We Were Wrong About The 1999 Mummy's Villain All Along
If anything, Imhotep is a victim.
The 1999 Mummy movie is a reason many of us had nightmares as kids, because the villain's origin story is pretty rough. You know what else was rough? The way we have all treated Imhotep over the years.
To refresh your memory, the mummy is actually the high priest Imhotep, who had the misfortune to have an affair with Anck-su-namun, the mistress of Pharaoh Seti I. Their romance did not end well for either of them: Anck-su-namun killed herself, and Imhotep was brutally tortured and buried in a sarcophagus while being eaten alive by scarabs.
This all happened after he tried to resurrect his love, and the Pharaoh's bodyguards, the Medjai, are sworn to prevent him from ever returning from the dead.
Spoiler alert, that doesn't help. Imhotep returns, and he is not the most pleasant guy to have around, bringing back the Ten Plagues and even wanting to sacrifice Jonathan Carnahan's sister Evelyn, who is an Egyptologist. She is the one who reads the Book of the Dead in order to resurrect Imhotep.
But was Imhotep really evil by nature? According to a new Reddit theory, absolutely not.
"There is a warning Imhotep will kill who opens the chest with the book. So he kills the people who opened the chest to resurrect his body. He is forced to as per his curse by the magi. He will destroy the world if he does not resurrect himself and his lover," Redditor Kroosh333 pointed out.
Imhotep suffered brutal torture for his love, and it is the curse that drives him to commit atrocities, not his own villainous nature. According to fans, Imhotep is more of a "monster" than a "villain."
"He's not so much a bad guy as he is a traditional movie monster – things happened to him that made him bad, and he has to be stopped because him existing is bad. The mummy's curse is the real antagonist, he is just the vessel of that curse," another Redditor noted.
What can we say? This is an era of misunderstood villains, and it looks like it started a lot longer ago than we thought. Maybe we'll get a new Mummy installment, after the 2017 reboot's poor performance prevented it from launching a new cinematic universe.