The Mummy Villains: Every Antagonist Across the Franchise

Boris Karloff, billed first in Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932), plays Imhotep, a high priest who goes by the name Ardath Bey once he walks among the living again. His crime was a sacrilege, and the punishment was burial alive. The Universal original treats him less as a brute and more as a patient schemer who has had thousands of years to plan.

The trouble begins in 1921, when a British dig in Egypt lifts his body from the ground beside a sealed casket that holds the Scroll of Thoth. Ralph Norton, the youngest member of the party, reads the scroll aloud despite the warnings around him. Imhotep opens his eyes, Ralph loses his mind, and the scroll leaves with its owner. A decade later Ardath Bey turns up to guide Frank Whemple to the buried tomb of the princess Anck-es-en-Amon.

What does he want? In his view the princess lives again as Helen Grosvenor, who has Egyptian ancestry, and he steers her toward him one step at a time. The plan is to kill her, wrap her as a mummy and wake her so the two of them can live forever. Dr. Muller, the one scholar who knows the old magic, becomes the main obstacle.

The finish comes at the temple. Helen calls on the goddess Isis, the statue lifts its arm, and the power that follows burns the scroll. Imhotep falls to dust, because everything that kept him alive was written on that one object. In my opinion, that fragile dependence is what keeps him frightening, since the heroes only need to find the weak point.

Arnold Vosloo plays the best known Imhotep in The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns, both directed by Stephen Sommers. In the opening of the 1999 film the high priest Imhotep and the pharaoh's mistress Anck-su-namun kill the pharaoh, she takes her own life, and he is mummified alive and sealed away under a curse.

Thousands of years later, in 1926, the librarian Evelyn Carnahan finds a golden book at Hamunaptra and reads aloud from it against Rick O'Connell's advice. That wakes him. His rules are what make him a strong creature design: he regenerates by draining life from the people he kills, he brings the plagues of Egypt down on the land, and he needs Evelyn as a sacrifice to bring Anck-su-namun back.

The Medjai warrior Ardeth Bay has spent his life guarding against this return. At the climax Evelyn reads from the second book, which takes away Imhotep's immortality, and Rick drives a blade into him. Imhotep dissolves and Hamunaptra collapses. Read more on imhotep mummy.

In The Mummy Returns, set in 1933, a cult resurrects him and he joins a plan to wake the Scorpion King. His powers are drained at the pyramid, and as the oasis of Ahm Shere collapses he lets go and drops into the underworld.

Anck-Su-Namun, played by Patricia Velásquez, is the pharaoh's mistress and Imhotep's lover, and she is the reason for his curse. She is credited as Anck-Su-Namun in The Mummy (1999) and as Meela / Anck-Su-Namun in The Mummy Returns.

Did she betray Imhotep? Not in the 1999 film. She helps him kill the pharaoh and then takes her own life, while Imhotep is the one who pays, mummified alive and sealed away under a curse. She waits to be brought back, and Imhotep needs Evelyn as a sacrifice to raise her.

In The Mummy Returns she has been reborn as Meela, a member of the cult led by Baltus Hafez, and the cult wants to use Imhotep to wake the Scorpion King and control his army. The film also reveals that Evelyn is the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess who was Anck-Su-Namun's old enemy. Anck-Su-Namun is killed by scorpions as the pyramid is destroyed. Her story is on anck su namun.

She is one of two major female villains in the saga. The other is Ahmanet, who arrives in 2017.

Dwayne Johnson plays Mathayus / The Scorpion King, the final threat of The Mummy Returns before he becomes the hero of his own spin-off. The legend behind him drives the plot: Alex O'Connell puts on a golden bracelet linked to the Scorpion King, which gives him visions of the oasis of Ahm Shere and starts a seven day clock.

The cult wants to wake the Scorpion King and command his army. At the pyramid he is turned into a huge scorpion creature that kills Hafez. Rick finds that a spear in the pyramid is the one weapon able to kill him, and he uses it to destroy the Scorpion King and send his army back to the underworld. See the scorpion king mathayus for the character on his own.

The tone flips in The Scorpion King (2002), directed by Chuck Russell, a spin-off with Johnson in the lead as an Akkadian assassin. The man who becomes a monster in 2001 is the hero in 2002.

Baltus Hafez, played by Alun Armstrong, leads the cult in The Mummy Returns, and he is the human villain who restores Imhotep to life. His goal is to use the mummy to wake the Scorpion King and take control of the army that comes with him.

