O Segredo da Múmia

• The scientist at the center of the film, Professor Expedito Vitus, is played by Wilson Grey in the LEAD role, not a supporting one — Grey won Best Actor at the 1982 Festival de Brasília and a Special Jury Prize at that year's Festival de Gramado for the performance.
• Brazilian horror icon José Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe) appears in the film in a small role as the dying family patriarch whose map sets Vitus on the path to Runamb's tomb.
• Screenwriter Rubens Francisco Luchetti won Best Screenplay at Gramado for the film — the first of several horror-comedy collaborations he and director Ivan Cardoso made together through the 1980s.
• Felipe Falcão, who plays Vitus's bald, sexually aggressive assistant Igor, won Best Supporting Actor at Gramado for the role.
• Special effects were handled by Sergio Farjalla, who had previously worked on Hector Babenco's Pixote (1980); accounts from the shoot describe the mummy makeup as brutally difficult to apply and endure for hours at a time.
• Beyond its Brazilian prizes, the film won the Grand Prize of Criticism at Madrid's Cine Imaginário festival in 1982 and picked up a Best Film nomination the following year at Portugal's Fantasporto.

The mummy Runamb's disorientation in modern Brazil reads as a metaphor for the country's own fractured relationship with its colonial past — an ancient body reanimated into a culture with no framework for understanding it, reduced to comic and violent spectacle.

Vitus's elixir functions as an allegory for control over memory itself: he doesn't just wake the dead, he curates what the dead are allowed to become, and Runamb's murderous, lust-driven rampage is the past refusing to stay curated.

The film's relentless tonal whiplash between horror and sex comedy isn't sloppy construction but a deliberate refusal to let genre contain the nightmare — the laughter and the dread occupy the same frame because Cardoso understood that in Brazil, they always have.

Ridiculed scientist Professor Expedito Vitus (Wilson Grey) is convinced his "Elixir of Life" serum can raise the dead, and gets his shot when his dying father — played by Brazilian horror icon José Mojica Marins — hands down a map to the tomb of Runamb, a cursed Egyptian merchant-mummy. Vitus digs up the corpse and injects it with the elixir, waking Runamb (Anselmo Vasconcelos) centuries after he died pining for a dancer named Nadja who spurned him. Loose in modern Brazil and still obsessed, the reanimated mummy, trailed by Vitus's leering assistant Igor (Felipe Falcão), goes on a spree of seduction and murder chasing anyone who might be Nadja reincarnated. Director Ivan Cardoso mashes mad-scientist theatrics, slasher-style violence, and broad sex comedy into his signature "terrir" style (terror plus humor), emerging with something that plays like a fever dream raiding both a Universal monster picture and a Brazilian chanchada sex farce.