove Tera’s spirits into Margaret’s body by force, so he can then control her and use her for his own lust for power. He’s trying to manipulate Margaret into that direction, but really, he is much further out of his depth than his mock-decadent left-hand magus demeanour suggests, looking rather a lot like an ant pretending it is controlling where the woman on whose shoulder it sits goes.
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, a film not containing a single mummy, is one of the lesser loved films from Hammer’s risk-taking phase in the early 70s when they tried to shake off the image of stuffiness they had developed over the course of the last decade and reach the increasingly elusive younger audiences again. I get why people don’t love the film as much as others from this stage. Director Seth Holt (a man with a small but excellent filmography, and apparently a rather intense personality) died four fifths through the production, which was finished by Michael Carreras without a clear idea where the whole of the film was supposed to go. So there’s a sense of something, maybe some explanations or some connective tissue, perhaps even important scenes, missing from what is nominally an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Jewel of the Seven Stars” (but is really inspired by motives from it more than anything). It can be a bit like watching a second draft of something that probably needed a third or a fourth, and this feeling of the film not being quite finished or quite whole tends to stand between a movie and the status of a classic for most people.
For me, Blood works as a fascinating artefact more because of this great flaw than despite of it. There’s clearly meant to be a lot of ambiguity surrounding Tera’s nature anyway, and this mystery and ambiguity is only strengthened by the film’s state. As it stands, it’s difficult to understand what Tera actually wants, the audience only ever seeing her through Fuchs’s or Corbeck’s interpretation, and the psychic pressure she puts on Margaret. But how much of Margaret’s actions under Tera’s influence are Tera’s decisions, Margaret’s own psychological torment caused by the various men in her life trying to dominate her in one way or the other is unclear. As it stands – certainly also helped by Tera never speaking – the Egyptian queen feels more like a force of nature, something much bigger than any of the human characters can comprehend, everyone, well, every man deciding what she is or wants on the basis of very little actual evidence.
Which of course also does the curious trick of putting this as close to Lovecraftian cosmsicism as well as to feminism as Hammer movies get. The latter aspect of the movie is additionally strengthened by Valerie Leon’s wonderful performance that should have recommended her to Hammer for a whole load of other substantial roles. Of course, they never did try very hard to develop any of their actresses with obvious staying power and charisma, while wasting a surprising amount of energy on some obvious male failures.
Anyway, all of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb’s flaws, its ambiguities purposeful and not, some fine horror scenes, as well as the cosmsicism and feminist readings it suggests combine for my taste into a very enticing whole, the sort of film I come to Hammer in this phase of their existence to.