Everyone knows the most reliable, even though old, horror movie tropes:
Some explorers travelling to the pyramids of Egypt trip upon an old mummy’s tomb. After opening it, bad stuff happens, usually involving angry mummies.
When news broke that an Egyptian coffin had been unlocked by archeologists for the first time in 2500 years, during the month where everyone watches horror movies, perhaps it was unavoidable that social media freaked out.
In many cases, made the same mummy joke.
Incidentally not resulting in any supernatural happenings, the video of the archeological event was spread thanks to an account labeled “Psychedelic Art,” which posts just that, from ancient relics to trippy computer graphics. It was revealed that on Saturday Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities hosted a mixed gathering to celebrate the finding of 59 preserved wooden coffins in a tomb in Saqarra, a necropolis near the city of Memphis.
It’s an incredible find! But the internet can never resist a dumb joke, especially when the news is so wild, as it was on Monday (and on Sunday, and on Saturday, etc.). But video of the group watching a coffin being opened, for the first time in 2 ½ millennia, was too much to resist. In fact, many made the same joke, summoning Brendan Fraser, star of the Mummy films from the late ‘90s-to-aughts. (Some even remembered to include his main costar, Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz.)
Even accounts for movie theater tickets got in on the action.
Eventually there were meta tweets about Brendan Fraser trending.
And some talk of Oded Fehr erasure.
Of course, this is also erasure of the other Mummy movies, from the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff to the even more lurid Hammer version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. And of course, it appears everyone forgot about the 2017 reboot starring Tom Cruise that tried, and utterly failed, to launch a Universal Monsters “Dark Universe” à la the MCU.
But even Tom Cruise was able to rebound from that, so maybe its existence is best left unmentioned.
