Seductive Mummy

"Are you my mummy?"

It's difficult to believe nowadays, but fictional Egyptian mummies haven't always been the dusty, bandage-covered zombie analogues they are now. The first stories about reanimated mummies, written in the early 20th century, involved mostly female mummies, and they were portrayed as mysterious, sensual and seductive, taking on the forms of the beautiful women they were in mortal life, and sometimes playing the part of Femme Fatale.

Moreover, unlike vampires, succubi and other undead/demonic creatures who usually took on human forms and employed their seductive powers just to drain mortals of their life energy, mummies were much more human, being capable of love and other feelings, sometimes even good-natured and involved in genuine romantic relationships with human males.

Since only people of high status could afford to be mummified in ancient Egypt, expect overlap with The Beautiful Elite. Most commonly, sensual female mummies were princesses when they were alive. The fact that the historical figure most associated with Egypt, Cleopatra VII, is often portrayed as a beautiful seductress also helped foster the idea of the beautiful Egyptian mummy.

The trope has been largely forgotten for the most of the 20th century due to the emergence of the classic "monster mummy" type, pioneered by Boris Karloff in the famous 1932 movie; however, it seems to be somewhat growing in popularity again nowadays, in part thanks to the resurgence of popularity Cute Monster Girls have experienced recently. Subtrope to both Mummy and Boy Meets Ghoul; Sister Trope to Attractive Zombie and Cute Ghost Girl.

Sub-Trope to Egypt Is Still Ancient. Not related to an attractive female parent.

For more examples of this trope, check out a thematic category on The Other Wiki.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• A Certain Magical Index: Nephthys is an undead Egyptian girl with Stripperifically placed mummy bandages.
• Kou 1 Desu Ga Isekai Joushu Hajimemashita: Mimia is an incredibly cute, buxom girl who happens to be a member of the Mummy Tribe, though she looks more like a normal human girl when she isn't wearing her layers of bandages.
• Monster Musume: Being a Cute Monster Girl series, the MonMusu Collection endcard for episode 8 of the anime describes mummies as a zombie subspecies whose native environment keeps their bodies intact and protects them from decay, resulting in them looking like attractive humans with parts of their body in bandages. The downside is that their environment robs their skin of its moisture, so they need to take long baths to replenish it, supplementing it with the placebo measure of sucking the life-force out of young men.
• Monster Soul: One of the main cast is the amply-named Mummy, a well-endowed Mummy with bandages wrapped around her body in a Stripperific fashion.
• One Halloween illustration for To Love Ru: Darkness has Momo dressed in a sexy mummy costume. Years later, the same artist reused the outfit for a Halloween drawing of Ayakashi Triangle, where it was worn by Matsuri.
• Queen's Blade: Antagonist character Menace is based on this trope, and emphasizes the "Seductive" aspect so much that you can easily be ignorant that she's supposed to be a mummy at all unless you paid attention when her backstory came up. She forgoes any semblance of bandages, sexy or otherwise, and just looks like a voluptuous bronze-skinned beauty running around in jewelry-based Vapor Wear. Her backstory is that she's the last ruler of an Egypt-themed fallen nation called Amara, which was overrun by invaders because Menace was too preoccupied with the pleasures of her lesbian harem to pay attention to ruling, something she deeply regretted when she was captured and thrown into her palace's slave pits to be beaten and raped to death. Brought back from the dead by the Swamp Witch, she's determined to rebuild her fallen nation and her harem, in roughly that order.
• Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!?: In Chapter 9, Kana dresses as a very shapely mummy for the School Festival's Haunted House.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: For the cover of one issue of Betty and Veronica, both girls are dressed as mummies for a Halloween party. But while Betty is a typical mummy, Veronica only wears enough wrappings for a makeshift bikini. Upon being called out on it by Betty, Veronica claims that she ran out of bandages.
• Empowered has Yummy Mummy as a minor character.

