ABSTRACT
The idiot-savant film director and pornographer Edward W. Wood Jr. (1924-78), who is now rapidly attaining cult status, had his finger as firmly on the pulse of popular ideas about Egyptian mummies as he did about so many other cultural phenomena, such as vampires and UFOs. The cover blurb of his lurid 1968 potboiler about necrophilia, The Love of the Dead, claimed that it: ‘reveals the limitless depths to which man can sink in his sexual cravings. A REAL SHOCKER!’ Unsurprisingly, mummies play a part in Wood’s survey of ‘the dark pages of history devoted to sex crimes’:
More so we might, for a moment take up the ancient Pharoahs (sic) of Egypt…the great temples built in their honour, their memorials, their tombs…their demand of the female mate or mates and Eunuchs to accompany them through the land of the dead. It is not above thought that the brides of the corpse (the Pharoah) have taken him on sexually even in death. Most men actually die with a hard-on and the instrument must be broken before he can be folded into his everlasting box.