He never gets the chance. When the Scorpion King is turned into a huge scorpion creature at the pyramid, Hafez is killed by it. The cult as a whole is thinned out earlier, when mummified pygmies attack in the oasis and kill most of its members.

Hafez shows how the film is built: a monster, plus a human accomplice who opens the way for it and is killed in the end.

Memnon, played by Steven Brand, is the villain of the spin-off The Scorpion King (2002), and he is a human warlord rather than an undead priest. He is overrunning the desert tribes with the help of a seer named Cassandra (Kelly Hu), whose visions let him foresee every attack.

King Pheron hires three Akkadian assassins, Mathayus, his brother Jesup and their friend Rama, to kill her. Pheron's son Takmet (Peter Facinelli) betrays the plan, the Akkadians are ambushed, Rama is killed and Jesup is executed. Mathayus survives, escapes the desert with the thief Arpid and slips into Memnon's city of Gomorrah. His captain Thorak (Ralf Moeller) fights Mathayus along the way.

Mathayus chooses to take Cassandra with him instead of killing her. He finishes Memnon with an arrow, and Memnon's remaining soldiers yield. Memnon has no supernatural rules, which makes him a useful point of comparison for the undead and cursed monsters elsewhere in the saga.

Emperor Han, played by Jet Li, is the villain of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), directed by Rob Cohen. In the film's prologue a ruthless warlord who unified ancient China wants to live forever and hires the sorceress Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh). She falls in love with his general Ming, the emperor has Ming killed, and she curses the emperor and his soldiers into a terracotta army.

In 1946 Alex O'Connell finds the buried emperor with the help of his professor, who is secretly working for General Yang (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) and Colonel Choi. The emperor is revived and kills the professor before escaping. He then drinks from the waters of Shangri-La, regains a human form with greater power, takes the dagger that can stop him and kidnaps Lin.

Han is the saga's army builder. Where Imhotep is one body with a book of rules, Han is a conqueror with an entire clay force behind him, ready to march on the Great Wall. Zi Yuan gives up her own immortality and Lin's to raise the old enemy army led by Ming, and Rick and Alex finally stab him with the dagger. That destroys the emperor and his terracotta army. See dragon emperor mummy for more.

Ahmanet, played by Sofia Boutella, is the villain of The Mummy (2017), directed by Alex Kurtzman. She is a princess of ancient Egypt who loses her place in line for the throne, makes a deal with the god Set (Javier Botet), kills her family and is mummified alive and buried far from home.

Soldier and treasure hunter Nick Morton finds her tomb in Iraq, and her power takes hold on the flight to England. Ahmanet means to use Nick as the vessel for Set. She raises an army of the dead in London while chasing him and drowns Jenny Halsey along the way. Nick is pulled into the orbit of Dr. Henry Jekyll, who runs a secret organization that hunts monsters.

In the final fight Nick accepts the power of Set, keeps control and drains Ahmanet's life force. That brings Jenny back to life and seals Ahmanet in her sarcophagus again. She is the second major female villain after Anck-Su-Namun, and the character has her own entry at ahmanet mummy. The film also points toward a wider shared universe of monsters.

In my opinion, the best Mummy villain is Imhotep as played by Arnold Vosloo in The Mummy (1999), because he is the only one whose rules you can follow in real time. He drains life to regenerate, he calls down the plagues, and he needs a specific sacrifice. Every scare lands because you know what he needs next.

Second, I would put Boris Karloff's Imhotep in The Mummy (1932). He is frightening because he is patient, waiting ten years before he returns as Ardath Bey. It could be argued that this is the template every later mummy copies, and the Isis statue ending is a sharp, simple solution.

Third is Emperor Han. The terracotta army is the biggest set piece in the series, and Jet Li gives the emperor real menace. The reason he is not higher is that the film spends so long on the family that he feels like a visitor to his own story.

Fourth is Ahmanet. Perhaps she is the most sympathetic starting point in the saga, a princess who loses her claim to the throne, and the pursuit through London has real menace. The film around her never quite lets her be the whole threat.

Fifth is the Scorpion King, who is an excellent image (a man fused into a giant scorpion) and a thin character. Sixth is Anck-Su-Namun, who is more motive than monster: she drives the plot of two films and rarely gets to menace anyone on her own. Memnon sits outside the ranking, since he belongs to a swords and sandals spin-off with no undead at all.

If you want my take on the films themselves, see the mummy movies ranked.