Films — Live-Action

• Blood From The Mummys Tomb, based on Jewel of Seven Stars, is about the resurrection of the beautiful Egyptian queen Tera.
• The Mummy (1999):
  • Imhotep is at first a rotten, disgusting monster when first resurrected, but over the course of the film his original fit, peak condition body is restored thanks to Liquid Assets.
  • Inverted with Anck-su-namun, who was a Ms. Fanservice while alive, but looks as decrepit and horrid as you'd expect a mummy to look like.
• In The Mummy (2017), when Ahmanet is first resurrected she starts out as a desiccated walking corpse, but after devouring enough lifeforce from her victims to restore her body she becomes a Cute Monster Girl. She also tries to seduce the hero by sending him visions in which she appears as her once-human self.

Literature

• In Club Monstrosity series by Jesse Petersen, Kai is an attractive female mummy working for a cosmetics company.
• Played for Laughs in the Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. novels, in which the Unnatural-staffed Full Moon Brothel's madame is a mummy whose feminine charms have not fared well after millennia of desiccation. She still acts the part of a seductress, though ... and at least the mummified Pharaoh who resides at the Museum of Unnatural History gets tongue-tied in her presence, thinking she's out of his league.
• Freaks: Alive, on the Inside! by Annette Curtis Klause centers on the main character's romance with a living mummy called Tauseret.
• Don't Tell Mummy, one of the books in the Graveyard School series, has the main character, Park, meeting a mysterious and sarcastic girl called Morton, who turns out to be a living mummy. Nevertheless, they become friends by the end of the novel, and there may be subtle hints at this trope (especially given that Park chose to pursue the career of an archaeologist due to his encounter with her).
• Iras by H.D. Everett involves the main character actually marrying a mummy who turned into a beautiful woman.
• Played with in The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker: Queen Tera is described as strikingly beautiful, even as a mummy. It is also possible that her spirit survived in Margaret, the main character's Love Interest, who is said to bear a striking resemblance to her.
• In The Mummy's Foot by Théophile Gautier, the protagonist buys a mummified foot of a Egyptian princess as a souvenir. This very night, the princess comes to him to take back her foot and steals him away on a journey to Ancient Egypt, where he asks for her hand. Her father refuses however: the protagonist is only 27 years old, and the princess is over 30 centuries.
• Anne Rice's The Mummy Or Ramses The Damned features some steamy mummy/human sex scenes, facilitated by a magic elixir that brings mummies back to life.
• In My New Year's Eve Among the Mummies, the main character becomes enamored with a living mummy of the Princess Hatasou, and even agrees to become a mummy himself to join her (fortunately, this doesn't happen).
• Subverted in Myth Fortune. Skeeve meets a mummy girl who looks like the standard preserved corpse, but she's so sweet and nice that he ends up asking her out on a date regardless of her appearance. This is to showcase his Character Growth after he'd spent most of the book interested in a girl who was very good looking but was a self-centered manipulator.
• Ma-Mee from H. Rider Haggard's short story Smith and the Pharaohs: Smith's discovery of her tomb was originally motivated by him being smitten with a sculpture depicting her. Later at night in the museum she comes to life as an attractive female. Smith is also revealed as a reincarnation of her lover Horu.
• Julian Hawthorne's The Unseen Man's Story has the protagonist falling in love with the resurrected Queen Amunuhet, and eventually joining her.
• Unwrap My Heart by Alex Falcone and Ezra Fox is a parody of Twilight, which is about a teenage girl falling in love with a mummy.

Live-Action Television

• In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Guardian's Curse", an ordinary mummy becomes a beautiful Ancient Egyptian woman after being dosed with an Elixir of Life.
• Ampata from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Inca Mummy Girl" is a really tragic example: she has to drain life force from other people to sustain her existence, and she just wants to lead a normal life.
• An Egyptian demon in Charmed (1998) had the ability to put his dead wife's soul into the body of a hot mortal woman, thus turning her into a seductive mummy. He targeted Phoebe and Paige for this vessel.
• Night Man: Subverted when an evil mummy queen showed up as the Monster of the Week in one episode. She used an illusion to make herself look like an attractive woman, but her true form was that of a rotting corpse.
• A Saturday Night Live skit parodying Twilight by replacing Edward with Frankenstein's monster also replaced Jacob with a suave mummy.

Magazines

• The cover of Dragon #336 (the October horror issue) shows an attractive woman in an Egyptian headdress, kholed eyes, and not entirely wrapped in bandages, with the only monstrous aspect to the picture being her Femme Fatalons.

