Synopsis

Mention Bram Stoker’s name, and literature and movie buffs will conjure up Count Dracula. But there was more blood in Stoker’s pen. He also wrote The Jewel of the Seven Stars, later filmed with chilling effect as The Awakening, grippingly directed by Mike Newell (Dance with a Stranger, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and sensuously shot on Egyptian locations by veteran cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Charlton Heston stars as an Egyptologist with a passion that will trigger several mysterious deaths. He’s obsessed with a sorceress whose return has been prophesied – and whose tomb he opened at the exact moment his daughter was born. Can ancient evil reach forward in time to curse the present? Horror movie fans know the terrifying answer.

Official Review

Between Dracula’s publication in 1897 and his death in 1912, Bram Stoker had several other supernatural successes, including The Jewel of Seven Stars. Moving from vampires to Egyptian mythology, his tale of an archeologist obsessed with an evil mummified queen was met with a lot of criticism when it was published in 1903 due to its horrific downer of an ending. The backlash was so severe that he had to alter the ending and make it more upbeat – “Hollywoodizing” before it was even a thing – before it could be published again. Sadly, this was not the last time Stoker’s vision would be tinkered with: his novel, The Lair of the White Worm, was posthumously republished with twenty-eight chapters instead of forty. …Read More