Clive Barker’s The Mummy is a pretty well known unmade horror at this point, I think, especially with Barker talking about it in more detail during a recent guest appearance on Mick Garris’ Post Mortem podcast. Barker was hired in 1990 to write and direct The Mummy for Universal and wrote a script with Garris that—in pure Barker fashion—would have been much more of its own, bizarre, metaphysical and psychosexual thing than any kind of straightforward remake of the original Universal film. Barker’s script marked the first of many attempts to make The Mummy throughout the ‘90s, and most of the people involved would be major players in the horror field. Barker was followed by George Romero, who again co-wrote with Garris. Then came Joe Dante, Wes Craven and, finally, Deep Rising director Stephen Sommers, who turned it into a huge hit.

But what most people don’t know is that the project actually goes back even further than when Universal first approached Barker, at least conceptually. 

Despite the success of Hellraiser II, it took years to actually get Hellraiser III off the ground, due largely to the change in ownership from New World to Trans-Atlantic Entertainment and, more than anything, the difficulty in finding the right idea and approach. Barker, true to form, came up with an idea that would be even more ambitious than the second, which had literally shifted the location from a confined house to the labyrinth of Hell itself. Barker’s original pitch was to go back to the beginning and explore the origins of the Cenobites themselves. According to Peter Atkins, this idea was “a Hellraiser movie set partly in Ancient Egypt in which it is revealed that the very first Cenobite was an overly curious Pharaoh.” The mummy of that Pharaoh would be dug up in the ‘90s and put on display in a museum. The objects found within a tomb, when placed in the right order, would form a pattern that according to Atkins “predates the Lament Configuration as a means of access from this reality to that other we all know and love.” 

This is a fascinating prospect, because it essentially is a version of The Mummy entrenched in Hellraiser lore. Even if the Mummy itself never becomes a part of the proceedings or is replaced by Pinhead at some point, as would seem to be the natural course of a Hellraiser sequel, it’s still the excavation of the mummy that sets the horror in motion and would make this idea a fascinating and—pardon the pun—outside-the-box approach. The idea of going back to the beginning, of having flashbacks to the past that affect the present, these things would not make it into Hellraiser III, but they would form the foundation of the next sequel, Hellraiser: Bloodline. That film is all about lineage and legacy, in this instance not for the Cenobites themselves, but for the family of Lemarchand, the man who built the box.

Interestingly, everyone was on board for Barker’s idea except for Barker himself. As Atkins states, “I liked it. Chris Figg liked it. But, despite it being his idea, Clive decided that he didn’t like it. Or rather, he didn’t like it as the basis for a Hellraiser movie. My guess is he saw the potential for a whole new Barkerian mythology in there and wanted to keep it clean.” That notion, I think, is right on the money. Barker’s role in the franchise was already diminishing by this point in time. He had handed the reigns to Hellbound over to Atkins and Tony Randel as he went on to direct Nightbreed.

The early 1990s saw no shortage of innovative, creative projects for Barker, though. He had already shifted from being the so-called “future of horror” that Stephen King had famously described when he had written the Books of Blood into a creative force much harder to define. By this point had crafted expansive mythologies with things like Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show. As imaginative as Hellraiser is, Barker had truly become a master of—as he calls it—the fantastique by the time they were working on ideas for Hellraiser III. The idea that he would recognize the kernel of a new, likely rich, mythology within that initial pitch makes perfect sense.

That seems to be the case, too. In 1990, Barker embarked on his remake of The Mummy for Universal. In an interview with Vidpix at the time, he promised “I’m remaking it in a way that will be as far from The Mummy with Karloff as David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly was.” Barker’s story centered around a cult called Sythis attempting to restore power over the Western world by reawakening the Ancient Gods. Barker also noted that the mummy was also used as “the starting place” for the horror, and that the mummy itself had little to do with the actual antagonists, which definitely sounded like it would have been the case with his Hellraiser as well. That’s not the only thing that sounds as though it carried over from his Hellraiser pitch, nor the thing that I think makes it clear that they began life as the same idea. The building in Barker’s The Mummy would have been decorated with Pyramidic symbols that unlocked the key to the horror, and the resurrection of these ancient worlds and beings, which sounds identical to the symbols that formed the proto-Lament-Configuration in the Hellraiser pitch. The concept of a building decorated and built out of powerful patterns and symbols (in this case the faces of the box) would show up at the end of Hellraiser III and also serve as a major plot point of Hellraiser: Bloodline. 