Tabletop Games

• Tiyet, the second known mummy to be a darklord of Ravenloft, appears as a perfectly-preserved (and bandage-free) noblewoman, her undead nature betrayed only by her too-pale skin and the delicately-resewn gash where her heart has been cut out.

Theatre

• The Mystery of Irma Vep has Princess Pev Amri, who seduces Edgar in the tombs. Revealed near the end of the play to have actually been a trick played by his wife, Enid.
• The ballet The Pharaoh’s Daughter is about an English lord who takes shelter in a pyramid during a trip to Egypt, and after smoking some opium, the mummies begin to come to life. One of the mummies is the beautiful Princess Aspicia, who lays her hand over his heart and kick-starts an extended fantasy sequence about him being her lover in Ancient Egypt.

Toys

• While Monster High is full of Cute Monster Girl characters (it is a line of fashion dolls, after all), Cleo De Nile, the mummy girl, is a glamorous Lovable Alpha Bitch and the school's head cheerleader. As such, she gets a lot of attention from the guys at school, especially Big Man on Campus Deuce Gordon (with whom she was often packaged).

Video Games

• Anakaris from Darkstalkers has a quite attractive female mummy servant called Khaibit. Demitiri's Midnight Bliss attack will also turn Anakaris into a female mummy, but the result is significantly more cartoony.
• Princess Kiya in MediEvil 2 is a Egyptian mummy with bandages wrapping her hourglass figure and she serves as Love Interest to the undead knight Sir Daniel Fortesque.
• Krom-Ha from The Next Big Thing by Pendulo Studios: a beautiful female illusionist and a temple priestess, who is actually a mummy brought to life with the use of the Book of the Dead. The main character Dan Murray spends a night of love with her.
• Street Fighter V: Menat is an extremely elegant and feminine Egyptian girl. One of her DLC costumes has her dressed like a mummy, covered in wrappings that cover only scarce parts of her body. Additionally, she has a crossover costume that dresses her as Khaibit, mentioned above.

Web Animation

• Sisters Cleo and Nefera de Nile in Monster High, as is the logical consequence of a Monster Mash doll toy line. Even their vanity is an important characteristic.
• Xombie has Nephthys, who is the resident Ms. Fanservice in the show and a Variant zombie like Dirge. She is also a subversion in that while she aesthetically matches the trope, she is not an actual mummy. She even points out that if she were a mummy, the Egyptians would have removed her brain during mummification, and she wouldn't have reanimated in the first place.

Webcomics

• Parodied in this Oglaf strip, featuring a group of decaying, decrepit mummies posing provocatively and spouting bad pick-up lines.
  Mummy: I'm naked under this bandage.
• Defied in one of the The Order of the Stick bonus comics:
  Julio Scoundrel: I don't suppose you're actually a gorgeous woman under those bandages?
  Mummy Queen: It is literally like a graveyard threw up in here.
• Parodied via a scene from Twilight in Penny Arcade when they predict what would follow up the vampire craze.
• Shortpacked! had a plotline about Amber writing a series of sexy (male) mummy novels.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series: Thoth Kephera from the episode "Avatar." She held the secret of eternal life, and to those who enter her tomb, takes on this appearance to seduce men who come seeking said secret. When she drains their life, however, she is definitely not this trope.
• Averted with Cleofatra in Gravedale High, she's actually a fatty nerdy girl, unlike other female students like Blanch (an Attractive Zombie) and Durze (a Gorgeous Gorgon). Yet in one episode Cleo does manage to seduce a Vincent-like monster celebrity.
• Hero Inside has Mummy Girl, an attractive Egyptian mummy-themed hero who utilizes her bandages as weapons.
• Nefer-Tina from Mummies Alive! is pretty damn gorgeous and manages to briefly become a supermodel. One of the episodes involves her dating a living male, though he turns out to be an evil god in disguise.
• Played with in Scooby-Doo in Where’s My Mummy?: Cleopatra first appears as a beautiful woman, before turning into a scary crone. It is later revealed that she was actually Velma in disguise, and there are hints at a romance between Velma and Omar.
• Plastic Man's villainess Disco Mummy, as the name implies, is an attractive disco-themed Aztec mummy.

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