Blood from the Mummy's Tomb

• Adapted by Christopher Wicking from Bram Stoker's 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars - the only other Stoker work Hammer filmed besides Dracula - on a budget of roughly 200,000 pounds per Howard Maxford's studio history.
• Peter Cushing was cast as Professor Fuchs and shot a single day before walking off the production when his wife Helen was diagnosed with emphysema; Andrew Keir was rushed in to replace him.
• Director Seth Holt died of a heart attack on set at Elstree, five weeks into a six-week shoot, collapsing into actor Aubrey Morris's arms. He was 47. Producer Michael Carreras directed the final week uncredited, working to match Holt's style.
• There is no shambling bandaged mummy in the entire film - Hammer ditched the wrapped-corpse formula and let Queen Tera appear as a fully living, breathing woman, the studio's sharpest break from its own monster template.
• Valerie Leon, then famous across Britain as the femme fatale in the long-running Hai Karate aftershave commercials, plays both Tera and her reincarnation Margaret Fuchs - a rare lead for an actress Hammer mostly used for glamour. James Carreras reportedly insisted on her over the producers' preferred choice.
• Tera's severed hand is its own creature: pulled from the tomb to be thrown to the jackals, it comes alive, kills the animals, and conjures the sandstorm that tears out the priests' throats.

The film treats reincarnation as a hostile takeover, not a soul reunited. Margaret is born at the exact instant Tera's tomb is opened, which frames her entire life as a countdown - she was never her own person, just a vessel kept on ice for three millennia. The ring her father makes her wear 'always' isn't a gift, it's the key that lets the older woman drive. Read that way, the horror isn't possession by a ghost; it's the dawning fact that there was never a Margaret to lose.

Fuchs is the real monster, and the script knows it. He doesn't fight Tera's influence over his daughter - he engineers it, recreating her tomb under his own house and handing Margaret the relic that dooms her. His obsession with the dead queen reads as a father feeding his child to his own fixation, the mummy movie reskinned as a story about a man who loved a corpse more than his living daughter.

The ambiguous final shot - a bandaged figure opening her eyes, never confirmed as Margaret or Tera - makes the bandages the film spent 90 minutes refusing to show finally arrive, but on the wrong body. The one human in the story ends up wrapped like the mummy that never existed, suggesting the curse's real victory isn't resurrection but erasure: whoever survives, the person is gone.

Hammer's last gasp at the mummy throws out the bandages entirely. An expedition cracks open the tomb of Queen Tera, an Egyptian sorceress whose priests cut off her hand and drugged her into living death for her wickedness. Professor Fuchs hauls her perfectly preserved corpse back to London and rebuilds her tomb under his house. His daughter Margaret, born the instant Tera's sarcophagus opened, starts answering to a name three thousand years dead. The severed hand crawls. The ring binds. Two women, one body, no winner.