Undoubtedly, among those who have heard of it at least, Barker’s unmade version of The Mummy is most famous for its transgender central character, who is often mistakenly assumed to be the mummy herself, but that is not the case. From the sound of it, this character would have been more of a thief, a collector of rare artifacts and a bit of a femme fatale. Ultimately, The Mummy as conceived by Barker and Garris was described by Barker as being “a little too weird for Universal.” That sounds like putting it mildly, too. And so they went their separate ways.

From the sound of things, though, it sounds like Barker may have been just as uncomfortable with this largely original idea being saddled to the Mummy franchise as he had been with it being a Hellraiser movie, so much so that he began to simply refer to it as The Egyptian Project while they were still working on it as The Mummy. As recently as his appearance on Garris’ podcast, Barker suggested a desire to possibly dust off The Egyptian Project as something original, removed from The Mummy altogether, and it sounds like an original project is what it was always meant to be. I hope it does someday materialize in that form, but I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Both The Mummy and Hellraiser III underwent quite a few ideas before becoming what they both respectively became. Atkins’ first idea for Hellraiser III would have brought back the detective character, Ronson, from Hellbound. The plot revolved around Ronson investigating a cult called the Church of the Sacred Wound, with an charismatic leader named Lilith who would have been revealed to be Julia Cotton, having taken the woman’s identity—and skin. Kirsty would also have been roped in to help take Julia down. This very much fits with the original intention to have Julia, not Pinhead, be the face of the franchise. After that came an idea about two rival academics, a professor and a grad student, one of whom opens the box and unleashes the Cenobites. Then came an idea that seemed to stick around for a minute about Pinhead being resurrected into—and then taking over—a bordello in service to Hell. Atkins wrote three drafts of this version before New World went under and the project was dead. After that, Trans-Atlantic Entertainment took over the rights to the franchise and Atkins was once again offered the chance to write the next installment, which then (finally) became Hell on Earth. 

The Mummy had its own development hell after Barker departed. After he left, George Romero took his own stab at the project. His would have still been its own unique thing while also using much more of the lore of the original Universal franchise. For instance, Romero’s Mummy would have involved both Imhotep of the 1932 classic and Kharis, the mummy of the sequels that is much more synonymous with the slow, shambling mummy of pop culture. It would also have been a deeply romantic version, expanding on the romance of the original film. Wes Craven was offered to direct as well, but rather than entering into this development hell, simply turned it down. Then came Joe Dante, whose version also, naturally, did not come to fruition. Dante’s version would have starred both Daniel Day-Lewis and Christopher Lee—who had himself played Kharis in Hammer’s 1959 Mummy—and the script was even read by Spielberg, who arranged a meeting for Dante with head of Universal at the time, Sid Sheinberg. Unfortunately, Sheinberg was not impressed and immediately dismissed the notion of the movie being set in the present, despite both Barker and Romero’s scripts also being set in the present and (most importantly) the Universal original being set in the present day at the time. 

Stephen Sommers then came on board to do a more straightforward—all things considered, at least—remake of the original, set in the 1920s just as Sheinberg had wanted. This version became one of Universal’s highest openings ever at the time and remains a beloved blockbuster to this day. It bears very little in common with Barker’s original idea, and only the faintest, passing similarity to Romero’s or Dante’s as well. Somehow, it’s not as if the two projects are devoid of similarities, either. The unnerving scarab beetle scene in The Mummy could have been perfectly at home in the works of Barker. Even with its more humorous approach, things like Beni attempting to ward off evil with relics of every religion he can think of embodies a very Barker sense of humor, and even something found in his own works. Paranormal detective Harry D’Amour, protagonist of several Barker stories, has tattoos and tokens of all religions, and that’s just one example. It’s made even better by Beni being played in The Mummy by Lord of Illusions’ Kevin J. O’Connor. 

These things are purely coincidental, though it’s entirely possible that moments like that evolved from the earliest incarnation to the last. It is amazing to look at Hellraiser III and 1999’s The Mummy on the shelf and think that what got both projects up and running, that the wheels that started the motion that eventually got them both made, were the same initial idea. It’s pure, weird happenstance. It’s a perfect game of Hollywood telephone that Barker had an idea for Hellraiser III so good that he, frankly, didn’t want to waste it on Hellraiser III. And so with enough passing of hands, from project to studio and so many people in between, that thing wound up at Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy. That is movie magic at its most mystic, unfathomably unpredictable. I’m happy, if anything, for the utterly wild anecdote in film history it became.